<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/books/review/Newhouse-t.html> August 12, 2007 Out of Egypt By ALANA NEWHOUSE
THE MAN IN THE WHITE SHARKSKIN SUIT My Family's Exodus From Old Cairo to the New World. By Lucette Lagnado. Illustrated. 340 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95.
In her new memoir, "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit," Lucette Lagnado relates how her father, Leon, first reacted upon escaping the dangerous anti-Semitic environment of Nasser's Egypt in 1962: "Ragaouna Masr," he cried, as their boat left the Alexandria harbor — "Take us back to Cairo."
It's a sad moment, but one would be forgiven for finding it melodramatic. After all, we know how the story ends: the family settles in America and, judging at least by the ascent of Lucette, their youngest daughter, as a prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter, they presumably enjoy success and happiness. That this assumption is so far off the mark — that the reality of the Lagnados' fate is so far from the triumphalism that Americans have come to expect from immigrant narratives — is one of many reasons to read this crushing, brilliant book.
Lagnado traces the story of a family so connected to Cairo that they held on until they were forced out, thankfully alive. "Alas, what no one could stop was the cultural Holocaust — the hundreds of synagogues shuttered for lack of attendance, the cemeteries looted of their headstones, the flourishing Jewish-owned shops abandoned by their owners, the schools suddenly bereft of any students." Some will blanch at her use of the word "Holocaust" here, arguing that only the World War II murders of European Jews are worthy of this term. But the wholesale destruction of Middle Eastern Jewish life, along with the even more devastating evisceration of individual lives, was nothing short of a catastrophe — and not only for the Jews. Leon Lagnado, like many others, had a love affair with his city, and "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit" is a story about what happens when two such lovers are torn apart.
The man of the title is, of course, Leon. Fluent in seven languages and full of charisma, he was the consummate man-about-town. He spent his days immersed in a web of discreet business deals — all conducted in such privacy that even family members couldn't describe his profession — and his nights gallivanting at the city's hot spots, like L'Auberge des Pyramides, where "on a good night, the king was almost certain to drop by with both an entourage and a determination to seduce the prettiest woman there, or whoever appealed to him the most."
But Leon was also a good Jew, as it were, one who went to synagogue every morning. "It was as if two people resided within one sharkskin suit," Lagnado writes, "one who was pious and whose vestments resembled those of the priests at the Great Temple, all white and sparkling and pure, and the very different creature who led a secret, intensely thrilling life."
Leon eventually married an innocent waif 20 years his junior, whom he brought into the home he shared with his mother and teenage nephew — though he hardly settled down. The two would have four children together (a fifth died shortly after birth), but throughout, Leon remained resolutely social, "a broker and middleman between two worlds — cosmopolitan colonial Cairo and mystical, sensuous Islamic Cairo."
He developed a special relationship with Lucette, known as Loulou, who became his eager sidekick and kindred spirit. In this book, she so effortlessly captures the characters in her family, and the Egyptian metropolis around them, that the reader may fail to notice the overwhelming research buttressing this story. But then you stumble upon a wonderfully vivid detail: the kind of stove used by her grandmother, what her mother was drinking when she met Leon, the exact menu of the elaborate meals served to a relative struck with pleurisy.
Lagnado is equally adept at maintaining suspense, particularly as the skies begin to darken for Egypt's Jews after Gamal Abdel Nasser's rise to power. Leon resisted leaving for a decade and then did so only after harassment and discrimination extinguished all hope for his family's future in Cairo. Beaten down, they shuffled weakly through Alexandria, Athens, Genoa, Naples, Marseilles, Paris, Cherbourg and Manhattan, before finally landing in Brooklyn.
But an easy union between Leon and America was not to be. Heartbroken and infirm, he failed to impress the social workers and bureaucrats in charge of helping new immigrants, leading to a string of humiliations and failures. The "boulevardier of Cairo" never regained his footing, and the already thin threads holding his family together frayed irrevocably. Lagnado recounts the irony of their Passover Seder in Brooklyn: "No matter how loudly we sang, our holiday had become not a celebration of the exodus from Egypt but the inverse — a longing to return to the place we were supposedly glad to have left."
Lagnado did eventually return, decades later, encouraged by an Egyptian government now "hungry for Western currency and Western tourism and Western goodwill." She found a city suffering, just like her own family, from "decline and faded splendor." Cairo and its Jews should never have been torn asunder. But by this point, the author has drained herself of anger and instead makes a surprising peace — one final kiss from the Lagnados to their beloved city.
