Thursday, May 1, 2014

‘Farewell to Salonica’

‘Farewell to Salonica: City at the Crossroads’ by Leon Sciaky (Haus Books, $25, 262 pages)

If I could travel back in time to any city at any historical moment, Salonica at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries would be near the top of the list. Distant from the surveillance and authority of Istanbul, perched on the edge of Europe, Salonica was an archetypal Ottoman metropolis, a cosmopolitan mélange tugged in conflicting directions by the forces of history. The city - majority Jewish for many years after the wave of migration from Spain in the 15th century - had become a crucible for dangerous and revolutionary new ideas and movements by the end of the 1800s, a whirlpool of conflicting forces tugging at the status quo.

Various nationalist groups were seeking to break away from the empire, while others were seeking to reform it; European influence was steadily increasing in industry, commerce, fashion, and new technology, while the general population largely continued with its ossified traditions.

Plenty has been written about Salonica, but Leon Sciaky’s vivid memoir of a childhood growing up in a prosperous Jewish family in the city is not very well known. Much of “Farewell to Salonica” belongs firmly in the genre of rose-tinted inter-communal Ottoman nostalgia, but its early soft-focus sepia hue only serves to frame the grimmer reality that comes later, as a prelapsarian idyll collapses into deadly rubble.........http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/farewell-to-salonica.aspx?pageID=238&nID=65786&NewsCatID=474

1/5/14

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