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Lucette Lagnado | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Lagnado in 2019 | |
| Born | Lucette Matalon Lagnado (1956-09-19)September 19, 1956 |
| Died | July 10, 2019(2019-07-10) (aged 62) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | A.B.Vassar College |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Spouse | |
Lucette Matalon Lagnado (September 19, 1956 – July 10, 2019) was an Egyptian-born American journalist and memoirist ofSyrian origin.[1] She was a reporter forThe Wall Street Journal.
Lagnado was born to aSyrian Jewish family inCairo,Egypt.[2] She attended P.S. 205 inBensonhurst,Brooklyn, New York City, and was 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 2008Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The prize, which is administered by the New York-basedJewish 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 inJerusalem in April 2008.[3][4] "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 inPublishers Marketplace.
In September, 2011, she published a companion volume to "Sharkskin" which 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 epicfamily saga of faith and fragility.[5]
In 1995, she married journalistDouglas Feiden in aJewish ceremony at a Manhattan Sephardic Congregation; the couple lived inNew York City andSag Harbor on the East End of Long Island.[6][7]
Lagnado died on July 10, 2019, at the age of 62.[8]
