The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (24 page)

Dad was still in his faded raincoat, which had become his armor during our months in Paris. He was trying to come to terms with the fateful decision he had made. He realized, of course, that choosing America over Israel dashed any hope he had of rebuilding what he had lost. Never again would he live within walking distance of his brothers and sisters, never again would the family come together as in the dining room on Malaka Nazli, the men in their crisp new cotton pajamas, the women in their elegant robes, looking to him—the Captain, the patriarch—for guidance.

My father's entire life had been guided by the primacy of family that was the Aleppo way. Family above work, family above money, family above ambition, family—though his wife would deny it—above personal pleasure. Yet there we were, on our way to a city where we had no one except a handful of relatives who didn't care enough about us to meet us at the dock.

M
y jaunty gray Cicurel coat did little to shield me from the arctic chill of Pier 90, where the
Queen Mary
berthed after arriving in New York. We stood on the ship's bow, looking down toward the dock. The entire landscape was white, and we were mystified. César decided to investigate.

“What is that on the ground?” my brother asked the passenger next to him.

The man's eyes widened, as if he had encountered a Martian.

“Snow,” he replied, and then edged away.

After going through customs, we stood in front of the pier, our mountain of luggage piled up around us, waiting I wasn't sure for what. Our fellow travelers were leaving us behind one by one. They disappeared into waiting arms or waiting cars or waiting taxicabs even as we continued to stand out in the cold. We had come so far, yet we didn't know where we were going, and we had no one to take us there.

We were somewhat in shock, staring at the cars bobbing up and down the West Side Highway; they were all so enormous—so outsize:
nothing like the endearing little Citroëns and Renaults we were so used to seeing on the streets of Paris. Those were my first impressions of America: the bitter cold and the large imperious automobiles that occasionally came to a full stop and picked someone up, but never me or my family.

I went over to my father and reached for his hand. He had on his thin old raincoat, which was, if possible, even flimsier than my woolen coat with its matching scarf, but he didn't complain, though I noticed that he wasn't wearing gloves, and his hand felt like ice. He was strangely silent: no cries of “Ragaouna Masr.” He simply stared, as we all did, at the grayness of the sky, the whiteness of the ground, the bleak horizon of low-lying buildings and the cars moving, moving along the highway.

I tugged at his sleeve, which I did whenever I wanted his attention, and he managed to dig into his pocket and remove a piece of candy. He had bonbons left over from the stash he'd collected on the
Queen Mary,
where every night was a feast, an occasion to shower passengers with desserts and favors and music and treats.

Our passage across the Atlantic had felt like a holiday cruise, one long luxuriant party. The sheer opulence of it all left us almost in a daze after the miseries and privations of the prior year. It was sheer luck that we had maneuvered a trip on a grand ocean liner, instead of flying coach for ten hours or more on Pan Am, the usual mode of travel for refugees. My father told HIAS that he couldn't tolerate an extended plane ride because of his leg. We were steered toward the
Queen Mary,
since its departure for America coincided with the date HIAS had decreed we should leave. Before we knew it, we had tickets on the grandest ship afloat, fit for dukes and duchesses and debonair film stars.

Admittedly, we had the least expensive accommodations available—third class, modest quarters for the most budget-conscious travelers. They didn't strike me as particularly modest, though, not compared to our recent digs—the cabin by the engine on the
Massaglia,
or the Violet Hotel.

The gracious, exquisitely polite culture of the
Queen Mary
suited us to perfection: at last, a world outside of Cairo where people weren't rude or impatient, where they were actually solicitous, and deigned to show us some kindness and concern.

My father felt at home with the British crew. He bantered amiably with everyone from the captain to the purser, showing off his command of the language and his exquisite accent. None of us could compete with him when it came to speaking English.

We sailed a couple of weeks before Christmas, and a holiday mood prevailed. There were nonstop diversions—concerts and dances, movies, plays, games, and soirees, organized by an energetic crew that seemed interested in our well-being—making certain we were happy and enjoying ourselves.

I couldn't remember the last time anyone had cared whether we were happy.

While I stuck close to my dad, my siblings roamed a ship that felt as vast as a city. Though first class was technically off-limits, César made friends who let him peek at its dazzling ballrooms and lounges, tall staircases and elegant carpeted suites. At night, he went dancing at the clubs that catered to teenagers and featured the latest American hits, including a jazzed-up, souped-up Latin version of “If I Had a Hammer,” sung by Trini Lopez.

