By JERUSALEM POST STAFFbooks 88(photo credit: )
On Wednesday Lucette Lagnado, a senior special writer and investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was announced as the recipient of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Lagnado's memoir The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (HarperCollins/Ecco) was chosen for its fresh vision, which demonstrates her future potential to further contribute to Jewish literature.
The memoir chronicles her family's heartbreaking tale of their exodus from Egypt and eventual resettling in Brooklyn. Lagnado sheds light on the untold stories of the nearly one million Jewish refugees across the Middle East, cast out from homelands they cherished and longed to return to until their deaths.
The Jewish Book Council also announced two recipients of the $7,500 Sami Rohr Jewish Literature Choice Award. Ilana M. Blumberg won for Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books (University of Nebraska Press) and Eric L. Goldstein won for The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton University Press).
The inaugural Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature was awarded last year to fiction writer Tamar Yellin for The Genizah at the House of Shepher (Toby Press). The Prize considers fiction and non-fiction in alternating years.
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