Monday, October 24, 7:30 p.m
An Evening with Lucette Lagnado
In this much-anticipated new memoir, The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn, 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. Born in Cairo, Lucette Lagnado is the author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, for which she received the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2008. Currently, Lagnado is a senior special writer and cultural reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
Introduced by Alexandria born Maurice Elia, writer, novelist, film researcher,
former Dawson College professor. Books and autographs available.
Sponsored by The Norman Berman Memorial Lecture Fund of the JPL.
Jewish Publich Library, 5151 Côte Ste-Catherine
Admission $10
Members*/students $5
Info: (514) 345-2627
ext. 3017
Reception
* Advance tickets only
