The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  In the years since my uncle had left Cairo, a number of myths had proliferated around him and his career within the church. He was said to be high up in the Catholic hierarchy, a monsignor perhaps, even a cardinal—or on the road to becoming one. He was whispered to have close ties to the pope. There were even stories about his heroism during the war, rumors he had helped smuggle dozens of Jewish children who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe into Palestine.

  The same family members who professed horror at my uncle’s embrace of Christianity were the ones who felt compelled to build up his accomplishments within the church, as if to say, If he had to be a priest, let him at least be a great priest.

  In truth, Père Jean-Marie’s standing within the Catholic Church was vastly exaggerated. My uncle enjoyed a perfectly respectable career, but he was hardly an intimate of popes and cardinals. He was at most a competent, respected, and—except for his background as a devout Jew—rather ordinary member of his Benedictine order.

  But he had spent two years in Rome, so he certainly knew whom to ask about the fate of his own sister.

  Was there any chance they had survived? Père Jean-Marie asked his friends and associates in Rome to trace the whereabouts of Bahia, his sister, her husband, Lelio, and their twenty-year-old daughter, Violetta.

  The winter of 1945 was a season of wrenching questions and vague, desultory answers. Alas, the Vatican could only confirm what the Red Cross had already gleaned: that the family had been arrested and jailed, then placed on a transport to Auschwitz. After that, all traces of them had vanished. There were no records showing they had been exterminated—and no signs indicating they had survived.

  Salomone(standing, right) next to his sister, Violetta, and his parents, his two brothers in the foreground; Italian Riviera, 1937. Violetta, along with his mother and his father, perished at Auschwitz.

  Perhaps that was the true horror: there could never be a resolution, a definitive word on their fate, never a death certificate or a burial site.

  But Père Jean-Marie had done what he could. Would the family now honor his request?

  My father refused to budge. He wouldn’t allow the priest to step foot in Malaka Nazli.

  In his mind, his older brother had brought nothing but dishonor to a family that prized its good name above all. In the close-knit neighborhood of Ghamra, all the neighbors knew about his apostate brother, and as Leon walked to temple each morning, regal and dignified in his white suit, our neighbors would shake their heads in sorrow that someone as devout as the Captain would be forced to endure such a tragedy.

  My grandmother herself was torn. This deeply religious woman still spoke wistfully of the family-owned synagogue in Aleppo, and she had never recovered from the shock of Salomon’s conversion. But she also missed him, and she wasn’t well, and time was passing.

  Would she really die without seeing her son once more?

  A compromise was finally reached, brokered through intermediaries, as no one would admit to any direct contact with the priest. Zarifa would meet with my uncle at a prearranged time and location, not far from the house, if two conditions were met:

  He would not wear his black priestly habit, and he wouldn’t carry a cross.

  The day of the reunion, a taxi was summoned to Malaka Nazli. My grandmother, holding on to Salomone, emerged from the house, wrapped in her shiny black chabara. Together, my tall, gangly cousin and my frail, petite grandmother made their way to a small house on the grounds of a nearby convent where Père Jean-Marie was waiting.

  My uncle was in civilian clothes, as promised. Zarifa burst out crying. Once her most promising child, the one who had caught the eye of all his teachers at the Collège des Frères with his dazzling mind and his facility with most subjects, especially math, where he solved the most complex theorems and equations effortlessly, Salomon would be the one who would help the family recapture its lost greatness. He was destined to go far.

  But “far” wasn’t supposed to mean total estrangement from all that the family had held dear for hundreds of years. After he had left Cairo, the letters arrived from exotic destinations: Lanzo, Rome, Louvain, Issy, and, finally, Jerusalem. They went unanswered, of course. Still, how odd, Zarifa thought, that her son had ended up in the Holy Land, the place where Jews dream of settling.

  Yet the corner of Jerusalem where my uncle lived had a unique history of wooing Jewish converts. The Benedictine monastery in Ratisbon had been founded in the nineteenth century by a French Jew and banking heir named Alphonse de Ratisbonne, who claimed that a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary had led him to embrace Christianity.

