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soul

of blessed memory

Journalist/Author 
Lucette Lagnado

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL JTA
L

ucette Matalon Lagnado, a 
Wall Street Journal reporter 
whose 2007 memoir of her 
Egyptian-Jewish family won 
the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish 
Literature, has died. She was 63. 
The Jewish Book Council, 
which awarded the prize for 
The Man in the White Sharkskin 
Suit, did not specify a cause in 
announcing her death. 
Described as “stunning” by 
Michiko Kakutani in a New York 
Times review, Lagnado’
s memoir recalls 
the lost, cosmopolitan world of Cairo’
s 
Jewish community before and after 
World War II and her high-living father, 
a prosperous clothier. She would later 
devote another memoir, The Arrogant 
Years, to her mother’
s story.

After leaving Egypt in the turmoil 
that followed the rise of the dictator 
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the family even-
tually moved to Bensonhurst, 
Brooklyn. 
Lagnado graduated from 
Vassar College and started her 
reporting career at a commu-
nity paper in Brooklyn. She 
served an internship with the 
investigative reporter Jack 
Anderson, as a columnist for 
the Village Voice and as exec-
utive editor at the English-
language Forward newspaper.
A story she worked on about Dr. 
Josef Mengele helped rekindle global 
interest in his macabre experiments 
at the Auschwitz concentration camp 
and the search for justice for his 
victims. That was also the subject of 

Children of the Flames, her 1991 non-
fiction book with Sheila Cohn Dekel.
At the Wall Street Journal, which she 
joined in 1996, Lagnado was a cultural 
and investigative reporter, most recently 
covering health care, health delivery for 
the poor and uninsured, and new treat-
ments for cancer.
Among her awards are the Columbia 
University Graduate School of 
Journalism’
s 2002 Mike Berger Award 
for a story about the aging residents of 
an Upper West Side apartment building 
and three Newswomen’
s Club of New 
York Front Page Awards for her report-
ing on hospital billing and collection. 
The 2008 Rohr Prize came with a check 
for $100,000.

In a blog post from 2011, Lagnado 
revisited the subject of exile and return 
— this time about her old neighbor-
hood of Bensonhurst, where she would 
eventually buy one of the apartments 
where she grew up.
“My trips to Bensonhurst always 
have a ritual quality to them, like a 
religious pilgrimage. I must go to this 
block, I tell myself, I must pay my 
respects to that building,” she wrote. 
“There are no people left there that I 
knew, not a single familiar face — my 
community long moved out — yet I 
keep returning.”
She is survived by her husband, 
Douglas Feiden, with whom she lived in 
Bensonhurst and Sag Harbor, N.Y. ■

Lucette Lagnado

Lucette Lagnado, then 6, and her 

family pose for a family portrait 

on the eve of their exodus from 

Egypt in the 1960s.