By John Hood

Leon Lagnado was a character straight outta storybook. Gamesman, boulevardier, bon vivant and, yes, man of many women — these days he might be considered a player. It is even rumored that he bedded Om Kalsoum, the Nightingale of the Nile, known to her many fans simply as al-Sitt, The Lady. Though, ever the gentleman, he never would tell.

To the French, the British, the Australians, the Egyptians and whoever else found themselves astir in colonial Cairo, he was called simply The Captain. A cross between Cary Grant and Omar Sharif had they Bogie’s Rick Blaine to thank for their acumen, he swung the streets of the old city as if they were his and his alone, which, in fact, they were, if not in fact, then at least in spirit.

It’s a spirit that’s reverently immortalized in Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus From Old Cairo to the New World (Ecco, $25.95), a memoir haunted by the man she called Dad.

Dad was a card all right. A Jew of Syrian descent, he always carried himself as if he inhabited the best of all possible worlds. It was a bearing that would help him each morning at shul (he was decidedly devout), as well as at table with King Farouk (both were inveterate gamblers), and in business, be it at “the Bourse,” or among the many back alley merchants he supplied with hard-to-get wartime items. He held court, and, in his own inimitable way, he held sway, at a time when all markets were gray.

But wars have a way of ending, and with them generally end their markets. After World War II was over and the colonial keepers had fled back to their respective homelands, Leon Lagnado lost much of the hustle that had made him. Worse, a not-so-nice guy named Nasser had led his henchmen to power, and the King and his cronies were ceremoniously kicked outta the country.

As were the Jews, though the boot they got came with neither fanfare nor ceremony. Now with family, and with fewer and fewer friends, Leon reluctantly relinquished everything he owned and led his brood to America.

Lagnado gets to the heart of the modern exodus in a way only those who lived it can — the hurt, the heartbreak and the consequence of callous power. More, though, she gives us the heroics of a family — and a people — heaven-bent on being, obstacles be damned.

And, yes, she gives us Old Cairo: the wide Malaka Nazli (Queen Nazli Street) where she was born; Groppi’s, “[p]art pastry-shop, part paradise, a favorite of kings, colonialists and privileged Cairenes”; the action on the terrace of the hundred-year-old Shepheard’s Hotel; the deals made in the dark bar of the Nile Hilton. That it all occurs in “the land of prophets and mystics … the birthplace of Moses, the home of Maimonides, the city where Jeremiah, the mournful prophet, and Elijah, the immortal one, were known to have sojourned,” only makes the shade that much more illuminating.

Last month Lagnado, whose stellar work with The Wall Street Journal has earned her numerous awards, returned to the city of her birth, where fewer than a hundred of the original 80,000 Jews remain. Groppi’s was still there, but a barren ghost of its former self; Queen Nazli Street had long ago been renamed for Ramses; and Cairo was now a rather poor city of some 16 million. Still, she came to an awakening:

“Groppi’s, Queen Nazli Street, Cairo — they hadn’t simply been places, but a state of mind. They were home — filled with mercy and compassion, tenderness and grace, those qualities that make and keep us human.”

So, too, the memory that is The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.

Lucette Lagnado reads from The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit 8 p.m. Tuesday at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. For more information call 305-442-4408. Comments?

Hood is online at www.therealjohnhood.com.

Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com.