Alana Newhouse is the arts and culture editor of The Forward.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/books/review/05mess.html> August 5, 2007 Lost in Tehran By CLAIRE MESSUD
THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ By Dalia Sofer. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95.
A memorable title will surely attract readers, but when a book becomes a classic, it's hard to say whether the title has been part of its canonization or has merely become retroactively canonical. Would "Trimalchio in West Egg," one of Fitzgerald's initial choices, have in time accrued the same force as "The Great Gatsby"? "The Septembers of Shiraz," poignant once you've read this first novel by Dalia Sofer, is, on its own, a title at once overly poetic and misleading. An American reader might be forgiven for thinking Sofer has written a romance set in the Napa Valley, "Sideways" with Vaseline on the lens. And that would be a great shame because "The Septembers of Shiraz" is a remarkable debut: the richly evocative, powerfully affecting depiction of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran shortly after the revolution. In this fickle literary world, it's impossible to predict whether Sofer's novel will become a classic, but it certainly stands a chance.
Told in the third person, largely in the present tense, the intersecting narratives follow each member of the Amin family over the course of their most difficult year, from September 1981 to September 1982. Isaac, the paterfamilias, is approaching 60. A successful jeweler and gem merchant, he has — to his grave discredit and danger — been patronized by many in the aristocracy, including the wife of the shah. In the opening chapters, he is arrested by two armed Revolutionary Guards, taken from his office at lunchtime on a routine workday: "He looks down at his desk, at the indifferent items witnessing this event — the scattered files, a metal paperweight, a box of Dunhill cigarettes, a crystal ashtray and a cup of tea, freshly brewed, two mint leaves floating inside."
>From this beginning, Sofer deftly interweaves Isaac's experiences with
those of the other members of his immediate family: his wife, Farnaz;
his 9-year-old daughter, Shirin; and his 18-year-old son, Parviz, who
has been sent to New York to study architecture.
The book's simple plot is immediately engaging: What will become of Isaac Amin? Will he survive the brutally byzantine, surreal game that his incarceration becomes? Will he die by accident or from illness or torture? What allows one prisoner to survive while his cellmate faces the firing squad? Meanwhile, outside the prison, Farnaz searches for her husband and struggles to maintain their household: Will she find word of him? Will she and her daughter escape the scrutiny of the Revolutionary Guards? How can her life continue — and yet how can it not?
The Amins' young daughter is caught between an adult perceptiveness and a child's belief in magical thinking. "Absence, Shirin thinks, is death's cousin. One day something is there, the next day it isn't. Abracadabra." But "what happens to a house full of nonbeings?" What if she, her mother and the housekeeper should disappear, just like her father? "The house, of course, would not know it. That would be the sad part."
Shirin's brother, Parviz, strapped for cash in Brooklyn, reduced to working in his Hasidic landlord's hat shop, has a more practical dismay: "Why is it, he wonders, that no one understands his situation? This is not how his life was supposed to turn out. Only two years ago he was debating between an architecture school in Paris and another in Zurich, and his parents were considering buying him an apartment. ... That he should now be a burden on others both angers and shames him."
The Amins' acute daily struggles are laced with deeper emotional and philosophical questions. Before their tragic separation, Isaac and Farnaz had reached a state of near estrangement: both felt their marriage had made them people they hadn't wanted to be. To transcend their ordeals, each must confront what has transpired between them and what is still possible in the future.
Isaac and his son, in their very different contexts, are also forced to consider and question their secularism: Isaac because he is persecuted on account of an inherited religion he does not practice, and Parviz because he falls in love with his landlord's daughter. Even Shirin, in her childish realm, becomes embroiled in a risky attempt to save lives, only to find that the simplest bonds of friendship will save her own life. "No one came to my house as often as you did," says her friend Leila, explaining why she has chosen to safeguard Shirin. "I wouldn't want anything bad to happen to you."
The ironies of the Amins' lives are evident even to themselves: under the shah's regime, the family enjoyed unthinking privilege and prosperity. Their reasons for staying in Tehran at the time of the revolution are not so far from those given by Isaac's sister and her husband: "If we leave this country without taking care of our belongings, who in Geneva or Paris or Timbuktu will understand who we once were?"
For Farnaz, her belongings define her, giving shape to her memories: "These objects, she had always believed, are infused with the souls of the places from which they came, and of the people who had made or sold them. On long, silent afternoons ... she would sit in her sun-filled living room and look at each one — the glass vase, a reminder of Francesca, in Venice; the copper plate, a souvenir of Ismet, in Istanbul; the silver teapot, a keepsake from Firouz, in Isfahan."
