The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

  César turned thirteen a year or so after Dad had his accident, and his bar mitzvah, or coming of age, was a subdued affair. Unlike his friends, he didn’t have a party—only a small gathering at our house. But at least the ceremony was at Temple Hanan, a grand synagogue near our house that had tall vaulted ceilings and a whisper of the opulence of old.

  My oldest brother had changed forever after Dad’s accident—our entire family had. He found himself constantly looking out the window on Malaka Nazli Street, anxiously waiting for one parent or the other to come home, wondering if some catastrophe would befall them.

  When I started school in 1961, my mother took charge again. She decided to enroll me at the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk. The lycée had a vast campus with a private courtyard. The school was sealed from the outside world by a big gate that was kept shut except when we arrived in the morning or when it was time to leave in the afternoon. Children would gather in the yard and one by one, their parents, maids, bawabs (doormen), or chauffeurs would swoop down to take them home.

  César or Suzette usually took me to school in the morning, but Mom was expected to come pick me up. Yet day after day, I found myself the last child at the lycée, anxiously waiting for her to appear.

  As I stood alone in the vast courtyard, my imagination ran amok. Had my family forgotten all about me? I was sure that was it—that in the midst of the hullabaloo about staying or leaving Egypt, my parents had lost track of me. What would happen if no one came? I was scared out of my wits. It is not as if the lycée staff was especially solicitous, and I suppose the administrators thought we were perfectly fine on our own in the courtyard. Occasionally, some staff member would come down and notice me waiting, anxious and teary-eyed. Most often I waited alone.

  At last, even as I’d given up hope, I would see my mother arrive, a small figure pushing past a massive wooden door. Smiling and vaguely apologetic, she’d have in her hand a little bag of petits pains, the soft, warm golden miniature rolls she had stopped to purchase at a bakery on her way to pick me up. As we walked together to the tram, she’d hand me one of the rolls, no bigger than my fist, and they tasted utterly delicious after the long school day and the rigorous classes and the agony of not knowing if anyone was ever coming for me and my terror that I would be left to fend for myself forever at the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk.

  This scene repeated itself day after day, week after week. Mom was habitually late coming to get me and I was always so nervous, practically on the verge of hysteria, convinced that my own family had abandoned me in their distress over the revolution and its aftermath. She never explained why she was so late, and I was never sure she or anyone in the family was even aware of the intensity of my distress.

  The political situation only exacerbated Mom’s inability to cope. It was such a turbulent, confusing period. We weren’t leaving and we weren’t staying and we didn’t know what we were doing. My family was so preoccupied that my childish concerns were by necessity given low priority.

  The ultimate snafu came at the end of the year. Each June, the school held la distribution des prix—the ceremony when prizes for academic performance were given out to top students. On that day, I was home with the maid: My family had completely forgotten about la distribution des prix. After being contacted by the lycée the next day, one of my siblings went to pick up my prizes—a couple of children’s books, beautifully wrapped and adorned with ribbons—and brought them home to me.

  I think that my mother felt terrible—how could they have allowed me to miss that special day? She tried to make it up to me with a trip to our favorite dressmaker. Even as a young child, I had an immense passion for clothes, and trips to la couturière were obligatory for any Cairo female of a certain wealth and social status. Everyone had their personal dressmaker who could whip up the latest Parisian designs, since this fashion-conscious city fancied itself as European even more than it was Arab.

  We favored a trusty middle-aged woman with her own small workshop steps away from Sakakini Palace. As a rule, I was blissfully happy at her atelier, a universe of fitting rooms and sumptuous fabrics and women delicately wielding tape measures.

  But on this trip, because I had developed a fixation on a black dress with a rose at the waist, all hell broke loose.

  It began one night at my father’s synagogue, which held a get-together to restore morale among our dwindling community. We jammed into the little shul to watch a film of a fashion show in Europe. I was riveted by the spectacle of tall elegant models strutting up and down a runway, clothed in seductive dresses with low backs and plunging necklines. As I looked around me, I noticed the women had dressed up for the occasion—as if they were competing with the models on the screen. Several wore clingy black dresses with a large satin rose pinned to their waists.

