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By David Strom
 SAN DIEGO—Lucette Lagnado came as a young girl with her family as immigrants to the United States. It was in the early 1960’s shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy. Her family had just left their temporary home in Paris, France for what they hoped would be their final destination. No family greeted them when they arrived in the United States, and no family member came to help them adjust to the “American Way” of doing things. If they had illusions of what life would be like in America, they were quickly dashed. The streets of America were not “paved with gold.”
A HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) bureaucrat formally greeted the newly arrived immigrants, gave them a few dollars and helped take the Lagnado family to a lumbering old Broadway Central Hotel that was long past its prime.
Why had they come to the United States? They came because the Egyptian leader, Nasser abruptly took their comfortable way of life away from them.
This book is not only about the experiences of a young immigrant, but about the demoralizing changes and humiliation forced upon her parents from their loss of status and economic stability when they left Egypt in search of political and religious freedom. Back in Egypt, Lucette Lagnado’s father had no official place of work, but he was a prosperous and respected business man in this multiethnic community. The city streets of Cairo were his office and workplace. With a handshake or a nod or a smile he moved goods. He searched and found hard-to-get goods for merchants, with no accounting records and no paper trail, no written transactions. Mr. Lagnado was just the relaying agent of items that person A wanted and customer B received. All of this was done without the trappings of a formal company or building or workers to pay. Lucette’s father’s business did well. It seemed as if this informal business arrangement was mutually beneficial to all concerned.
Lucette’s mother did not know what her husband did for a living. Like so many other Egyptian women of her day, she did not care to know. She knew her role and “place was in the home.” Nor did she bother to openly question her role or her husband’s in the traditional Arab/Jewish household of her day.
The oldest child in the family was Lucette’s sister. Her two brothers were next in age, and she was the youngest. Prior to the creation of Israel, her family lived a comfortable life, but after the surprise victory of Israel over the Arab states, things began to change quickly for the Jewish citizens in Cairo. Life became difficult. Many Jews left for Israel or anywhere else that would take them in.
While the majority of the Cairo Jews applied to leave Egypt, Lucette’s father, did not think of leaving Egypt. It was his home where he planned to spend his life and raise his family. The “modern” ways of the west annoyed such a religiously traditional man. Lucette’s father did not want his family corrupted by the modern “sexual” revolution. He was perfectly comfortable with his current lifestyle.
Every day Lucette’s father would get up early and walk to a neighborhood synagogue. There he prayed, met his friends, discussed the politics of the day, visited and did some business. He spent many hours at the synagogue. Then he went off to do his official work which consisted of meeting and greeting persons at bars, or having lunch with prospective clients at nice restaurants. Occasionally he would take Lucette with him. She loved going, especially when he wore his white sharkskin suit. After traveling from place to place, listening to the discussed issues of the day and determining what a merchant wanted, they would be exhausted and finally travel homeward.
Lucette’s mother was younger than her husband. When they married she was a beautiful young woman who was glad to have caught the dashing Jewish bachelor. No one thought the bachelor was ever going to marry or settle down. For a short while after the marriage, he tried to settle down, but soon went back to his old bachelor ways. There would be no reproaches, no restraints imposed on him by his wife. A Jewish woman accepted the traditional role of wife and
mother. Lucette’s mother did not like the arrangement, however she was resigned and accepted her poor relationship with her husband. Soon her parents slept in separate
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bedrooms, didn’t talk much with each other, and lived in two completely parallel but separate and dissimilar worlds.
When her mother began to have children, her father was sure the first child was going to be a boy. It wasn’t. Her older sister always resented the fact that her father took it so hard that she wasn’t a boy. Lucette’s brothers could deal with her father. As long as the family lived in Cairo, they listened and respected him as a father and a man.
As soon as the family left Egypt things changed. Lucette’s brothers became “westernized” and openly began to defy father’s weakened authority. However, being the youngest and the most spoiled, Lucette continued to revere her father.
Life in Egypt after the Nasser revolution gradually became more and more difficult for the surviving Jewish community. Most of the Lagnado relatives left earlier for other parts of the world. Some went to Israel, some to Europe, and others to the United States. Now it was time for the Lagnado family to leave Egypt, however reluctantly. The Egyptian government did not allow families to take out much money, so Jewish families were poor when they left. Their departure in search of a better life left and the exit of so many others, left the beautiful synagogues empty, the Jewish businesses closed or abandoned, and the ancient Jewish cemeteries untended. Only a ghost of a once-thriving community remained.
When Lucette’s family first left Egypt, they went to Paris, France. In France they were poor. Lucette’s father could not make a living. He seemed to have lost his main purpose in life-the financial support of his family. Her father had no prospects for work, lost his status as “bread winner,” and now was reliant on what his sons earned just to sustain a subsistence living. Lucette’s father was a “broken” human being.
In France, the official Jewish Agency contact with them was, at best, dismal. The social worker assigned to them took an immediate dislike to the father. She was rude to him and viewed him as old and sickly. The aid worker tried to discourage him about prospects for gainful employment. However, she did get them “a place line” for coming to the United States.
Upon arrival in the United States, their lives did not improve. Lucette’s father had a bad leg and found it difficult to walk and even more difficult to work. Her mother, who for so many years was a stay-at-home mom, was offered a professional job. But she did not take it, and so, she and her family missed the opportunity for a potential middle-class lifestyle, and possibly better chances of financial and educational success in their newly adopted country. For whatever reason Lucette’s mother did not take the job, she never seemed to regret it.
Lucette’s oldest sister moved to California, and her brothers went to work. She attended public school and did well. Lucette graduated college and became a writer.
Lucette’s mother and father were eventually placed into Jewish residential care when they could no longer take care of themselves. It was there that her father, for the first time in his Jewish life, ate non-kosher food (all of this in an official Jewish agency institution). They lived on separate floors, did not speak to each other often, and continued with animus towards each other until their eventual deaths.
Lucette Lagnado's memoir of her family's life in cosmopolitan Cairo and their painful relocation to an impoverished existence in America is an engaging account of the struggles of some Jewish immigrants following their displacement from their homelands because of political strife and anti-Semitism.
Lucette Lagnado’s memoir is full of rich description and compelling stories of traditional Jewish life and the hardships of having to abandon their communities as exiles. It can give readers insights into the difficulties new immigrants encounter, even when established agencies, like HIAS, exist to help them adjust and assimilate into a new culture. The reader can empathize with the trials and challenges of legal immigrant trying to adjust to the demands placed upon an immigrant’s shoulders by the dominant society and culture.
Although learning to navigate the bureaucracies is difficult for any newcomer to American society, how much more difficult and scary it must be for those who come illegally, many of whom are driven to live and hide in corners so as not to be sent back to their country of origin. This book evokes compassion and reflection on the hopes, dreams and tribulations of Jews and other immigrants who are forced to leave their countries to escape political turmoil, poverty and persecution.
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