There is no intrinsic merit in the Amins' ideologically unconsidered existence. And the arguments of the Revolutionary Guards as well as the beliefs of Farnaz's disgruntled housekeeper and Parviz's landlord cast doubt on their former hedonism. But just as Shirin's friend chooses to save her because of the pleasure of their play, the novel repeatedly suggests that life's significance derives less from ideas than from the most basic, the most concrete shards of memory.
Sofer is particularly good at illuminating the sensual experiences of her characters — the way that, in extremis, memory and experience are resolved into colors, sounds or scents. After Farnaz visits a local prison in the unsuccessful hope of finding her husband, "she walks for a long time through the city. Above her, windows and balconies close, shutting out the cool September breeze. Summer is leaving, and with it the buzz of ceiling fans, the smell of wet dust rising through the air-conditioning vents, the clink of noontime dishes heard through open windows, the chatter of families passing long, muggy afternoons in courtyards, eating pumpkin seeds and watermelon."
When Shirin looks at the now empty swimming pool in the family's backyard, "she remembers swimming in it, in the shallow end, while Parviz and his friends dove from the terrace into the water. ... Afterward, when they had showered and dressed, they would gather around the kitchen table smelling of soap and chlorine, and eat cherries picked that morning from the garden, just washed and dripping in the sieve."
Early in the novel, Isaac is badgered by fellow prisoners about his religious beliefs. "So what if I wanted a good life?" he replies. "My belief is that life is to be enjoyed." To bolster his argument, he recites a few lines of poetry: "Give thanks for nights in good company." Although strategically naïve, Isaac's argument is recognizably true, and emotionally forceful.
Sofer writes beautifully, whether she's describing an old man's "wrinkled voice" or Shirin's irritation at wearing a head scarf, imagining "there are tiny elves inside ... crumpling paper against her ears all day long." And she tells her characters' stories with deceptive simplicity. Every member of the Amin family attains a moving, and memorable, depth and reality. Although their crises — and the philosophical questions they raise — are of the greatest urgency and seriousness, "The Septembers of Shiraz" is miraculously light in its touch, as beautiful and delicate as a book about suffering can be.
Claire Messud's most recent novel is "The Emperor's Children."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/books/review/Gevisser-t.html> June 17, 2007 The Dispossessed By MARK GEVISSER
WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN A Memoir of Africa. By Peter Godwin. Illustrated. 344 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $24.99.
If Peter Godwin's new book about Zimbabwe is part family memoir and part bulletin from the barricades, then these two streams converge at a portent so ominous it takes your breath away: "A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere — on sufferance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility."
The book is hinged on this notion, which presents itself through the revelation of a family secret. As Godwin's aging parents find themselves dispossessed by the deranged kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe, the author discovers that his father, the upright Anglo-colonial George Godwin, is actually Kazimierz Goldfarb, a Polish Jew whose family was exterminated at Treblinka. When asked by his son why he reinvented himself, the father explains that he did it "for you," because anti-Semitism "will never really go away. ... It goes underground for a generation or two but always re-emerges."
Like race hate in Africa. This is Godwin's message, and what is so troubling about it is that the author is no apartheid-era supremacist. Far from it: he is a worldly and respected journalist who believed fervently in the post-independence Zimbabwe — a place where race seemed finally to be "losing its headlock on our identities." Since the emergence of a viable political opposition in 2000, however, Mugabe's jackboot has stomped the life out of such possibility. As many as four million Zimbabweans — out of a total of only 13 million — have fled the county as it has descended into darkness. But Godwin's own parents, liberals who dedicated their lives to public service, will not countenance it, not least because they have fled "mayhem and genocide" once before.
Now, in the ember-time of their own lives, they find themselves the victims of a brutal car hijacking and barricade themselves into their suburban bungalow, turning their swimming pool into a fish farm because they can no longer afford the chemicals, making occassional forays out armed with bricks of useless Zim dollars to shop like poor folk, and growing old miserably: a condition only exacerbated by their country's collapse.
The emotional heart of this book is Godwin's description of his relationship with his taciturn father and doughty mother, a renowned doctor who worked in a public hospital well into her 70s. He draws them with love and wit, but does not shy away from complexity. His description of the damaged paternal relationship is particularly acute, as is his understanding of the effects of his father's concealment. He also captures, with terrible poignancy, that inevitable moment when the child becomes the parent. I have read this book twice, and wept twice, through the final chapters documenting George Godwin's decline and death.
