Family Papers

September 30, 2019
UCLA professor Stein (Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce) delivers a fascinating history of the Levy family, Sephardic Jews with roots in the Ottoman city of Salonika (now Thessaloniki, Greece). Beginning with patriarch Sa’adi Besalel Ashkenazi a-Levi, a publisher who was excommunicated in 1874 for denouncing Salonika’s religious elite, and his 14 children, Stein draws from the Levys’ voluminous correspondence and records to trace four generations of family history across five continents. Along the way, she documents the pressures the Levys and other publishers and editors felt from Ottoman Empire censors and the influence of Alliance Israélite Universelle schools on Jewish families across the Levant, among other intriguing historical tidbits. A 1917 fire devastated Salonika’s Jewish quarter and dispersed many of Sa’adi’s descendants across Central and Western Europe, where “entire branches of the family tree” were destroyed in the Holocaust. Sa’adi’s great-grandson Vital, however, became a Nazi collaborator and “the only Jew tried in Europe as a war criminal.” Stein’s short chapters allow readers to get to know only a few members of the Levy family well, but her spirited account, which is greatly enhanced by its many photos, makes a fine contribution to the field of modern Jewish studies.

Starred review from October 1, 2019

True to its title, this book by Stein (Maurice Amado Endowed Chair in Sephardic Studies, & Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director, Alan D. Levy Ctr. for Jewish Studies, Univ. of California Los Angeles) delivers a tour de force tracing one family's history, beginning in Ottoman Turkey, and the lives of their descendants across the world in the present day. The Levys were a prominent clan in Salonica, Greece, and as publishers and editors, they had firsthand views of events in the Ottoman Empire. Stein relies on personal family narratives and correspondence to tell the story of nearly three dozen relatives from the late 19th through the early 21st century. The result is a small window into the world of Sephardic Jewish history along with the changes and turmoil world events had thrust upon them. The fate of history, the redrawing of nations' borders, and the Holocaust force the family to escape to other parts of the world, including India, Israel, the United States, South Africa, and South America. VERDICT A moving, wonderfully written history of a fascinating family that will attract readers of history and those interested in Judaic studies. Highly recommended.--Jacqueline Parascandola, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2019
The experiences of a Sephardic family reveal tumultuous Jewish history. Drawing on rich archives that yielded thousands of letters, telegrams, photographs, and legal and medical documents, two-time National Jewish Book Award winner Stein (History and Jewish Studies/UCLA; Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century, 2016, etc.) offers a fascinating history of the Levy family, Sephardic Jews descended from Sa'adi Besalel Ashkenazi a-Levi, an influential publisher in 19th-century Salonica. The author's incomparable sources, which include Sa'adi's memoir (edited by Stein for publication in 2012), afforded her an intimate look at the challenges, quarrels, loves, and rivalries that beset Sa'adi and his wives, children, grandchildren, and their descendants as they experienced cataclysmic world events. Organized chronologically, each chapter focuses on a family member to explore their choices and opportunities in a changing world. Of Sa'adi's 14 children, one daughter became a teacher; one son followed in his father's footsteps as a newspaperman; another became a high-ranking official for the Jewish Community of Salonica. Yet another son, a gifted linguist and mathematician who rejected a teaching career in favor of law, rose to considerable stature as the Jewish Community's "director of communal real estate," a position that carried significant "legal, social, and economic authority." Four emigrated to Sephardic communities abroad. Generations of the Levy family were caught in the maelstrom of wars. The First Balkan War, which obstructed daily life, led to the Ottomans' loss of Salonica to Greece, an upheaval that the Levys saw as calamitous because it gave Greek Orthodox Christians preference to Jews. After World War I, a massive influx of Greeks reduced the once-prominent Jewish population to "a mere fifth" of the city's residents. In 1943, Nazi persecution intensified in Salonica, and Stein uncovers harrowing evidence of one great-grandson of Sa'adi who became a Nazi henchman, for which he was executed. By the end of World War II, of 37 family members deported from France and Greece, only one survived. Still, the Levys endure, scattered throughout the world. A masterful multigenerational reconstruction of a family's life.

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