After months of the greasy dishes of Le Richer, dining on the
Queen Mary
was the greatest extravagance of all. We enjoyed gourmet meals served by our personal waiter who boasted a command of some twenty-five languages, and had each language that he spoke stitched into the fabric of his sleeve. Every lunch and dinner, he appeared magically at our side, offering to translate the menu into the language of our choice. Unlike the lone other family on our side of the ship who kept kosher, and insisted on Yiddish translations of every entrée and appetizer, we remained mostly silent and tried to follow along in English. We ate on elegant porcelain china, using fine silverware engraved with the word
Kasher.

I sat, as always, at my father's side; he was more cheerful than I'd seen him in months. It was as if the magical powers of the
Queen Mary,
its British culture, its deferential staff, its soothing vegetable broth prepared in the ship's kosher kitchen, made him feel hopeful for the first time about our lives outside of Egypt.

We had felt protected the entire time we were aboard the ship, but now, on the pier, the old feeling of being lost and at the mercy of an
uncertain fate returned. I noticed that my parents and siblings kept looking anxiously out toward the highway, as if some familiar face would materialize from the icy gray blur. No one could explain to me what we were doing, why we had come all this way only to be left out in the cold.

We were officially welcomed to America by an HIAS bureaucrat, who apologized profusely for being late. She handed my father $50 to help tide us over those first few days, and arranged for a taxi to transport us and our suitcases to our hotel.

The Broadway Central was a lumbering old hotel, long past its prime, perched between Greenwich Village and the Bowery. It had once housed any number of illustrious guests and visitors, from Diamond Jim Brady to James Fisk, the railroad tycoon who was shot there, to Leon Trotsky, who waited tables before hastening back to Russia to lead the Red Army.

But now, in the early 1960s, it was so down-at-the-heels it catered mostly to needy low-income families and stray out-of-towners and refugees like us who couldn't afford any better—a forerunner of the welfare hotels that would become commonplace.

Though we were given a suite, our accommodations were, if possible, even more squalid than at the Violet Hotel. We had a small kitchenette and two large drafty rooms, where beds were lined up one next to the other as in a hospital ward. There were only five beds for the six of us, so I doubled up with my mom in a small bed, close to a wall with a large gaping hole.

We were used to balmy winters, and even Paris had been mild the year we were there, but here it was freezing cold. I went to bed every night in my street clothes—a pair of gray wool slacks from Cairo and a turtleneck sweater.

My mother thought I was being silly, as did the rest of the family. No one could understand why I insisted on sleeping in scratchy woolen street clothes instead of the soft and toasty flannel pajamas they had managed to retrieve from one of the suitcases, and I am not sure I understood myself.

We fell back into the nerve-racking rituals of people with nothing to do. I took walks with various members of my family—slow walks with
my father, who was in constant pain, aggravated by the frigid temperatures; brisk walks with César, who was curious about America but not in love with it the way he had been in love with Paris; anxious walks with my mom, who seemed bewildered by the Village and New York in general; quiet walks with my sister, who took me again and again to Washington Square Park.

On the benches were people clad entirely in black, who looked like no one I had ever seen before. I couldn't help staring at these strange creatures seated amid the snowy white splendor of Washington Square Park. “Ce sont des bohémiens, des ‘beatniks,'” my sister explained. We'd sit in one of the benches and stare at them, hoping they would approach us. They had eyes only for each other, and neither I nor my sister, all bundled up in our layers of Mediterranean garb, could possibly be part of any group. We were still outsiders, even to the beatniks, the quintessential outsiders.

When she walked alone, Suzette would occasionally find herself accosted by a beatnik, asking her for a handout. She'd shake her head no and continue walking. But she felt strangely guilty about turning them down, though she had even less than they did.

More inviting even than Washington Square Park was our local supermarket. I'd never been inside a supermarket before, and I found it dazzling, especially the fruits and vegetables, which I was used to buying loose by the pound, in outdoor stalls or from the vendors who roamed around Malaka Nazli. Here, they came packaged in green paper cartons, tightly wrapped in a layer of cellophane, so that even ordinary grapes or pears seemed remote and shiny and untouchable. I wondered why anyone would take the trouble to cover bananas or green beans in plastic, when anywhere else in the world, it was possible to simply reach for some. That must be America, I decided: a country where even commonplace items like apples sparkled and looked expensive and desirable beneath their plastic sheathing.

