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Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century
An award-winning historian shares the true story of a frayed and diasporic Sephardic Jewish family preserved in thousands of letters
For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree.
In Family Papers, the prizewinning Sephardic historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family's correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers.
With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.
For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree.
In Family Papers, the prizewinning Sephardic historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family's correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers.
With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published November 19, 2019
200 people are currently reading
1018 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Abrevaya Stein
17 books13 followersSarah Abrevaya Stein is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, as well as Professor of History and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA. Learn more about her award-winning books and upcoming speaking engagements at sarahastein.com, or join the conversation @sarahastein. Sarah is the author or editor of nine books, including Family Papers: a Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century and Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce. The recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Jewish Book Awards, Sarah lives with her family in Santa Monica, CA.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
March 31, 2024
4.5☆
Wow. This was such an eye-opening read concerning a family of Sephardic descent: the Levy family. It not only told the fascinating, yet horrifying, experiences of a Jewish family before, during, and after the tragedy of the Holocaust, but it also showcased the experiences of Sephardic Jews as a whole. This was a story told through the family papers, namely letters and diaries, shared by family members, both close and distant, and demonstrates the measures that relatives took to remain close in such tragic times.
Although this was a book required for my history class, I genuinely, and thoroughly, enjoyed reading it. I particularly appreciated the manner in which this story was told; the author did a wonderful job in keeping the reader equally intrigued and fascinated by this expansive story as she conspicuously was. I definitely would recommend this to anyone unaware of this culture and family.
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Another book for my history class🫠
(this one actually seems interesting though, so I’m kind of excited)
Wow. This was such an eye-opening read concerning a family of Sephardic descent: the Levy family. It not only told the fascinating, yet horrifying, experiences of a Jewish family before, during, and after the tragedy of the Holocaust, but it also showcased the experiences of Sephardic Jews as a whole. This was a story told through the family papers, namely letters and diaries, shared by family members, both close and distant, and demonstrates the measures that relatives took to remain close in such tragic times.
Although this was a book required for my history class, I genuinely, and thoroughly, enjoyed reading it. I particularly appreciated the manner in which this story was told; the author did a wonderful job in keeping the reader equally intrigued and fascinated by this expansive story as she conspicuously was. I definitely would recommend this to anyone unaware of this culture and family.
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Another book for my history class🫠
(this one actually seems interesting though, so I’m kind of excited)
November 11, 2020
I usually don't count books I read for class on here nor do I usually write reviews but I enjoyed this so much I'm moved to ~break all the rules~
This captivating history reads like a Sephardic Jewish Garcia Marquez novel with its generation-spanning cycles, family secrets, twists of fate, and mysterious genealogical dead ends. The story begins with a patriarch: Sa’adi Besalel Ashkeanzi a-Levi. By the time he wrote his memoir before his death in 1903, Sa’adi’s Salonica was a cosmopolitan port city, known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” A place where Jews could be found at each rung of the economy — stevedores, merchants, teachers, barkeepers, brick-shapers, and printers — and also could be found praying openly on the city’s quay and obstructing the pedestrian path.
Sa’adi’s descendants went on to witness the 1917 fire in Salonica, the Balkan Wars, the First and Second World Wars and lived under Ottoman, Greek, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Indian, and Brazilian rule. Stein tells the story of this Salonican family whose name was made in the emerging Ottoman newspaper business and was tied together by print as the world changed under their feet.
Family Papers is a perfect title for this history because it is, among other things, a love letter to a dying medium: paper. The papers that appear in various form throughout Stein’s narrative history — passports, birth certificates, writs of divorce, letters, identity cards, residency permits, and one baptismal certificate — are a lifeline for members of the Levy family over the course of the twentieth century. Daout Effendi, the most prominent member of the Levy family who rose to a position in the emerging Ottoman bureaucracy that gave him the power to issue and approve such papers, came to know intimately, as Stein describes, how “life-changing opportunity could hinge on the possession of a passport.” At the collapse of the Ottoman empire, papers moved family members from place to place and informed them of the deaths of loved ones. Papers were how they learned about the existence of far-flung nieces and nephews. Papers saved at least one of them from death. Stein has a knack for capturing the details of this unspooling bureaucratized world of paper permits whose bearers might “carry, fold, and unfold a sheet for years, or an entire lifetime.”
