At the crossroads of the Eastern and Western worlds, Salonica -- now Greece's third largest city Thessaloniki -- was an oasis in a desert of conflicting powers and interests. A Turkish territory until 1912, the city was an economic centre of the Ottoman empire and a cultural centre of Sephardic Judaism. In this memoir, Leon Sciaky, the son of a Sephardic merchant family who immigrated to Turkey during the Spanish Inquisition, tells of growing up in the vibrant community that flourished in Salonica at the turn of the century. He introduces the Turkish sheiks and dervishes, Sephardic rabbis, Hungarian revolutionaries, Bulgarian farmers, Greek priests, Kurdish grocers, Albanian woodcutters, and French headmasters who populated this little Balkan world. Although his early years were idyllic, Sciaky's well-respected merchant family could not escape the violence of Salonica's constant lesions and struggles. Situated amidst peoples of different languages, religions, cultures, and national allegiances, Salonica was like a vividly set stage in a drama where these very diverse peoples lived, in peace and strife, vying for power and prosperity.
About the Author :
Leon Sciaky was born in 1894, when the Turkish flag still waved over Salonica. His family left their beloved but turbulent homeland in 1915, and settled in New York, where he lived until his death in 1958.
Review :
Praise for Leon Sciaky and Farewell to Salonica
"A jewel of memory."--Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Book-of-the-Month Club
"Farewell to Salonica is a fresh and charming book that throws a kindly light on a sector of human life unknown to most Americans."--New York Times
"A gallery of beautiful and quaint sketches, revealing fascinating aspects of civilization in a strange city where East met West and the ancient past met the future...It creates an atmosphere of expectation and wonder and enjoyment. Most of all, an atmosphere of living."--Christian Science Monitor
"An altogether charming book, so simply and truthfully written...The Salonica one reads about is not only a fascinating and complex city in which many national and cultural strains run side by side, but it is a critical city of Aegean politics...The breakdown of the Turkish Empire and its consequences for Balkan affairs are better understood when one has read this book. But it is not the political value of the book that should be emphasized so much as its quiet charm, its unpretentious and easy portrayal of a cultural pattern through an account of an engaging family...A warm and softly luminous book."--The Nation
"This is a story of one man's intensely happy boyhood, set against the politically seething years at the turn of the century in the ever-coveted prize city of the Balkans, Salonica...written in a charming and effortless manner."--Philadelphia Inquirer
"For the gift of a happy youth, Mr. Sciaky has repaid his city handsomely...it recalls Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon...It is an intensely personal story, yet so completely was [the young Sciaky] of his time and place that it is also the story of Salonica in the final phase of its existence; for the city that Sciaky knew, largely dominated by its 70,000 Spanish Jews, has gone...The author has made Salonica a living town, peopled by men and women of flesh and blood, people with all the human faults and weaknesses, but also with the lovable qualities that may be found in humanity everywhere by the man with skill to pick them out"--New York Herald Tribune
"A charming portrait of an era."--Honolulu Advertiser
"This picture of a Jewish childhood among rich merchants in Salonica has a glow, the radiant sunshine of a protected childhood."--Chicago Sun
