Rebecca Kreiser
Reflection 5/5
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit – by: Lucette Lagnado
In The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, Lucette Lagnado captures her Jewish- Egyptian father’s inability to embrace the coldness of NYC. By focusing on the ways her father clung to fellow Jewish-Egyptians living in Brooklyn, Lagnado essentially shows her readers how ethnic enclaves form and function in New York.
Upon losing his home, money and way of life, Leon Lagnado lived with the dream of returning to the Cairo of his youth. He always kept a suitcase ready, and the refrain “Ragaouna Masr: Take us back to Cairo, please take us back” (Lagnado 318) was imprinted on both his heart and mind. Still, because Leon understood that his dreams would never become a reality, he wished for the next best thing: a son-in-law to “give…back all [they] had lost” (248). This nostalgia is common among people living in ethnic enclaves. Who would not want to go back to a time and place where they felt loved and at ease?
While NYC does offer many opportunities, the one thing it can lack is warmth. The anonymity, cold winters and skyscrapers can intimidate newcomers. Yes, there is warmth to be found, but one has to search for it. For those not born here, this search can be arduous. While many do fall in love with New York, others form tight knit communities that remind them of home. This is simply their way of coping with a city so unlike anything else they know.
Members of ethnic enclaves may technically live in Brooklyn or the Bronx etcetera, but their hearts are bound up in the place they emigrated from. This means that they thrive on eating traditional foods, marrying people from the same/similar background(s) and passing on their memories of home to their children. Lagnado’s detailed focus on all of these aspects of enclave life, allows any reader, no matter how American, to understand the sentimentality of enclave communities.
- Have you ever dreamed of visiting/seeing a place and time that no longer exist?
- Do you find NYC to be a cold place?
