Vox Tablet

In her best-selling memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, journalist Lucette Lagnado brought to life the multiethnic metropolis of Cairo in the 1940s and 1950s. Lagnado’s father, Leon, a debonair man-about-town, thrived in that cosmopolitan world, and young Lucette basked in his glow. But Egypt’s 1952 revolution changed all that. The family held on for a time, finally immigrating to the United States in 1962, and Lagnado’s book—winner of the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature—arrestingly described her father’s steady decline. Now she has written a second memoir, The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, that offers a loving and often devastating portrait of her mother and all that she sacrificed to keep her family...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.