  These struck me as the epitome of style—so grown-up and confident—and I longed to look exactly like them. When Mom took me to la couturière and I was asked what I had in mind, I declared that I wanted a fitted black dress with a rose at the waist.

  It was completely inappropriate, of course; even in modern Western cultures, little girls didn’t wear black, but that was especially the case in Egypt, where young or old, women traditionally avoided what was seen as the color of sadness, the color of mourning.

  My superstitious mother took pains to remind me, as she had a hundred thousand times, that I shouldn’t even want to wear black. “Loulou, ça va porter malheur”—it will bring you bad luck, she kept saying.

  The dressmaker offered me a choice from a selection of outfits she had recently made for other children. She held up a darling hot pink dress with a low waist that was clearly a popular model—and which I secretly found very pretty indeed. But I declared I would have none of it—I didn’t want to dress like other little girls, I fumed. She turned to my mother with alarm as other clients watched aghast.

  I think that everyone was taken aback by my fury. We left with nothing resolved, except that I felt more anguished than ever.

  When we returned a week later, the dressmaker anxiously brought out a pretty lime green dress she’d sewn specially for me. She had made it with one of the fabrics my mother had picked out when I wasn’t looking, and, in an attempt to be conciliatory, she had put a small rose at the waist. I peered at it suspiciously, then tried it on; it fit perfectly, and I agreed it looked quite wonderful and my dreams of owning a sleek womanly black dress were temporarily forgotten.

  Unfortunately, at around this time, I became very sick and no one knew why or what to do about it, though Mom was certain it was bad luck. She had warned me, after all. The doctors we consulted seemed completely at a loss. They peered at the suspicious lump at the top of my left thigh and then at me and shook their heads.

  Despairing, Edith took me one day on a long journey to Fustat, the most ancient part of Old Cairo. We were headed for Ben Ezra, the synagogue that was hundreds of years old; the point of going there wasn’t really to pray but to mingle with the poor who gathered there and give them alms. It was considered a blessing—a sacred, hallowed deed—to give them charity. The tradition of helping the poor of Ben Ezra dated back centuries, and my parents were convinced the mendicants had a direct pipeline to God. My father had taken Suzette with him when she was a little girl, giving her coins or small bills to offer the people who showed up near the synagogue and seemed so pitifully in need. Now, Mom was urging me to stuff lots of coins directly into the hands of the people who shyly hovered around us, and in turn they vowed to pray for me and God would listen to them.

  Dad shared her belief in the mystical powers of the poor of Ben Ezra. At least once a month, my father took his clothes—his beautiful white sharkskin suits that had become slightly frayed, shirts, trousers, vests—and gave them to the men hoping for a handout, and who were delighted to find they not only had some coins to get by but a resplendent new wardrobe.

  Mom and I entered the virtually empty synagogue and recited a small prayer. It was always da
rk inside Ben Ezra—the building itself was ancient, dating back to a time when Jews lived in this decaying part of the city and, legend had it, to the spot where the pharaoh’s daughter had found baby Moses floating in a basket.

  On our way home, we hurried past a beggar sitting on the sidewalk with his two stumps of legs exposed—they were completely bruised and covered with scabs so that his limbs even from a distance were a bloodied red and seemed to glow in the evening light. I was hypnotized and kept staring at the poor man’s hopelessly damaged legs, even as Mom tugged at my arm and tried to rush me along streets of a Cairo I didn’t even recognize, a Cairo that I found strange and frightening.

  I kept looking back at the beggar. I had the feeling that in this part of the city, he was not an uncommon sight, that if we kept walking I’d see other beggars in his condition, like the thin, ailing cats that seemed to be everywhere and that looked nothing like my well-fed gourmet of a tabby, Pouspous.

