The Arrogant Years by Lucette Lagnado

     In this beautifully written, touching coming-of-age memoir Lucette Lagnado writes, , “I had neither the soul nor the temperament nor the fashion sense of a yeshiva girl.....And the only cult I was susceptible to following was the cult of Emma Peel.”  She fancied herself a version of the glamorous secret agent on TV’s The Avengers.  “This was  my time to be vain and flamboyant; my arrogant years had begun.”  And what years they were.

    Following her highly successful “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit” in which she focused on Leon,  her once boulevardier-like father, Lagnado now focuses on her mother, Edith, as she shares in flashbacks life in once bustling, sophisticated Cairo to resettlement in the United States.  It was a time of upheaval and discord as they were forced to leave Egypt due to Nasser’s dictatorship.  Cairo was not longer a city that welcomed all religions and cultures.
  
    The 60s and 70s were also a period of  rejection of tradition, and sometimes just survival in an unwelcoming new world.  Undoubtedly this was  exacerbated by the young woman questioning the restraints placed upon her by her religion and her mother.  Why did the women have to sit behind a screen in the Bensonhurst synagogue they had joined?  She yearned to be on the main floor with the men and plotted to make this happen - she was unsuccessful.

    Edith vainly tries to create the home the family had once known in her new surroundings.  It is a hopeless attempt as Leon’s small income keeps them working class at best, and Lagnado’s older sister has moved to her own apartment.  Unthinkable.  We read, This “was the recurrent nightmare of America, as my parents were experiencing it -- a place where children left, and home, instead of being central, became meaningless."

    As disappointments and misfortunes build Edith dreams for her pretty, bright daughter, and many of those dreams do come true.  Today Lagnado is a cultural reporter for The Wall Street Journal.  Yet it has not been an easy journey, side-swiped by a serious illness and other obstacles.  She records this journey in an affecting memoir penned eloquently and tenderly.

    - Gail Cooke