Reviewed by Lisa E. Smilan

The word “arrogant” in Lucette Lagnado’s new memoir, The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn, means more than an exaggeration of one’s worth or importance, more than one feeling superior to others; it also signifies fearlessness and optimism. While Lagnado’s earlier memoir, the award-winning and best-selling The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, focused on her father, this new book spotlights her mother, for both she and her mother experienced arrogant years, which peaked for each during their teens.

The Arrogant Years begins in 1960s Brooklyn with a 20-page prologue describing Lagnado’s experiences as a young girl relegated to the women’s section of the Shield of Young David, her Orthodox synagogue. A wooden divider separated the women from the men, and the women, she observes, “dutifully as always,” sat in “their pen surrounded by the wooden fence.” Lagnado continues: “The more I watched the men, the greater my longing to join them, sit next to them, worship at their side.”

Ten-year-old Lagnado dreamed of someday being like her idol, British secret agent Emma Peel of the 1960s TV show “The Avengers.” The extraordinary crime in 10-year-old Lagnado’s world, the crime that needed to be avenged, was that divider in her synagogue. Her valiant attempts, week by week, to lead a group of girls in inching their chairs closer to the men’s section (through an opening in the divider) ended in humiliation, with the men and boys berating the girls, calling them sinners and forcing them to lift their chairs and return to the women’s section. The adult women, including Lagnado’s mother, stared at this spectacle in silence.

After this tense prologue, the first chapter takes a sudden turn in tone, time and setting. Lagnado tells of a feminist movement in 1920s Egypt, and of the modern Jewish woman Madame Alice Cattaui Pasha (Madame Cattaui), who became Queen Nazli’s chief lady-in-waiting and King Fouad’s confidant and adviser. This story is different from the prologue but just as interesting. Eventually, Lagnado makes a connection between Madame Cattaui and Lagnado’s own mother, Edith, who worked as a schoolteacher in 1930s Egypt, where Jews, Muslims and Christians lived in harmony as neighbors and friends. Edith became close to the older, wealthy Madame Cattaui, who shared her love of books and gave Edith the key to the Cattaui private library. To Edith, who by age 15 had read works by Proust and Flaubert, this was a monumental honor.

Not only does The Arrogant Years provide readers an opportunity to learn about an Egypt unknown to most — a place of religious tolerance and acceptance — it also brings readers inside the world of an Orthodox Jewish community and explains the lifestyle choices membership in that community requires. Lagnado poignantly describes the experience of her once-affluent immigrant family doomed by unfortunate circumstances and bad luck, suddenly living in poverty, scraping together what they could in order to survive as outsiders in the land of opportunity.

While The Arrogant Years is Lagnado’s memoir, it is as much a tribute to her mother. In Egypt, Edith was an independent working woman who abruptly ended her own arrogant years, abandoning a career in education to become a wife, and then the mother of five children, four of whom survived. Edith relinquished her own dreams but never gave up on her dreams for her youngest daughter. “I was the last crucible of all her outlandish hopes and dreams,” Lagnado comments, “her last chance at a new and better life. She was so convinced I had it in me to realize her dreams.”

Being the recipient of such maternal dedication and unyielding faith left the author feeling pressured to rebuild what her mother could not, to achieve what her mother would not. Her mother hoped that Lagnado would someday “rebuild the hearth” for their family, a dream that her mother later realized would never materialize. Yet the bond between the two was always solid, and strengthened more when Edith helped Lagnado through a near-fatal illness.

Lagnado tells of her difficult freshman year at Vassar, where she felt a total disconnect with her preppie, well-to-do classmates, and her year-long reprieve at Barnard, a better fit. Despite her mother’s urging that she not return to Vassar, Lagnado felt compelled to overcome her feelings of social inadequacy and returned to Poughkeepsie to complete her degree. She writes of her early journalism career working as a “junior muckraker” for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.

Anderson sent Lagnado to South America to penetrate Nazi circles in a hunt for Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death of Auschwitz; her subsequent exposé of Mengele and her other reporting on young twins who had been subjected to his medical experiments helped spur the U.S. government to launch its “first major manhunt.” In 1992 she co-authored a book on the same subject, Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz. Finally, she felt she was living up to the ideal of her childhood hero, The Avenger Emma Peel. When she joined the Wall Street Journal, she exposed corrupt hospital and nursing home executives, a way of avenging her elderly parents’ poor treatment in a failing healthcare system. More recently, the Wall Street Journal assigned her to cover the arrest of her former Hebrew school teacher, Rabbi Saul Kassin, who was charged with money laundering; this same rabbi once publicly rebuked teenage Lagnado for asking why the Messiah could not be a woman. Again, she was The Avenger.

Not all aspects of Lagnado’s memoir are riveting. At times I found my mind drifting from the page, as if Lagnado were that friend who goes on talking about herself for a bit too long, in too much detail. But then the narrative would once again captivate my interest. Another issue is that the prologue seems to be a chapter that originally came later in the book but was then lifted and plopped down at the beginning in order to draw the reader in more quickly. This probably did have the intended effect, yet when I came to the section on her life as a girl at the Shield of Young David, I had some difficulty remembering the cast of characters who were introduced almost a hundred pages earlier.

I was surprised when, as an adult reflecting back on the divider of her girlhood synagogue and her failed ploy to shatter that barrier, Lagnado wavers. Her nemesis, Mrs. Menachem, an older woman at the synagogue once said, “You are a silly, silly little girl who’s trying to change the world.” Lagnado notes that she has found herself increasingly wondering if Mrs. Menachem had a point. She comments: “What I’d failed to realize was that for the women of my childhood, the world within our closed-off area was every bit as rich and vivid as the universe beyond it; and the barrier in fact fostered and intensified feelings of kinship and intimacy. Inside was a world that was remarkably collegial and embracing and kind.”

I expected Lagnado to revere the girl who questioned the status quo and wanted a choice, and a voice. And yet she states: “I had broken free of the barrier. I had fled the women’s section and joined the men. I now sat side by side with them in newsrooms and corporate offices and boardrooms.” After sitting down exultantly with the men, she says, she was no longer sure what she had been looking for. “To my shock and bewilderment, I found the world beyond the divider deeply wanting in comparison to the world I had left behind.”

Lagnado writes with pride of her mother’s accomplishments. When admitting that her mother wrote one of Lagnado’s freshman college papers — her first “A” at Vassar — she notes that although Edith was forced to abandon her teaching career at 19, she still “could wow a Vassar professor with her style and erudition.” She also tells of Edith’s dedication to her job as a cataloger with the Brooklyn Public Library. I imagine Lagnado’s mother — as a reader, teacher, librarian, writer and parent — would be proud of the daughter who appears in the pages of The Arrogant Years. This honest, introspective telling of a family’s history and one woman’s place in the midst of it all is a very good read.

Lisa Smilan writes novels for adults and young adults and serves on the editorial board of The Independent. She is an attorney and lives in suburban Maryland.