  After establishing a Catholic mission in Jerusalem, he devoted his life to doing good works. Beloved by the Vatican, he created an order of nuns, the Sisters of Zion, as well as building the massive stone monastery where my uncle would settle years later.

  Salomone watched silently as our uncle tried to comfort Zarifa—priests were supposed to be good at that. He failed, of course, because he couldn’t make the one pronouncement that would have effectively wiped away her tears, the one that she and the rest of the family had been waiting for him to make since 1914: that it had all been a mistake, that he had never intended to stray so far, and that he was coming back to Malaka Nazli and returning to the faith of his ancestors.

  That was the dream, the fantasy none of us could ever relinquish—that my uncle would abandon the priesthood, beg his family to take him back. And it didn’t change from year to year, or decade to decade, or generation to generation. The same hopeless longing of Zarifa was shared by her children, and then her children’s children.

  Yet there was a softening of attitudes. Marie, the youngest of the ten children, and perhaps the most tenderhearted, was the first to forgive him. My aunt decided to end the schism that had existed for so long. Against the advice of my father—and even her own husband—she opened her house to Père Jean-Marie and allowed him to come meet her own children and as many of the nieces and nephews as she could gather.

  Tante Marie was a kindly soul, all softness and curves and compassion, the embodiment of femininity. But she could be every bit as authoritarian as the men in the family. Once she made her decision to receive the priest, no one could dissuade her, not even Leon, the sibling she loved and respected the most, and the only one she feared.

  Tante Marie was convinced that the moniker Jean-Marie was a tribute to her. It didn’t matter that everyone laughed at her for her foolish notion and said it was only a coincidence—the name Marie was extremely popular among Catholics to honor the Virgin Mary.

  But to Tante Marie, it was a way her brother had found to maintain a link to the family when all links had been severed.

  Père Jean-Marie arrived at her home dressed in flowing white. He carried beautifully wrapped packages he distributed to the children who gathered around him, delighted by the attention they were receiving from this stranger who looked so familiar, somehow, with his fair skin, aquiline nose, and intense green eyes. Only the beard was jarring; the men in the family tended to be clean-shaven. Still, he was jovial and charming, embracing his nieces and nephews one by one, their very own Jewish Santa Claus.

  Reigning over the festivities was Tante Marie, who sat there beaming.

  He was her older brother and she loved him and nothing, not even the Church of Rome, would be permitted to erase the bond between them.

  MY PARENTS’ MARRIAGE ENDURED its first rocky year. The relationship survived both Leon’s return to his restless ways and the arrival of a daughter instead of a son. Malaka Nazli was far from joyous. It was a house of tears, steeped in mourning in the wake of the news about Bahia. My mother was struggling to care for my infant sister as well as looking after Zarifa, who was increasingly frail. My grandmother was no longer able to stand for hours at her beloved Primus, and retired to her room.

  Barely a year after my sister was born, Mom found herself pregnant again. In May 1946, she gave birth to the longed-for son, my brother César.


  At the bris held in Malaka Nazli, Zarifa, summoning one last time her legendary strength, carefully handed the infant over to the mohel, the man who would perform the circumcision on a satin pillow. The mohel dipped his index finger in a cup of wine and gave César three drops, intended to numb the pain.

  Several months later, my grandmother died, still grieving over the loss of her daughter but heartened that she had lived to see Leon settled, with a son and heir. His fretful bride and incessant wanderings were almost trivial, incidental details to this indomitable matriarch who had ruled with an iron hand, even when her hand was old and frail. To the end, she had kept her focus on the essentials as defined by Aleppo: faith, honor, and family.

  Edith holding Suzette, the oldest, and Leon holding César, his firstborn son and heir, Cairo, 1946.

  One more tragedy cast a shadow over Malaka Nazli. My father’s nephew, Siahou, Tante Leila’s son, jumped out the window of his mother’s house. His suicide was never talked about and never explained.