  My mysterious ailment, which we knew only as cat scratch fever, flared up several times in the months that followed, and then seemed to subside once and for all, perhaps because of our pilgrimages to Ben Ezra and other Jewish shrines. By the time my youngest brother Isaac turned thirteen, old enough to have a bar mitzvah, we knew that our most fervent prayer would go unanswered.

  It was the spring of 1963, and we had worn out our welcome in Egypt. In the eyes of the new regime, we weren’t Egyptian and never had been, even though we were born here, even though Dad had lived here since arriving as an infant from Aleppo in 1901. We would have to leave.

  Our visits to la couturière intensified. It wasn’t about ordering beautiful dresses anymore: She was sewing far more prosaic items for me, flannel T-shirts by the dozens, and woolen slacks such as I had never worn. A colleague of hers was commandeered to knit me some sweaters—thick pullovers that were several sizes too large. Wherever we were going, it was going to be nothing like Egypt.

  On the eve of leaving Egypt, Leon and Edith had a family portrait taken with Isaac and six-year-old Loulou.

  The fabric of choice for my new wardrobe was du castor—a kind of flannel typically used for pajamas or robes, and that was about as heavy as fabrics got in this sultry clime we took for granted. My mother was persuaded that I had to have as many models of des robes en castor—flannel dresses—as our seamstress could whip up.

  Overnight, I found myself with a collection of navy blue crew necks and flannel dresses. I wondered why my clothes were changing so dramatically overnight. This is how I learned that we were leaving Cairo, how I began to grasp the intricate mechanics of exile: through my awkward, bulky robes en castor.

  Those last few days, all of us—with the possible exception of Pouspous—were nervous and on edge. One morning, my father went out with César, and the two came home brandishing an expensive transistor radio, a Sony, sleek in its brown leather carrying case. Wherever fate landed us, we were at least going to be well informed and understand the world beyond Egypt. My father was clearly despondent. He couldn’t bear to leave, couldn’t even imagine how he would cope.

  César took possession of the radio and carried it around the way a woman holds on to a valuable shoulder bag. It gave him a sense of safety, I suppose: Those days my oldest brother was gripped by fear—fear that we were leaving, fear that we would not be allowed to leave.

  Unlike the rest of us, a strange calm descended on my mother. She loved Cairo every bit as much as Dad, but the city of her youth hadn’t been the same since Alexandra and Félix left. There had been so little happiness in the years since my grandmother had joined my uncle.

  At last—if only we made the decision to settle in Israel—she would be with them once again.

  Edith with official papers allowing her to stay in Paris for only a few months, 1963.

  Of course, we had made no such decision. And Mom was too meek and too passive to insist on it no matter the hardships. We were leaving Cairo without the slightest idea where we were settling permanently. We would first journey to Paris, the most popular transit point for refugees headed for God knows where.

  One afternoon before we left, Mom took a walk to Sakakini. She hurried past the palace and made her way to the Alley of the Pretty One and the corner house where she had grown up. Its newest occupants were seated on the terrace exactly as she and Alexandra had done so many times, and she felt a strange comfort knowing that life hadn’t really changed in this corner of Cairo, that revolution or not, the favored ritual of her youth, gathering for café turc, was popular with a new generation. As my mother watched them sipping their small cups of coffee, the sadness passed, replaced with hopefulness: She would see Alexandra again, enjoy a coffee with her again on some other terrace in Tel Aviv or Haifa, hold on to her arm again.

  That was all she needed to believe to weather the storms raging around her—my father’s anguish at leaving, César’s terror, Suzette’s balkiness, Isaac’s moody blues, and my lingering, mystifying illness. All would be well once she was reunited with her mother.

  We left Egypt on March 17, 1963, and made our way to France. We had barely settled in our dingy refugee hotel when news reached us that Alexandra had died. Though we had no money—we had been allowed to take only about two hundred dollars out of Egypt—Mom purchased a black dress, simple and very inexpensive. She wore it every day, mourning Alexandra in the only way she could in this new friendless city that didn’t really want us and where we didn’t belong.

