Lucette Matalon Lagnado, who won the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, her 2007 memoir of her family's Egyptian-Jewish past, has died, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. She was 63.
The Man in the Sharkskin Suit recalled the Jewish community in Cairo before and after World War II and the life of her father, a prosperous clothier. Another memoir, The Arrogant Years, focused on her mother. She co-wrote Children of the Flames, a 1991 book that grew out of her reporting about Dr. Josef Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz and the efforts to seek justice for his victims.
A longtime journalist, Lagnado had an internship with the investigative reporter Jack Anderson, was a columnist for the Village Voice and was executive editor at the English-language Forward. In 1996, she joined the Wall Street Journal and had been a cultural and investigative reporter since then.