Mother’s Day Books & Bagels ~ Sunday, May 13

Books & Bagels

Sunday, May 13 ~ 10:00am
Braun Youth Center

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

by Lucette Lagnado

Breakfast will be served
Babysitting will be provided

Book sale and signing will follow author presentation.

Complimentary Admission
No RSVP Required

The Arrogant Years ($15) is available for pre-order through the synagogue office

The author of the award-winning The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit—hailed by the New York Times book review as a “crushing, brilliant book”—returns with this, the extraordinary follow-up memoir

In The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, Lucette Lagnado offered a heartbreaking portrait of her father, Leon, a successful Cairo boulevardier who was forced to take flight with his family during the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, and of her family’s struggle to rebuild a new life in a new land.

In this much-anticipated new memoir, Lagnado tells the story of her mother, Edith, coming of age in a magical old Cairo of dusty alleyways and grand villas inhabited by pashas and their wives. Then Lagnado revisits her own early years in America—first, as a schoolgirl in Brooklyn’s immigrant enclaves, where she dreams of becoming the fearless Mrs. Emma Peel of The Avengers, and later, as an “avenging” reporter for some of America’s most prestigious newspapers. A stranger growing up in a strange land, when she turns sixteen Lagnado’s adolescence is further complicated by cancer. Its devastating consequences would rob her of her “arrogant years”—the years defined by an overwhelming sense of possibility, invincibility, and confidence. Lagnado looks to the women sequestered behind the wooden screen at her childhood synagogue, to the young coeds at Vassar and Columbia in the 1970s, to her own mother and the women of their past in Cairo, and reflects on their stories as she struggles to make sense of her own choices.

“The Arrogant Years [is] a paragon of memoir writing, a story about the complex swirl of people and events and forces out of which individual lives are made — some, like Ms. Lagnado’s, more painfully, but also more fully, than others.” (New York Times )

“Lagnado is at her best when she plumbs her own psyche to sort out her life’s ups and downs…a rewarding journey.” (Washington Post)

“Lagnado is a gifted storyteller who spins ordinary family experiences into enchanting fairy tales, complete with magical backdrops…nasty villains and dashing heroes…. Vivid and evocative…tender and heartfelt.” (Kirkus)

“Lyrical…[Lagnado’s] memoir is a fully fleshed, moving re-creation of once-vibrant Jewish communities.” (Publishers Weekly )