  On many days we huddled around the radio. It seemed to be the only link between us and the world. We followed the news with an odd sense of detachment, a kind of numbness. Edith Piaf died, and hundreds of thousands of people turned out into the streets of Paris to mourn her. We stayed put in our hotel room. President Kennedy was assassinated, and again, we remained holed up in the hotel, debating where to settle, Israel or America, America or Israel, or—as I kept urging—simply returning to Cairo.

  Mom emerged briefly from her mourning to compose one of her startlingly beautiful notes to French officials. She hoped to persuade them to let us settle in France where at least we knew the language. She had no desire to go to America, and at least by staying put here in Paris, she thought she had a fighting chance of seeing Félix again. Her brother had reinvented himself as a journalist in Israel and occasionally traveled to Europe on assignments.

  By December it was clear we weren’t going to be allowed to stay in France. Dad, after heavy lobbying from my oldest brother, decided we weren’t emigrating to Israel, either.

  For my mother, the last flicker of hope was lost.

  We finally heard from immigration authorities that we would be resettled in America. My father signed papers promising to pay back the cost of five and a half third-class tickets aboard the Queen Mary, bound for New York.

  BOOK TWO

  Rebuilding the Hearth

  BROOKLYN: 1964–1970

  · 6 ·

  The Legend of Agent Extraordinary

  From my earliest days at the Shield of Young David, I relished my role as resident contrarian. I used the women’s section as my perch to challenge and question and dispute many of the notions those around me held dear.

  Nothing was more sacred to our congregation than the need for a woman to marry and marry young. No matter that the rest of America was moving in a different direction and beginning to challenge the need for a woman to get married at all.

  Here, an engagement while still in high school was the norm; that way, the wedding could take place immediately after graduation.

  There were any number of eligible young women who sat with us behind the divider. Their quest for a suitable mate was of intense interest to all of us, a subject of much discussion, not to mention concrete matchmaking efforts on the part of the older matrons. Some saw it as almost a religious obligation to marry off any single female.

  At sixteen, Marlene, a pretty brunette with a sleek pageboy and an elegant wardrobe, was my mother’s favorite in the women’s section. Mom liked M
arlene for her gentle demeanor, though she was actually quite forceful and outspoken. Ever since enrolling at the House of Jacob Academy, a religious girls’ school in nearby Borough Park, known as the strictest yeshiva in all of Brooklyn, Marlene had become increasingly devout. She changed before our eyes, arriving each week in dainty skirts that fell below her knee and modest—though stylish—sweaters. If she were husband hunting, or was even contemplating marriage, you couldn’t tell from her sedate behavior. She came early, prayed intensely, and seemed to prefer our company to that of the men across the divider. Yet we knew that Marlene would need to be engaged within a year or two because rules were rules at the Shield of Young David.

  Fortuna, Gladys’s younger sister, couldn’t have been more different. Pretty and, to my eyes, a tad arrogant, she ensconced herself in a prominent seat that offered a good view both of the men’s and women’s sections. She wore heavy eye shadow, and her black hair was teased, sprayed, and pouffed provocatively. Her skirts were short and her sweaters fashionably clingy.

  Yet I realized that she was, in her own way, a hopeless romantic. Even as she dreamed of that elusive mate, she pined after one man who was far from the Shield of Young David and wasn’t even Jewish. Fortuna had a crush on Elvis Presley. She went to all his movies, often in the company of Gladys, bought his latest records, and memorized the lyrics to his songs.

  I noticed that she became animated whenever she spoke about him. I suspected that if Elvis were ever to materialize in Bensonhurst, Fortuna would happily abandon her family, her watchful brothers, her doleful sister, and the women’s section to run away with him to Memphis.

  Another one of the eligible young women behind the divider was Janet, who was brainy and attractive. Janet had had an unfortunate marriage that had lasted only one day. We never found out what happened, but it was the source of gossip, the kind of experience that could ruin a girl in our community. But Janet was charming and educated, and her mother was one of the saints of our women’s section, the kind of person who visited you if you were sick and made a match for you if you were single. Janet waited for a new opportunity.