Lucette Lagnado (1956-2019)  *62

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was an Egyptian-born American journalist and memoirist. She was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Lagnado was born to a Jewish family in Cairo, Egypt. She attended P.S. 205 in Bensonhurst Brooklyn, New York City, and is a graduate of Vassar College. Lagnado wrote a prize-winning memoir about her childhood, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. The book, published by Ecco, was awarded the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The prize, which is administered by the New York-based Jewish Book Council, comes with a $100,000 stipend and is the richest cash award in the Jewish literary world. The presentation of the Rohr Prize took place in Jerusalem in April, 2008. "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit" was optioned by producer Anthony Bregman ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), according to a December, 2008 announcement in Publishers Marketplace.

In September, 2011, she published a companion volume to "Sharkskin" that tells the story of Lagnado's mother, Edith. "The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn" (Ecco/HarperCollins) juxtaposes the author's own coming of age in New York with that of her mother in Cairo, revealing how the choices she made meant both a liberation from Old World traditions and the loss of a comforting and familiar community. The book was described by the publisher as an epic family saga of faith and fragility.

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