Bread was another mystery. I was used to tall thin golden baguettes purchased fresh from bakeries all over Paris, and in Cairo, we enjoyed hot round pita bread that came from the oven. But here, the package of white bread looked nothing like the bread I knew. It was all dough with practically no crust, while I was used to crust and very little dough.
We eyed the packages of Wonder suspiciously, inspecting them closely.

I was anxious to sample some, but my father seemed horrified: “Loulou, ce n'est pas du pain, ça,” he said; This is not bread. We never bought white bread from the supermarket near the Broadway Central and rarely, if ever, later on.

A few days after we'd arrived, the resettlement agency called, asking to see us. HIAS had discharged us from its files; our only remaining contact involved the debt we had incurred for the tickets to sail aboard the
Queen Mary,
and which my father had agreed to repay over time. Now we were in the care of NYANA, the New York Association for New Americans. Mom, who loved to Frenchify every English name, promptly dubbed it
la Nyana.

My father and César made their way to the agency's lower Manhattan office to meet with the social worker in charge of our Americanization. Sylvia Kirschner, a tough-talking veteran, seemed from the start to take an active, almost visceral dislike to my father. She offered so much advice it was dizzying. Our stay at the Broadway Central had to be as brief as possible. The family needed to find a place to live. My dad, my older siblings, and even my mom all had to go out and find work. We had to master English and meet people and make friends and lead normal lives again.

The initial meeting had the feel of a police interrogation. Why hadn't we begun to look for an apartment? Where were my mother and the other children? Why hadn't they come, too? Had we made any contact with relatives who could help us find work or a place to live? We had been in America all of five days; Mrs. Kirschner seemed in an awful hurry.

My father sat there, listening politely, talking only when she lobbed questions his way. He was so quiet and deferential that the social worker misunderstood—the way that she would consistently misunderstand him. She mistook his silence for contempt, and decided he was being obsequious when he was simply trying to be gentlemanly, more so than usual because he knew that this woman held our fate in her hands.

Unwittingly, Dad had incurred the wrath of Sylvia Kirschner.

It wasn't that Mrs. Kirschner was blind to my father's frailties—his
advancing age, his deepening infirmities, his growing dependency. On the contrary, in page after page of notes that read almost like a diary, she chronicled my dad's failing strength, observing that he “looks considerably older than his age, walks with a pronounced limp and also very slowly due to his leg fracture,” and “was obviously in pain.” Even in the relative comfort of her office, she noticed that he could barely sit still without shifting his leg or grimacing, and he was so “very tired.”

Yet, faced with a man clearly in decline, Mrs. Kirschner seemed unmoved. She found him troubling. Though skilled and vastly experienced, a professional who'd helped thousands of immigrants make the transition from the old world, making that transition had been based on the act of
letting go
—abandoning belief systems that were quaint and out of date in favor of the modern, the new, the progressive ideas that were so uniquely American.

That is what assimilation was all about, yet the overly polite gentleman with the vaguely British accent and the severe limp rejected the notion out of hand.

My father was by no means convinced the values of New York trumped those of Cairo. He couldn't see abandoning a culture he loved and trusted in favor of one he barely knew, and which he instinctively disliked. He preferred being an old Egyptian to a new American. He had, in short, no desire whatsoever to assimilate. “We are Arab, madame,” he told Mrs. Kirschner.

It was a tragic clash of cultures and personalities. Both strong-willed people, my father and Sylvia Kirschner were set in their ways, and adhered to belief systems that were worlds apart and could never, ever be reconciled. Like boxers in a ring, they stood in their respective corners, determined to fight to the final bell for the principles they cherished.

And in a way, the test of wills between Sylvia Kirschner and Leon Lagnado in a small refugee agency in early 1964 presaged the conflicts my family would face for years to come in America, where our values and feelings about the importance of God and family and the role of women would constantly collide with those of our American friends. It also hinted at the larger, more terrifying and far deadlier conflict that would break out between the United States and the Muslim world decades later, when the United States would seek to spread its belief in
freedom and equality only to find itself spurned at every turn by cultures that viewed America as a godless and profoundly immoral society.