The award-winning journalist Lucette Lagnado, who has died aged 56, was the co-author of Children of the Flames: Dr Josef Mengele and the untold Story of the Twins from Auschwitz, on human experiments in the death camps.
She later won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2008 for The Man in The White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. It depicted the multicultural society in Egypt between the two world wars.
The youngest of five children born in Cairo to Leon Lagnado and Edith Matalon, Lucette was seven when her family was expelled from Egypt, moving first to Paris and finally Brooklyn.
She was struck by Hodgkin’s Lymphoma as a teenager but recovered to study French literature at Vassar College and entered journalism, eventually becoming an executive editor at Forward. She joined The Wall Street Journal in 1996 and brought her experiences to investigative reporting on hospitals, healthcare, and related issues. Among her plaudits she won the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s 2002 Mike Berger Award for a story about the ageing residents of an Upper West Side apartment building. One of her final articles before succumbing to illness, A Sisterhood of Nurses, was devoted to six Filipino nurses who emigrated to the United States.
The Man in the Sharkskin Suit was followed in 2011 by The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for her lost Youth from Cairo to Brooklyn, a memoir of her life and that of her mother. Lucette wrote of her: “Defying centuries of deeply ingrained traditions about a woman’s place took more courage than the speeches and epithets mouthed by generations of feminists. No one who knew my mother Edith ever thought of her as an icon of American feminism. Yet – I have become convinced that this is exactly what she was”.
Lucette’s articles and books, translated into several languages including Arabic, helped open the world’s eyes to the story of the Jews exiled from Arab countries. She is survived by her journalist husband Douglas Feiden whom she married in 1995, sister Suzette and two brothers César and Isaac Lagnado.
Alec Nacamuli
Lucette Lagnado: born September 19, 1956. Died July 10, 2019