  With Zarifa gone, my other grandmother, Alexandra, became a more frequent visitor to Malaka Nazli. She would arrive every day, and knock rapidly four times, tap tap tap tap. Once inside, she’d settle on a chair and, taking my sister and César in her arms, proceed to rock them and sing to them in Italian. Unlike Zarifa, who only spoke Arabic, Alexandra never spoke Arabic, and she only wandered to the kitchen to retrieve a small cup of steaming café Turque.

  Alexandra of Alexandria—even more than with Zarifa and her kings, there was an apocryphal quality to the stories about her and her gilded past.

  In my mother’s telling, Alexandra was a creature both fantastic and fatally flawed. She had lived a life of extraordinary indulgence. The daughter of doting, wealthy parents, Alexandra was lavished with the finest that money could buy. As a young girl, she’d had maids and nannies to attend to her every need.

  “Why,” my mother, Edith, loved to recall, smiling, “Alexandra couldn’t even comb her own hair.” Each morning, the governess took it upon herself to brush and braid the young girl’s long dark strands of hair, and tie them back with satin ribbons. Perfectly coiffed and dressed, Alexandra would proceed to the parlor for her daily piano lessons. She had the finest instructors in all of Alexandria.

  When she was old enough to attend school, her parents enrolled her in a convent run by nuns. Devout Jews, they were also consummate snobs, and no schools enjoyed the cachet of Egypt’s Catholic convents. Each morning, a maid would walk Alexandra to school, and then return in the afternoon to take her home.

  The nuns were strict and prided themselves on a no-nonsense, disciplinarian brand of education. Alexandra seemed hopelessly weak and vain—someone who needed to be toughened up so she could face the world.

  At noon, her parents sent over another servant with a tray and a hot meal, since Alexandra complained she couldn’t eat the slop that was served in the common lunchroom, yet which the rest of her classmates seemed to enjoy.

  But she couldn’t eat what the maid had brought over either. She simply fasted day after day, and her évanouissements—fainting spells—made her the talk of the school. Mostly she felt self-conscious over being “different”—a Jew among Catholics, a rich girl among those who were merely well-to-do, a sensitive soul among ruffians. Her sense of isolation only increased, and she plotted to leave the convent at the first opportunity.

  That opportunity came in the form of Isaac Matalon, a womanizer with a mysterious income visiting from Cairo. Charmed by the lovely teenager and no doubt finding her an easy mark, he persuaded Alexandra to abandon her parents, her home, her convent, and her city, and accompany him back to Cairo. They left together after a wedding ceremony her parents didn’t even attend, and moved into his dingy apartment in a deeply impoverished area of narrow, windy streets and alleyways that seemed worlds away from Alexandria.

  The shabby residence helped illuminate the secret of Isaac Matalon’s income: he had almost none. He survived through his wits and charm. The year was 1921, Alexandra was eighteen and, within a few months, pregnant. Isaac, a widower with grown children including Oncle Edouard, who would one day accompany Edith and Alexandra on their first visit to Malaka Nazli, was in his forties, possibly even older, since he was as unreliable about his age as about his louche activities.

  Isaac was hopeful that Alexandra’s parents would bless the union and help out the couple, if only for their daughter’s sake. What he didn’t foresee was that his in-laws, bitterly disappointed at Alexandra’s choice of a husband, would cut her off completely.

  The Cairo apartment was so unlike the spacious villa by the sea where she had been raised, and it felt even more cramped after she gave birth to a little girl, my mother, Edith, in 1922, and then, a couple of years later, to a boy, my uncle Félix.

  Alexandra felt completely adrift without her maids and her beloved gouvernante to help her take care of the house and the children and herself. She didn’t have a clue as to how to keep a room clean and tidy, or the faintest notion how to fix a meal for her husband and two infants, as she never learned to cook. She still couldn’t even brush her own hair. Without her parents’ help, she experienced abject poverty for the first time. There was nothing she could pawn for extra income. Her parents hadn’t even allowed her to take her clothes or jewels.

