Like the Levys, the clan at the centre of this new book, many Sephardic families would spend the 20th century tugged between secularism and faith
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 336 pages; $28.sultan came to Salonika, David Levy was waiting. As befitted an Ottoman official and president of a local Jewish organisation, he greeted Mehmed V at the port when he landed in the summer of 1911. The next day, as the sultan was preparing to leave, he gave David a pair of diamond cufflinks. Yet all this pageantry was the wheeze of a dying world. Soon the Ottomans lost Salonika to the Greeks; their empire crumbled.
By mining the Levy family archives, from photographs and birth certificates to medical records and passports, Ms Stein is able to summon her characters with the depth and feeling of a novelist. Thoughtfully, she notes that even the handwriting in letters can open windows into their authors’ lives. A dignified bureaucrat to the end, David Levy signed his name in elegant flourishes. Estherina, his daughter-in-law, composed “long, impassioned, if unintelligible letters in her loping hand”.
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