Weeping, himself, at his father's funeral, the author surveys the church and observes how "we've all been battered by our history, by eight years of war followed by 23 years in thrall to a violent and vengeful ruler." Contained in this sum is the book's power — and its problem. Why does Godwin's timeline begin only in the early 1970s? What about the prior decades of colonial depredation? The very thing that makes Godwin so powerful as a memoirist compromises his authority as a reporter: his proximity to the pain.
And so the dispossessed farmers he meets are decent folk who provided work for the locals and made Zimbabwe boom. In many cases this is true. But they were also racial overlords, beneficiaries of the brutal dispossession of a sophisticated rural peasant civilization who went to war to keep their Rhodesia and whose very recalcitrance about land reform helped precipitate the reaction against them.
This is not to suggest that Mugabe's land restitution policy is justified, or that dispossessed white farmers deserve their fate. But Godwin does the story of his country — not to mention the legacy of his murdered Polish family — a disservice by succumbing to a victimology that renders white Zimbabweans "the Jews of Africa" and by failing to see the part they played in their country's bloody history. Obviously deeply affected by his parents' decline and his father's revelation, Godwin accepts too easily his father's assertion that "being a white here is starting to feel like being a Jew in Poland ... the target of ethnic cleansing." An estimated 15 white farmers have been killed in the land invasions. This is 15 too many, but it is not a genocide. Far worse off are poor black people, who had nothing to begin with, less now, and no way out of the nightmare either.
The very nature of Godwin's project means that his empathy with whites cannot be matched by an empathy with blacks, who become increasingly unknowable and threatening. Certainly, he has an easy familiarity with black professionals; certainly, too, he understands that blacks are the victims of the Mugabe regime. But he cannot get close to them.
It begins with the thugs who invade white farms, and who claim to be "war vets." The way they say it sounds like "wovits," so this is what some white Zimbabweans disparagingly call them, and how Godwin chooses to identify them. The effect is to render them beastly, and given the inebriated thuggery Godwin observes, this is not inappropriate. Abuse, unquestionably, dehumanizes its perpetrators.
But slowly, inexorably, Godwin's empathy with his parents' encroaching sense of doom means that the book crackles with Mau Mau anxiety: the overlord's fear that the servants are going to slit his throat. One by one, faithful servants betray their masters, including the Godwins' own trusty retainers. "This is what this vile president has done to us," Godwin writes, "reduced us all to desperadoes and thieves, made us small and bleak and old and tired." Well yes, of course: not least by wrecking the country's economy. But even the most faithful servant carries, somewhere, the pain of servitude, and Godwin has no access to this, and to what it must feel like to be, still, a servant two decades after liberation.
And so when he visits his sister's grave — she was a casualty of the independence war — and finds it covered in the fresh feces of shack-dwellers who have comandeered the cemetery to grow their corn, he cannot but find the perpetrators to be callously inhuman. These women are not "wovits" at all, and one wants him to go over and talk to them, to hear their stories, rather than shout obscenities. But how could he do otherwise? How could you possibly empathize with someone who has just desecrated your sister's grave?
Likewise, he is quite understandably disturbed by the advent of hawkers just on the other side of the bougainvillea hedge at the end of his parents' garden. One day, the hawkers' fire burns the hedge down, tearing away the Godwins' last screen of dignity and exposing their impoverished humiliation to the "huddled masses." A few evenings later, Godwin returns to his parents' home after hearing about how the practice of witchcraft turns peasants on their own grandmothers, whom they cut with razors and force to jump around like baboons. In a fitful night, his unconscious finishes the job of othering begun centuries ago by the narratives of colonialism: he dreams that the hawkers are actually baboons, "whooping and barking and waiting."
Just like the workers who "try to keep Africa at bay" by trimming the roadside, Zimbabwe's white farmers are redoubts of civilization and order. Godwin writes habitually about "Africa" rather than "Zimbabwe" or "Harare" and the effect is to blur specificity. "Africa" becomes, indeed, a place of the mind, of possibility or of fear, rather than the real set of coordinates the expatriated author once knew.
In "Africa," "the illusion of control ... is almost impossible to maintain"; in "Africa," one lives "more vividly" because of the proximity of death; "people love harder." When Godwin and his parents realize that a mob of supposed hijackers is actually a neighborhood patrol saluting them, "I feel like weeping ... at the way Africa does this to you." One minute, you're scared to death, "the next you're choked with affection." Of course, Africa has done nothing at all. It is an inanimate landmass. The work is the author's, and he has done it beautifully, even if not always with a full enough awareness of his own people's agency.
Mark Gevisser's biography of Thabo Mbeki, "The Dream Deferred," will be published in South Africa this fall.
-- Yoshie