Sarah Abrevaya Stein
FAMILY PAPERS, A SEPHARDIC JOURNEY THROUGH THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, ISBN: 978-0374185428
Reviewed by Jess Olson1
Eleanor’s father, Daout Effendi, was born in 1863, when Salonica was Ottoman, when his father, Sa’adi, could provoke the rabbinical establishment with the incendiary tools of a printing press and a violin. His great-granddaughter Lenora was born in 1939, the year the Second World War began. The two bookended four generations, yet they breathed their last breaths in the same claustrophobic space in rural Poland, inhaling a poison invented to eradicate vermin, in a chamber designed by German engineers.
It is not often that I begin a review with a quotation, but in this case the power of Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s words can only be diminished by a second-hand description. In this stark passage, brutally simple, one grasps the profundity of Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century. A deft combination of the intimate and the epochal, Stein’s book goes beyond documenting a remarkable, and remarkably dispersed, family correspondence to produce, in her own unique way, a glimpse of the depth and breadth of the modern Sephardi Diaspora. Gathering the letters of the a-Levy family of Salonica, Stein traveled to the ends of the earth, literally to every continent save Antarctica. It is with good reason that a reviewer in the New York Times calls her a “fierce” researcher and historian.2 This was apparent to anyone who had encountered her earlier works; what this book reveals as well is that she is a consummate storyteller.
From the first, a project like Family Papers poses a real challenge for a historian and writer. Without doubt, it is the material of a compelling story. The question is one of organization and structure: how do you tell it in the most effective way? Stein’s approach meets this challenge with aplomb. She begins with the patriarch Sa’adi Besalel a-Levy, a printer, writer, and accomplished performer, interpreter of the diverse musical traditions of Ottoman Salonica, and colorful communal gadfly. It is his story in a previous text brought to print by Stein and Stanford historian Aron Rodrigue, A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa’adi Besalel a-Levy,3 itself an archival jewel, that was the origin of Family Papers. That book brought out a hitherto silent, quotidian voice, that of a man whose life, career, relationships, and experiences were deeply interwoven with his society, and revealed in vibrant color a world that, though an archetypal modern Jewish experience, had been largely absent from the historical record.
Family Papers continues this work, and it is this quality -- the combination of the daily travails and triumphs of family life against the backdrop of a process of rapid historical change -- that is the work’s most powerful contribution. The book is organized around the individual biographies of several members of multiple generations. Stein refers to four, but in reality the story touches upon at least six. Their voices are brought with immediacy to the reader, mostly speaking for themselves in the words of their letters to one another as the family’s members spread out from Ottoman Salonica to all points of the compass. Each voice appears multiple times; the book is arranged into multiple chronological “eras” of the family history.
Thus does Stein engage the matrix of the private and the epic. “Ottomans” tells of the origins of the story in the late years of the Ottoman Empire, a liminal period which saw the deeply traditional Jewish community of Salonica, one of the largest single Jewish communities in the world where Jews were at various times a plurality, even majority, of the city’s population. It is a familiar story of the Jewish confrontation with modernization, yet at the same time distinctly flavored with the regional dynamics unique to Sephardi Jews.
“Nationals” continues the story into the period of “Ottomanism” and the Committee for Union and Progress’s (CUP) attempt to refashion the ailing government along its own unique form of nationalism and pluralism. Greeted with equal parts enthusiasm and caution, Ottoman Jews saw a mixed bag of change with regard to their status and engagement with the institutions of state. Daout Effendi, son of Sa’adi Besalel, not only stepped into the shoes of the family patriarch, but into a role as community leader, even candidate for the public office. In one felicitous encounter with a more well-known history, Sarah notes, “When Theodor Herzl wanted an audience with the Ottoman Sultan to discuss the future of Ottoman Palestine, it was on Daout Effendi’s door that he knocked.” At the same time, the empire itself lurched towards disintegration due to the pressures of rising nationalism at the end of Ottoman rule over Salonica in 1913. In addition, the city’s Jewish district was devastated physically and economically by a fire in 1917. The fortunes of the a-Levy family became ever more precarious with the intolerant policies of Eleftherios Venizelos towards non-Greek citizens.
In “Emigrés,” the interwar tumult so familiar to students of Central and East European Jewish history is shown to be no less present in the Balkan successor states to the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. The fortunes of the a-Levy family came more and more to resemble those of other interwar European Jews; first they spread out from Salonica out of economic need, and later to escape danger. This is the origin of the a-Levy family Diaspora, typified by Esther Salem, who with her husband established part of the family in Manchester. As Stein relates, Esther embraced her new British citizenship, all the while retaining her Salonica Sephardic identity down to sipping Turkish coffee at tea time; each member of the a-Levy exile kept nervous tabs on their less-fortunate siblings, parents, and cousins as the menace of rising fascism placed greater and greater stress on Jews worldwide.
The most chilling sections, and certainly the most unsettling, are “Captives” and “Survivors.” The Jewish rate of survival after the onslaught of Nazi violence reached Greece was among the worst of any country in Europe; the utter devastation came through ghettoization and the swift deportation to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen of ninety percent of the Salonica Jewish population. There was no chance that the a-Levy family would not be impacted. In fact, as Stein reveals in the most surprising twist in the family story, the devastation was compounded for the a-Levys; not only were members of the family victims, but they were also among the perpetrators of Nazi violence themselves.
In the final sections, “Familiars” and “Descendants,” Stein brings home the a-Levy saga into the postwar years and beyond, tracing the family lines that continue to this day. It is with the book’s conclusion that one truly appreciates the sheer expanse of time, geographical space, and family connections that this sweeping story covers. It is the sweep of a Buddenbrooks, or, perhaps even more close to home, of the great family sagas of Israel Joshua Singer, the great Yiddish epic novelist, such as The Brothers Ashkenazi and The Family Karnovsky.
If there is a single note of variation that resonated in my mind as I read Family Papers, it is less one of critique than of expanding part of its conceptual framework, not of the construction of the book itself, but rather in how Stein understands the process of change in the a-Levy family. The story is without doubt one of modernization. But it is the specific shape of modernization of Ottoman Sephardim that Stein relates. This, I think, is a unique expression of the larger tapestry of Jewish encounters with the various modernities in which they were embedded. It is a pervasive tendency among modern Jewish historians that, while we understand the variations of Jewish encounters, we don’t attend enough to the fact that there was no single “modernity,” but rather many modernities. That which Sa’adi Besalel, Dauot Effendi, and the rest of the a-Levy clan negotiated was its own, multi-determined matrix of meaning and culture which perhaps demands its own, more discrete conceptualization.
Family Papers is a book worthy of both the immersive engagement of a good novel and the close reading of an important contribution to Jewish historiography. I have no doubt that it will continue to expand our understanding of Sephardi history and culture.
1 Jess Olson, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. Dr. Olson is also the Leon Charney Senior Scholar at the YU Center for Israel Studies. His areas of research include the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany, history of Zionism and Jewish nationalism, and the intersection between Jewish Orthodoxy and political engagement.
2 Matti Friedman, Family Papers, A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Book Review, The New York Times, Nov. 19, 2019)
3 See review by Ralph Tarica in Sephardic Horizons, Vol.5, Issue3-4.