Needless to say, I enjoyed reading this book tremendously -- it was grounded in reality, meticulously researched, yet novelistic and light-handed in its prose. I learned a great deal about a world that seems to have disappeared entirely -- Jewish Salonica -- and how it has resurfaced and will continue to resurface in the family and archival stories we tell today.
This captivating history reads like a Sephardic Jewish Garcia Marquez novel with its generation-spanning cycles, family secrets, twists of fate, and mysterious genealogical dead ends. The story begins with a patriarch: Sa’adi Besalel Ashkeanzi a-Levi. By the time he wrote his memoir before his death in 1903, Sa’adi’s Salonica was a cosmopolitan port city, known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” A place where Jews could be found at each rung of the economy — stevedores, merchants, teachers, barkeepers, brick-shapers, and printers — and also could be found praying openly on the city’s quay and obstructing the pedestrian path.
Sa’adi’s descendants went on to witness the 1917 fire in Salonica, the Balkan Wars, the First and Second World Wars and lived under Ottoman, Greek, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Indian, and Brazilian rule. Stein tells the story of this Salonican family whose name was made in the emerging Ottoman newspaper business and was tied together by print as the world changed under their feet.
Family Papers is a perfect title for this history because it is, among other things, a love letter to a dying medium: paper. The papers that appear in various form throughout Stein’s narrative history — passports, birth certificates, writs of divorce, letters, identity cards, residency permits, and one baptismal certificate — are a lifeline for members of the Levy family over the course of the twentieth century. Daout Effendi, the most prominent member of the Levy family who rose to a position in the emerging Ottoman bureaucracy that gave him the power to issue and approve such papers, came to know intimately, as Stein describes, how “life-changing opportunity could hinge on the possession of a passport.” At the collapse of the Ottoman empire, papers moved family members from place to place and informed them of the deaths of loved ones. Papers were how they learned about the existence of far-flung nieces and nephews. Papers saved at least one of them from death. Stein has a knack for capturing the details of this unspooling bureaucratized world of paper permits whose bearers might “carry, fold, and unfold a sheet for years, or an entire lifetime.”
Needless to say, I enjoyed reading this book tremendously -- it was grounded in reality, meticulously researched, yet novelistic and light-handed in its prose. I learned a great deal about a world that seems to have disappeared entirely -- Jewish Salonica -- and how it has resurfaced and will continue to resurface in the family and archival stories we tell today.
September 23, 2020
More like three-and-a-half stars, but this was lovely, even though it covers a lot of terrible history. I wish we had more histories of ordinary people! It was extremely interesting - more interesting than I imagine a lot of people will expect, seeing as how it really is just about ordinary people living their lives (though through some extraordinary times - though aren't they always?)
I just really liked this, though it's definitely very quiet. Not for everyone.
I just really liked this, though it's definitely very quiet. Not for everyone.
June 27, 2022
La historia de una familia judía sefardí que se traslada a Tesalónica y recorre los avatares de los Levy desde finales del siglo XIX hasta los últimos descendientes que se encuentran repartidos por varios paises y continentes.
Un trabajo ingente de la autora con documentación monumental que los descendientes han ido guardando, cartas, fotografías, documentos, pasaportes…
Muy interesante.
Un trabajo ingente de la autora con documentación monumental que los descendientes han ido guardando, cartas, fotografías, documentos, pasaportes…
Muy interesante.
February 13, 2024
“The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.”
Susan Cain ~ “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Makes Us Whole”
And yet, Thomas Wolfe had already warned me in his feverish novels: you can’t go home again.
This book was destined to sink under the weight of my own personal expectations. They were too high, too full of longing. I was too hungry for ghosts that I simply did not find.
Being a great-great-great-granddaughter of Sa’adi Besalel Ashkenazi A. Levi, I was hoping to find some traces of my direct ancestors in this epic family history, having been jolted by the discovery of my father’s name in the most epic family tree I’d ever seen. But there were none to be found. My branch remained desperately quiet, its silence howling in the trunk of the tree.
It was also no fault of this book that it came in the wake of reading “The Postcard” by Anne Berest. That astonishing work of creative non-fiction had given such flesh and marrow and blood to the bones of personal history that it made it the hardest of acts to follow. I related a thousand times more to Anne Berest’s ancestors than to those who are technically my own. I remember their names. I think about them all the time.
Which is befuddling. And heartbreaking.
Which leads to penetrating questions about the nature of family. The nature of history. The nature of descendance and inheritance. The nature of cellular memory.
Which made my encounter with Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s mind-bogglingly impressive work of historical sleuthing one of the most bittersweet experiences of my life.
Susan Cain ~ “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Makes Us Whole”
And yet, Thomas Wolfe had already warned me in his feverish novels: you can’t go home again.
This book was destined to sink under the weight of my own personal expectations. They were too high, too full of longing. I was too hungry for ghosts that I simply did not find.
Being a great-great-great-granddaughter of Sa’adi Besalel Ashkenazi A. Levi, I was hoping to find some traces of my direct ancestors in this epic family history, having been jolted by the discovery of my father’s name in the most epic family tree I’d ever seen. But there were none to be found. My branch remained desperately quiet, its silence howling in the trunk of the tree.
It was also no fault of this book that it came in the wake of reading “The Postcard” by Anne Berest. That astonishing work of creative non-fiction had given such flesh and marrow and blood to the bones of personal history that it made it the hardest of acts to follow. I related a thousand times more to Anne Berest’s ancestors than to those who are technically my own. I remember their names. I think about them all the time.
Which is befuddling. And heartbreaking.
Which leads to penetrating questions about the nature of family. The nature of history. The nature of descendance and inheritance. The nature of cellular memory.
Which made my encounter with Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s mind-bogglingly impressive work of historical sleuthing one of the most bittersweet experiences of my life.
May 14, 2021
“This is a Jewish story, an Ottoman story, a European story, a Mediterranean story, and a diasporic story, a story of how women, men and children experienced wars, genocide and migration, the collapse of old regimes and the rise of new nations.” Acclaimed Jewish Studies scholar and author, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, meticulously researched the nearly 5000 letters and documents of the Levy “family papers” to present the journey of this Sephardic family, beginning in 19th century Salonica with Sa’adi Besalel Ashkenasi a-Levi and tracing his descendants through to contemporary times, through three continents and nine countries. As an Ashkenazi Jew, I admit with embarrassment that I knew little about the history of Sephardic Jews and welcomed the opportunity to learn about their rich and often embattled history, particularly of their rich culture in Salonika prior to WWII.
Stein’s presentation was intense and demanded concentration to detail from the reader, who was rewarded with the portraits of the individuals of each generation of the Levy (modernised name change) family, as well as with the historical background to the lives of each. Unfortunately, because there were so many life stories explored, it was difficult to keep track of the familial connections of each as the family tree was hand-drawn and hard to decipher. There were those who remained faithful to their religious traditions, those who broke away from Jewish lives, and even the disturbing account of Vital Hasson, who was executed “at the behest of the Jewish community” in Salonika after WWII as a Jewish collaborator of the Nazi regime.
The chapters were each dedicated to a Levy descendant, moving from Sa’adi to the great-great-great grandchildren of this stunning patriarch. The author examined the significance of inheritance through her portraits and stressed that “the longer we save [family documents and letters], the better we understand one another and ourselves.”
Stein’s presentation was intense and demanded concentration to detail from the reader, who was rewarded with the portraits of the individuals of each generation of the Levy (modernised name change) family, as well as with the historical background to the lives of each. Unfortunately, because there were so many life stories explored, it was difficult to keep track of the familial connections of each as the family tree was hand-drawn and hard to decipher. There were those who remained faithful to their religious traditions, those who broke away from Jewish lives, and even the disturbing account of Vital Hasson, who was executed “at the behest of the Jewish community” in Salonika after WWII as a Jewish collaborator of the Nazi regime.
The chapters were each dedicated to a Levy descendant, moving from Sa’adi to the great-great-great grandchildren of this stunning patriarch. The author examined the significance of inheritance through her portraits and stressed that “the longer we save [family documents and letters], the better we understand one another and ourselves.”
February 27, 2021
Every week for roughly 50 years, my father has written a weekly letter. Although not necessarily a two-sided correspondence, the letters reveal the interests and concerns of one person, and one family, over a half century. As an historian, I wonder who would be interested in them --ordinary family life, not much of interest. As a reader, I am grateful for the Levy family's network of letter writers, and letter keepers. And I am grateful to Sarah Abrevaya Stein for tracing and tracking these letters down and sharing this fascinating family with us.
Although the Levys may be "just" one family, they are one family over a century. They are one family that goes global. They are one family that is in equal measures decimated by the Holocaust, and spared. They are a family in a bustling and critically important city about which most Ashkenazi-leaning Jews know little to nothing. Too, this book makes me wish that I'd ask my friend from Salonica many more questions about Jewish life there, 30 years ago when I knew too little and she may have known too much. The descendants of Sa'adi a-Levi stayed in Salonica, and moved to Manchester, Paris, Rio, India, Canada, Israel, and elsewhere. They were journalists who may have left the profession but continued to write, and chronicle the family. And we, the readers, are the richer for reading this family's history.
Although the Levys may be "just" one family, they are one family over a century. They are one family that goes global. They are one family that is in equal measures decimated by the Holocaust, and spared. They are a family in a bustling and critically important city about which most Ashkenazi-leaning Jews know little to nothing. Too, this book makes me wish that I'd ask my friend from Salonica many more questions about Jewish life there, 30 years ago when I knew too little and she may have known too much. The descendants of Sa'adi a-Levi stayed in Salonica, and moved to Manchester, Paris, Rio, India, Canada, Israel, and elsewhere. They were journalists who may have left the profession but continued to write, and chronicle the family. And we, the readers, are the richer for reading this family's history.
November 18, 2020
A fascinating book about a community - the Jewish Sephardic community of Salonika -- that exists no more. I knew some of the history but it was interesting to review the 20th century calamities that led to this city's transformation into the Greek city of Thesalonika - from WW I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the population exchanges, the terrible fire that destroyed much of the city, the transformation of the city to part of Greece, the 2nd World War, migration - all the tragedies of the early and mid-20th century told through the lens of one large extended family. What a treasure there is in the written records and letters the family kept.
February 2, 2020
You can't review the book you wished the author wrote, or even the book you thought the author wrote--just the book as it stands. But I was disappointed that a story of a Sephardic family, sparked by the large trove of letters the author found, should really give such a limited sense of what people were like. The Levy family (various spellings) flourished in Salonica, now Thessaloniki, starting in the 19th century during Ottoman rule. Many family members moved to different parts of Europe and were caught up in the Holocaust, with disastrous results. Their home city changed, too--from a place with a plurality of Jewish families to a predominantly Greek-Christian city. As this is a predominantly academic study, it seems fair to criticize it for the lack of an index. Illustrated.
May 7, 2020
The author did a wonderful job using the family records of a Sephardic family from Salonika (now Thessaloniki) to explore life in the diaspora from the eve of World War I through the present (although really more through the 1960s). She deftly combined the personal and the historical in a short, but very expansive, book.
My only quibble was the family tree at the beginning. Because it was hand-drawn, it was hard to track the generations, and frustrated me when I would try to find a specific person on it. Because the family was so large, I would have appreciated it if the family members who were discussed at length in the book were identified prominently on the family tree (highlighted, bolded, italicized, etc.). But that's a small complaint. The book was wonderful.
My only quibble was the family tree at the beginning. Because it was hand-drawn, it was hard to track the generations, and frustrated me when I would try to find a specific person on it. Because the family was so large, I would have appreciated it if the family members who were discussed at length in the book were identified prominently on the family tree (highlighted, bolded, italicized, etc.). But that's a small complaint. The book was wonderful.
August 7, 2023
I found the concept of the book very interesting. However, I did have trouble following the story; there are a lot of people mentioned throughout the book, and many of them have their own chapters. I did really liked the photographs within the book, but sometimes I felt they didn’t exactly line up as I expected. For example, the author would be describing a family photo, but the photo actually shown wasn’t that one.
July 10, 2020
Honestly , this family isn't that interesting or unique compared to many other families. In large part that is what is holding this back from being an interesting book. Also nearly every story or sketch is very superficial and demonstrates very little insight besides the author reading their correspondence. The writing itself is, frankly...amateurish.
May 21, 2021
Extremely well-written, well-researched, and at the same time a pleasure to read.
June 14, 2020
This book was incredibly valuable for learning more about the Sephardic Jewish community in Salonica and its history. The community was a rich part of the Ottoman empire, in a bustling trade city. But with the Balkan Wars and then with the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the city became a part of Greece and became increasing Hellenized as a result, the Jewish community devalued and undermined—for example, an attempt to take the land of the biggest Jewish cemetery in Europe and turn it over to Greek Orthodox interests. A rise of anti-Semitism led to riots and the burning of a Jewish neighborhood in 1931, and World War II brought the decimation of the Sephardic population.
This is a personal history for me. My great grandfather came to Ellis Island from Salonica with his family in 1916. I've heard tangled information of our family history, and of what happened that made us leave: some of what I heard were events that technically happened when my great-grandfather was already in New Jersey, for example. My great grandmother spoke Ladino and made Greek dishes, but she emphasized to me more than once that we were decidedly not Greek ourselves. I've always wanted to learn more about what made this history so complicated, about my roots, and this book did that.
That said, as a book overall it struggled. The razor focus on the documentation of one family made it a bit bland. To be fair, I think this was partially my perspective: I wanted to hear about Salonica, and I found myself skimming for information about the broader community. But it was the writing too: the chapters were often repetitive, and I ended up having to make my own timeline because the decision to split chapters by person led to a lot of confusion around the actual chronology.
This is a personal history for me. My great grandfather came to Ellis Island from Salonica with his family in 1916. I've heard tangled information of our family history, and of what happened that made us leave: some of what I heard were events that technically happened when my great-grandfather was already in New Jersey, for example. My great grandmother spoke Ladino and made Greek dishes, but she emphasized to me more than once that we were decidedly not Greek ourselves. I've always wanted to learn more about what made this history so complicated, about my roots, and this book did that.
That said, as a book overall it struggled. The razor focus on the documentation of one family made it a bit bland. To be fair, I think this was partially my perspective: I wanted to hear about Salonica, and I found myself skimming for information about the broader community. But it was the writing too: the chapters were often repetitive, and I ended up having to make my own timeline because the decision to split chapters by person led to a lot of confusion around the actual chronology.
January 1, 2020
Sarah Abrevaya Stein has already proven herself to be a captivating storyteller, and this latest book is a tour of the Sephardi world(s) of the 20th century, linked through ancestral and familial connections (in this case, to Ottoman Salonica). She draws from her deep knowledge of the history and social context of Sephardi communities, especially in the Ottoman Empire, to follow six generations of the descendants of Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi (1820-1903) to the present day. Using the many personal letters saved by the descendants combined with other documentary sources, Stein reveals both continuities (e.g., textiles re-occur as an important economic resource; two women of different generations became teachers for the Alliance Israelite Universelle, etc.), and complex disparities in the choices available to each generation. Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi's children and grandchildren lived in Greece, Turkey, France, England, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Brazil, and India, and their descendants now also live in Israel, Canada, the United States, and South Africa. Some were politicians, others artists, others doctors. Several descendants were interned at Nazi camps in Europe, including Auschwitz; another chose to collaborate with the Nazis in Salonica, and was executed for war crimes in 1948. One joined his fellow Salonican Jew in creating the yoghurt company Dannon; another starred opposite Sean Connery in a Bond film. On a whole, the book is a wonderful and readable celebration of families, what spreads them across the world, and what holds them together.
July 28, 2020
Amazing story of an extensive Sephardi family from Thessaloniki going thru tremendous changes, tragedies and joys from the end of the 19th century through present. You have to love genealogy and be interested in Jewish history to appreciate this book.
This family reminded my of my own 100 years ago in Istanbul and their travels afterward. Impressive research and perseverance on the part of the author who went through hundreds of hand written letters in many languages and interviewed descendants on 5 continents.
This family reminded my of my own 100 years ago in Istanbul and their travels afterward. Impressive research and perseverance on the part of the author who went through hundreds of hand written letters in many languages and interviewed descendants on 5 continents.
January 9, 2020
The recent (20th c-pres) history of a single family based on archives of letters and other papers, personal interviews of descendants, and a lot of leg work. The narrative throws into stark relief both the extent of the Sephardic diaspora and the transformation of the great Ottoman city of Salonica to modern-day Thessaloniki. Very well researched and tidily written.
February 18, 2024
"Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century" tells a multi-generational story of a sprawling family with roots in the city of Salonica/Thessalonica. Salonica was once part of the Ottoman Empire, then part of Greece, and then with World War II the scene of a Nazi annihilation of the large and thriving Jewish community. Just for the story of Solinica, once a great Jewish city, this book is worth reading.
In Sarah Abrevaya Stein's telling, as the 1920s and 1930s wore on, the forces of economic turbulence, cultural change, and the pursuit of economic opportunity, spread the siblings and cousins of this one prominent Salonica family around the world to Brazil, Portugal, England, France and elsewhere. Some survived the Nazis, and others were wiped out. Each chapter is devoted to the experience of a different family member or branch of the family.
A few key family members provided Stein with extensive archives of family correspondence and memorabilia dating back to the late 19th century, and forward to the 1970s. Combining these personal letters, full of love, pleas for help, requests for financial assistance, personal arguments, travel plans, and business arrangements, with solid research on the history of Salonica and the destruction of its Jews in the Holocaust, Stein paints an insightful and illuminating picture of a world and its inhabitants across the 20th century. It's a great Jewish story, and a great example of how letters and personal stories about an "ordinary" family can tell a larger story about the human experience in tumultuous times.
As I write my own family history memoir, my keenest interest here was to observe the author's methodology. How can an author make sense of, and make interesting for the reader, four or five generations of history, and unite in one book the disparate experiences of so many branches of a single family, some of which remained in touch with each other, and others of which fell out of contact? How to make a story and a book that encompasses so much diverse human experience and find a unifying theme? I think the honest answer is that sometimes a story does not hang together, and sometimes one story becomes many stories, with a common past but a different future. That's okay. There is a bitter-sweetness. The past was not perfect, but it was together. In its way it was a world and a place complete. That world, here specifically that Salonica, dissolved and was destroyed and cannot be regained. But we are enriched by seeing the fragments that are left in the memories of those who came out of it. We hold together in the moment when we lay the book down a sense of all the places and ways in which the past became the present. There is beauty and tragedy and pain and sweetness in that moment of awareness.
I really enjoyed this book.
In Sarah Abrevaya Stein's telling, as the 1920s and 1930s wore on, the forces of economic turbulence, cultural change, and the pursuit of economic opportunity, spread the siblings and cousins of this one prominent Salonica family around the world to Brazil, Portugal, England, France and elsewhere. Some survived the Nazis, and others were wiped out. Each chapter is devoted to the experience of a different family member or branch of the family.
A few key family members provided Stein with extensive archives of family correspondence and memorabilia dating back to the late 19th century, and forward to the 1970s. Combining these personal letters, full of love, pleas for help, requests for financial assistance, personal arguments, travel plans, and business arrangements, with solid research on the history of Salonica and the destruction of its Jews in the Holocaust, Stein paints an insightful and illuminating picture of a world and its inhabitants across the 20th century. It's a great Jewish story, and a great example of how letters and personal stories about an "ordinary" family can tell a larger story about the human experience in tumultuous times.
As I write my own family history memoir, my keenest interest here was to observe the author's methodology. How can an author make sense of, and make interesting for the reader, four or five generations of history, and unite in one book the disparate experiences of so many branches of a single family, some of which remained in touch with each other, and others of which fell out of contact? How to make a story and a book that encompasses so much diverse human experience and find a unifying theme? I think the honest answer is that sometimes a story does not hang together, and sometimes one story becomes many stories, with a common past but a different future. That's okay. There is a bitter-sweetness. The past was not perfect, but it was together. In its way it was a world and a place complete. That world, here specifically that Salonica, dissolved and was destroyed and cannot be regained. But we are enriched by seeing the fragments that are left in the memories of those who came out of it. We hold together in the moment when we lay the book down a sense of all the places and ways in which the past became the present. There is beauty and tragedy and pain and sweetness in that moment of awareness.
I really enjoyed this book.
August 17, 2022
It took me a while to become engrossed in this, because there are zillions of main characters and it’s difficult to keep them all straight. The author provides a hand-drawn family tree, which was helpful once I got the hang of it, but it’s very rough and not very lineal, so even that took some practice.
Once I just stopped trying to keep track of which grandchildren and great-grandchildren belonged to which of Sa’adi a-Levi’s many children, it became much less difficult and then it was fascinating. It really is so very interesting how a widely scattered family network maintained connection by correspondence; how that connection - eventually among people who had never really known one another in person - tied them to an identity they honoured without really remembering; and how gradually that connection and that identity faded away as later generations got on with their own lives in distant nations, speaking alien languages.
“These conversations and encounters have left me thinking about the ways in which the past does and does not matter to a family,” the author writes in her conclusion. “The answer, I think, is that history emerges at unexpected moments, long after we assume it to be over, or even without our being aware of it.”
Once I just stopped trying to keep track of which grandchildren and great-grandchildren belonged to which of Sa’adi a-Levi’s many children, it became much less difficult and then it was fascinating. It really is so very interesting how a widely scattered family network maintained connection by correspondence; how that connection - eventually among people who had never really known one another in person - tied them to an identity they honoured without really remembering; and how gradually that connection and that identity faded away as later generations got on with their own lives in distant nations, speaking alien languages.
“These conversations and encounters have left me thinking about the ways in which the past does and does not matter to a family,” the author writes in her conclusion. “The answer, I think, is that history emerges at unexpected moments, long after we assume it to be over, or even without our being aware of it.”
December 18, 2025
The book tells a fascinating story about how Sephardic Jews lived in Salonica under the Ottoman Empire and the same city renamed Thessaloniki under the country of Greece. The Levy's family's diaspora leads them to Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, Damascus, Bombay, London -- and more solemnly, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.
Short chapters are centered around a different members of the family. The author (a historian) uses photographs, letters, newspaper articles, oral history, medical records, and other sources to create a page turning story. She is telling both a family history and a history of the 20th century.
The book is part history, family drama, and rumination on how the arrangement of national boundaries and power politics affect the lives of ordinary people. Personally, I would have liked a little more of the politics but this is a compelling book.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein does an excellent job of explaining unfamiliar culture, geography, politics, etc. My one quibble would be that the editor did not catch some repeated sentences (word for word).
But, overall, a book that changed how I think about what it means to be Sephardic and how the communities that flourished struggled with their identifies in the diaspora.
Short chapters are centered around a different members of the family. The author (a historian) uses photographs, letters, newspaper articles, oral history, medical records, and other sources to create a page turning story. She is telling both a family history and a history of the 20th century.
The book is part history, family drama, and rumination on how the arrangement of national boundaries and power politics affect the lives of ordinary people. Personally, I would have liked a little more of the politics but this is a compelling book.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein does an excellent job of explaining unfamiliar culture, geography, politics, etc. My one quibble would be that the editor did not catch some repeated sentences (word for word).
But, overall, a book that changed how I think about what it means to be Sephardic and how the communities that flourished struggled with their identifies in the diaspora.
March 8, 2020
With the advent of the Internet, many people now stay in contact with family and friends through electronic means. Some discourage printing the letters and/or documents due to ecological concerns. Yet, it is physical documents that can help historians uncover what occurred in past decades and centuries. Take, for example, “Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century” by Sarah Abrevaya Stein (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Through the use of letters and other documents saved by family members, the author, a professor of history in Sephardic studies at UCLA, was able to write a multi-generational history of a family whose origins began in Ottoman Salonica and whose descendants moved to other parts of Europe, the Americas, India and Israel.
See the rest of my review at http://www.thereportergroup.org/Artic...
See the rest of my review at http://www.thereportergroup.org/Artic...
January 18, 2020
Dit boek beschrijft de geschiedenis van de Levy familie. Zij zijn sephardische joden, die aan het eind van de 19de eeuw in Salonika (nu Thessaloniki) leefden. In de loop der jaren zijn de verschillende familieleden uitgezwermd over bijna de hele wereld. En natuurlijk is een groot deel omgekomen in de Holocaust. Een familielid heeft een grote hoeveelheid dagboeken, brieven en andere paperassen bewaard in Brazilie. Door een toeval is de schijfster hier achter gekomen en heeft vervolgens dit boek geschreven. Het geeft een interessant beeld van de tijd en de historische gebeurtenissen, waarin deze familie leefde. Het is geen roman en is ook niet zo bedoeld, maar het is soms wat droog. Al met al toch een boeiend familieverslag.
January 23, 2020
This was an interesting introduction to the Jews of Salonika (Thessaloniki), told through the history of one family. The sources at the end of the book indicate the level of research that went into telling this story. Each chapter details the life and events of a different family member. The photographs added to this history -- it would have helped if they were larger or a bit clearer. I felt that the author kept the characters at arm's length, though. There was a feeling of hearing about this through a distance, somewhat dispassionately. Nonetheless, I am stirred to read more about the history of the Jews of this region, who were Ottoman, Turkish, Greek. It's a fascinating area of the world in many respects, and certainly from the perspective of Jewish history.
February 10, 2020
This is the biography of the Levy family beginning Salonica and ending with the family spread all over the world. Salonica was a wealthy Sephardic Jewish community with numerous institutions, an 86 acre cemetery, the largest in Europe and the large Levy family, who were central to life in that city. Beginning with Sa’adi a Levy, a Ladino speaking family patriarch living in the Ottoman Empire and continuing for numerous generations, the author was fortunate that members of the family kept the correspondence from generations and kept corresponding as they spread through the world. A fascinating picture of a single family and the challenges the faced over the generations
December 5, 2020
Wow. A work of extremely dedicated scholarship, conversation, and consideration. Having been her TA, I can imagine that she was welcomed by this extensive, extended family not just because she’s a brilliant scholar, but also because she makes YOU feel like the important one in the room with the story to tell. All of this shows in this book, which as she writes refocuses the center of vibrant Jewish life in Greece and in other countries that have untold or ignored Sephardic Jewish histories. It’s nuanced, tragic, triumphant, and sentimental. It definitely leaves you wanting more!
February 10, 2020
The story of a Sephardic Jewish family with its roots in (what is now) Greece. It’s a quick read & a uniquely structured (for me, at least) way to trace the history of a subset of European Jews from the Ottoman Empire, through the Holocaust, to the late 20th century. The unique structure: Short chapters, each focused on a particular family member in a *very* extended family, which collectively illustrate the variety of life experiences faced by Jews in 19th & 20th century Europe & beyond.
May 28, 2021
I was expecting more of a narrative "journey" than I think this book delivered, but if you go in expecting a series of vignettes, I think the book is very effective. Stein does a great job of including little details to paint a real picture of each period in the day-to-day. It definitely gets tricky to keep track of the thread of who's who and how the vignettes intertwine, but Stein does her best to distinguish between similar names and to explain relationships, at least.
August 24, 2022
This is many histories in one: A history of one extended family, a history of a city, a history of a part of the world and a time in history we rarely read about. In the variety of experiences the Levy family had, they are the history of the Jews. Of course, because this is non-fiction and some facts are lost, we can't know all that we wish to know about these fascinating characters, but Stein brings them alive and makes us feel like we're living their lives a century or so ago.
October 29, 2023
Really enjoyed this very digestable, almost non-academic, look at a family through their letters to each other. Its all a bit wes anderson: the story of the long 20th century as told through a Salonica family. There are zillions of threads: patriarchs and matriarchs, merchants, scoundrels, a literal nazi collaborator. The way the author connects them all and lets them be their own people is truly staggering and beautiful.
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