Free The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado

many of the nieces and nephews as she could gather.
    Tante Marie was a kindly soul, all softness and curves and compassion, the embodiment of femininity. But she could be every bit as authoritarian as the men in the family. Once she made her decision to receive the priest, no one could dissuade her, not even Leon, the sibling she loved and respected the most, and the only one she feared.
    Tante Marie was convinced that the moniker Jean-Marie was a tribute to her. It didn’t matter that everyone laughed at her for her foolish notion and said it was only a coincidence—the name Marie was extremely popular among Catholics to honor the Virgin Mary.
    But to Tante Marie, it was a way her brother had found to maintain a link to the family when all links had been severed.
    Père Jean-Marie arrived at her home dressed in flowing white. He carried beautifully wrapped packages he distributed to the children who gathered around him, delighted by the attention they were receiving from this stranger who looked so familiar, somehow, with his fair skin, aquiline nose, and intense green eyes. Only the beard was jarring; the men in the family tended to be clean-shaven. Still, he was jovial and charming, embracing his nieces and nephews one by one, their very own Jewish Santa Claus.
    Reigning over the festivities was Tante Marie, who sat there beaming.
    He was her older brother and she loved him and nothing, not even the Church of Rome, would be permitted to erase the bond between them.
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    MY PARENTS ’ MARRIAGE ENDURED its first rocky year. The relationship survived both Leon’s return to his restless ways and the arrival of a daughter instead of a son. Malaka Nazli was far from joyous. It was a house of tears, steeped in mourning in the wake of the news about Bahia. My mother was struggling to care for my infant sister as well as looking after Zarifa, who was increasingly frail. My grandmother was no longer able to stand for hours at her beloved Primus, and retired to her room.
    Barely a year after my sister was born, Mom found herself pregnant again. In May 1946, she gave birth to the longed-for son, my brother César.
    At the bris held in Malaka Nazli, Zarifa, summoning one last time her legendary strength, carefully handed the infant over to the mohel, the man who would perform the circumcision on a satin pillow. The mohel dipped his index finger in a cup of wine and gave César three drops, intended to numb the pain.
    Several months later, my grandmother died, still grieving over the loss of her daughter but heartened that she had lived to see Leon settled, with a son and heir. His fretful bride and incessant wanderings were almost trivial, incidental details to this indomitable matriarch who had ruled with an iron hand, even when her hand was old and frail. Tothe end, she had kept her focus on the essentials as defined by Aleppo: faith, honor, and family.

    Edith holding Suzette, the oldest, and Leon holding César, his firstborn son and heir, Cairo, 1946.
    One more tragedy cast a shadow over Malaka Nazli. My father’s nephew, Siahou, Tante Leila’s son, jumped out the window of his mother’s house. His suicide was never talked about and never explained.
    With Zarifa gone, my other grandmother, Alexandra, became a more frequent visitor to Malaka Nazli. She would arrive every day, and knock rapidly four times, tap tap tap tap. Once inside, she’d settle on a chair and, taking my sister and César in her arms, proceed to rock them and sing to them in Italian. Unlike Zarifa, who only spoke Arabic, Alexandra never spoke Arabic, and she only wandered to the kitchen to retrieve a small cup of steaming café Turque.
    Alexandra of Alexandria—even more than with Zarifa and her kings, there was an apocryphal quality to the stories about her and her gilded past.
    In my mother’s telling, Alexandra was a creature both fantastic and fatally flawed. She had lived a life of extraordinary