  They had relented on a single object—Alexandra’s piano. There it stood, stately amid the squalor. Edith and Félix were left to their own devices, neglected and forlorn and, at times, ravenously hungry as Alexandra played and played.

  It wasn’t that my grandmother was uncaring, my mother would always insist. At her core intensely kind and loving, Alexandra was simply one of these people who couldn’t cope on their own, who needed others to get through one day to the next. My grandmother had received a wonderful education in her years at the convent, knew how to converse fluently in Italian, and had a finely honed literary sensibility in addition to her musical skills, but the nuns hadn’t prepared her for a life as a wife and mother.

  This wasn’t what Isaac had bargained for in a wife. Their life together unraveled, and more and more, he left her alone with the children and took off for destinations unknown. Still, those times he was home, he managed to be affectionate to his son and daughter, and Edith, in particular, adored him. If he had harsh words to dispense, they were directed only at his wife. He had come to hate the very qualities that once drew him to Alexandra—her vulnerability, her delicate and intensely fragile nature.

  Another child, a boy, came into the world even as my grandparents’ marriage was dying. The bonnie baby had soft dark hair, blue eyes, and a gleeful, hopeful disposition. His Hebrew name, after all, was Eliezer, which means “God will help me, God will take care of me.” My mother, a little girl of seven or eight, watched over him while her parents sparred, more absorbed in their hatred of each other than in their love for their children. Fights at home grew more bitter, the scenes of recrimination became more frequent.

  It all came to an end one morning.

  Isaac announced he was taking the infant out for some fresh air. “Edith, cherie, could you please dress the baby?” he asked his daughter very sweetly. The child was only a few months old at the time, and couldn’t walk or talk. She put him in a fresh cloth diaper—only a cotton diaper, my mother remembered, not even shorts or rompers—and une flanelle, a white cotton T-shirt.

  The diaper wouldn’t stay up, so Isaac offered one of his ties as a makeshift belt. It was wide and red and silk, so incongruously long that it went around the baby twice, at least. Edith gently combed his soft hair and rubbed the popular eau de cologne Arlette on his arms and legs; babies were known to love the refreshing scent.

  The baby was gurgling and smiling, clapping his chubby hands. He seemed delighted at all the attention; he played with the tie, trying to undo it.

  “On va faire une promenade,” Isaac announced, placing the infant in the carriage—We are going for a stroll. My mother kept fussing and fussing over her little brother, n
ot quite willing to let him go, maybe because he was especially sweet and loving that morning. Alexandra kissed the baby as she had done a hundred times, a bit distractedly, absorbed by a novel she was reading.

  Isaac returned later without the child or his stroller, and informed his wife what he had done. He had sold their blue-eyed baby boy at the souk, the Arab marketplace.

  They simply couldn’t afford another mouth to feed. There was no way she could handle another child. It was for Alexandra’s own good, he said. Then he turned around and left, never to be part of the household again.

  That is when Alexandra began screaming. She screamed so loud that her cries reverberated across the neighborhood. Her sobs were heard in the kuttabs, the small, homelike synagogues where men gathered to pray at any hour of the day or night, and echoed across the dusty alleyways and shabby streets, and were heard in the communal baths, where women came to wash away their impurities.

  Egypt was a country where professional mourners were often heard crying in the streets. “Someone must have died,” strangers thought as they continued walking.

  With nothing to fall back on, Alexandra sank into a kind of madness. Edith recalled how day after day, she’d watch her mother from the window as she walked to and from their home, an increasingly thin and haggard figure, old before her time, proud yet desperate, pleading for bits of donations from the Jewish charities that were active in the community.

  Whatever money she collected went to care and feed Edith and Félix. She kept almost nothing for herself, and survived on cigarettes and cup after cup of the exceedingly strong café Turque that she was constantly preparing in the kitchen. What had happened to her beautiful blue-eyed child? Was God indeed watching over him?