Lucette Lagnado

Lucette Lagnado, an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was born in Cairo, Egypt. She and her family left Egypt as refugees when she was a small child, an experience that helped shape and inform her critically acclaimed memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World and her latest memoir The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn (Ecco). An in demand speaker, she has spoken at Jewish organizations, temples, universities, conferences, fundraisers, and

A follow-up to The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, The Arrogant Years follows Lagnado during her first years in America. She revisits those beginning years first in Brooklyn, then at Vassar and Columbia, revealing a coming-of-age interrupted by a bout with cancer at age 16. Its devastating consequences would rob her of her ability to have children and of her "arrogant years" - the years defined by their overwhelming sense of possibility, invincibility, and confidence - leaving her with the lonely echo of her own fears and judgment: "I am not woman enough." Lagnado looks to the women sequestered behind the wooden screen at her childhood synagogue, to the young co-eds at Vassar in the 1970s, to her own mother and the women of their past in Cairo, and reflects on their stories as she struggles to heal, to make the leap from girl to woman without the grace and strength of her "arrogant years."

Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit recreates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years between WWII and Nasser's rise to power. Lagnado's father, Leon, was a boulevardier who bore a striking resemblance to Cary Grant and conducted his business in the elaborate lobby of the Nile Hilton, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit. Lagnado brings to life the color and culture of Cairo's sidewalk cafes and nightclubs, the markets and the quiet Jewish homes of the ancient city. But with Nasser's nationalization of Egyptian industry, Leon and his family lose everything. As streets are renamed and neighborhoods of their fellow Jews are disbanded, they, too, must make their escape. Packed into 26 suitcases, their jewels hidden in sealed tins of anchovies, Leon and his family depart for any land that will take them. From Cairo to Paris to New York, the poverty and hardships they encounter make a striking contrast to the beauty and comfort of old Cairo. A "riches to rags" inversion of the American dream set against the stunning portraits of three world cities, her memoir offers a grand and sweeping story of family, tradition, tragedy and triumph in their epic exodus from paradise.

Lagnado has received numerous awards for her work at the Wall Street Journal, where she has covered health care for a decade. She has been a finalist or received prizes from, among others, Columbia Journalism School, the University of Missouri, and the University of Southern California. She is also the 2008 recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the largest cash award in the Jewish book world.

In recent years, Lagnado has focused her coverage on hospitals and nursing homes, with a special emphasis on the elderly, the poor, and the uninsured. In 2008, Ms. Lagnado received two awards for her nursing home coverage: The National Press Club Joseph Riley Award for Excellence in Writing on Geriatric Issues, as well as the Jack Newfield Award given by FRIA - Friends and Relatives of the Institutionalized Aged.

Lagnado has also been recognized by the New York Press Club, which gave her its highest award, the Golden Typewriter for Outstanding Public Service, for her investigative work exposing the plight of America's uninsured. She is also the recipient of Columbia University's prestigious Mike Berger Award for her reporting about the elderly residents of the Belnord, a fabled West Side apartment building.

Lagnado is the co-author of Children of the Flames: Dr. Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz, a biography of the Nazi concentration camp doctor and the young children who were the subjects of his medical experiments during World War II. Children of the Flames has been translated into nearly a dozen languages; a Hebrew edition is being published by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Lagnado received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Vassar College where she majored in French literature. She and her husband, Douglas Feiden, a reporter for the Daily News, reside in Sag Harbor and New York City.

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World

The Untold Story of Jews of Arab Countries: The Jews Whose History was Forgotten

The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn