Stein, Sarah Abrevaya
Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century by Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century by Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Couldn't load pickup availability
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY THE ECONOMIST FINALIST FOR A NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD
"The Jewish past is visible only in the flickering light of remembrance. In Family Papers, Ms. Stein skilfully draws a map of this memory-scape and poignantly traces its travails."
-BENJAMIN BALINT, The Wall Street Journal
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 borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks, and spreading the family across boundaries and hemispheres. 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. Years after the family 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.
