Family Papers

Salem family visiting the Jewish cemetery of Salonica, 1917 In one of the photographs, Esther and her mother stand to the left of Sa’adi’s tomb, their eyes obscured by their wide-brimmed hats. To the right of the tomb stand two men, one wearing a fez, the other a large kippah and a traditional Salonican robe. Each holds a prayer book, and the latter rests his arm against the tomb. In all likelihood, they are honadjis, cemetery guides, hired to lead the Salems in prayer. It may be that the Salem men didn’t feel comfortable navigating traditional mourning prayers and rituals on their own (Ascher’s grandson confirms that his grandfather was not observant), or their patronage of the men was a small act of charity, a way of supporting the cemetery and its workers. To the left of the two men stands Esther’s young brother, Michael, in profile, his face obscured by a tear in the negative. The damaged image also removes some of the assembled from sight, though the full group of family members appears in a second image. Stretched out behind them is the expanse of Salonica’s Jewish cemetery, hundreds of thousands of tombs scattered across a hillside. Beyond the cemetery’s grounds, animals graze in empty fields. The Hebrew-language epitaph on Sa’adi’s grave is only partially visible in the Salem family’s photograph. It appears in full in a 1931 book on the Jewish cemetery of Salonica: He who lies [here] in refuge was the chief poet who composed several poems for the visit of the sultan and his entourage [in 1859] and songs 60 to be sung for Purim and many Jewish hymns in praise of the Almighty, pleasant melodies for Israel. To every gathering, for the sake of heaven, with all of his strength and with his feet, he would run like a deer. This man is Sa’adi a-Levi. This tombstone was erected here in honor of a man full of wisdom. From him [came] counsel and insight. He was girded with justice and faith. Behold it is he “the great and blessed” Sa’adi a-Levi Ashkenazi, “may his soul rest in paradise.” He was the first Jew in this city who brought to light newspapers. In 1875 he published a newspaper in the Sephardic language La Epoka In 1895 he published in the French language Journal de Salonique. He “departed for his eternal home” on the 8th day of Tevet 5663 [1903].10 The epitaph is unusual for its length, biographical detail, and literary style: it was clearly designed to impress. If photographs are any indication, Sa’adi’s tomb exerted a gravitational pull upon the extended Levy family, for whom visits to the grave—and, in time, bereavement over its destruction—became a ritual. In June 1919, Esther and her family at last departed Salonica, five years after they intended. The family traveled by ship to Marseille, lugging twelve suitcases in their wake, a thirteenth having been left behind so as not to jinx the voyage.11 One train carried the group to Paris, another two trains and a ferry took them to their new home. There, in a leafy suburb some five miles from the heart of Manchester, the Salems would cultivate one of the most robust branches of the extended Levy family tree. 61 SAM Sa’adi’s son Sam, newspaperman and impassioned activist, was already abroad during the series of dramatic events that transformed Salonica in the second decade of the twentieth century. With his wife, Anna, and their young daughter, Suzanne, Sam had left Salonica in 1911, just after Sultan Mehmed V’s visit to the city. In the years that followed, the small family moved—somewhat frenetically—between Belgrade, Bern, Lausanne, and, finally, Paris, where they at last settled and where Sam would live (but for the years of the Second World War) the remainder of his life. Throughout this peripatetic time, writing remained a constant, and moral outrage was Sam’s favored voice. Narrow-mindedness, ignorance, and conservativism were constant goads to Sam. Even as Zionism gained ascendancy among Sephardic Jews, he continued to reject the movement, as well as nationalism in most forms. Though fiercely political, he rationalized placing journalism above politics, seeking financial support for his newspapers from both the British and the Germans during the First World War.1 One could call this opportunism, were Sam not a man committed to the moral underpinnings of his own choices. An avid reader of French Romantic literature, he saw himself as a besieged protagonist, little understood, and haunted by fate.2 62 Sam Lévy, 1920, from Les Juifs de Salonique (Salonica, 1933) Far from home, Sam remained under the spell of early-twentieth-century Salonica and the particular form of Jewish cosmopolitanism that had flourished there. From 1922 to 1930, he edited a hefty trade annual that carried his name (Le Guide Sam) and that offered readers a phantasmagorical regional geography in which Salonican Jews—including many of his own relatives and friends—became the pillars of modern global commerce.3 He returned to Salonica for short visits in the decades after his emigration: for example, to deliver a series of lectures during the First World War.4 In 1925, he returned again, this time documenting his pilgrimage to the Jewish cemetery of Salonica with a photograph. In this image, Sam stands in a dark suit beside his father’s distinctive grave, his outstretched hand resting on Sa’adi’s headstone.5 Though a dedicated follower of current events, Sam also had a deep sense of the past. His opinions about Salonica were particularly firm. In 1919, when the First World War was freshly concluded and the Allied victors were gathered in Versailles to broker terms of peace, Sam submitted an unsolicited recommendation to the assembled dignitaries. Salonica, he wrote, should be internationally recognized as a free and neutral city administered by Jews, who (he argued erroneously) constituted two-thirds of the city’s population. He envisioned a city that would exist as a nation akin to other nations, replete with a voice in the newly created League of Nations. This proposal, Sam boasted, would assure tranquillity in the Balkans, thereby contributing to the promotion of peace in Europe.6 Sam’s was an audacious plan—conceivably the most audacious imagining of Salonica’s future to circulate at this time.7 He argued for a Jewish city-state that was neither Zionist nor Greek: a Sephardic government with the power to influence 63 global politics; a Salonica that could remain a vibrant center of the Jewish world, immune to the rise of nationalism across southeast Europe. Of course, Sam’s vision was pure folly. Yet Salonica was not the only place championed as a potential free and neutral European city: early-twentieth- century dreamers wanted the same for Trieste, Istanbul, and Danzig. For Sam, Salonica was fixed in time—let us say in 1911, when a sultan’s visit to the Levys’ beloved city brought the family great pleasure and honor. Sam seemed to relish nostalgia for the city of his birth, for the empire into which he was born, for a time when the Sephardic community exerted considerable influence. His nostalgia was shaped abroad. Despite his intense connection to Salonica, more than half of Sam’s life was lived outside his birth city.8 Emigration and the passage of time intensified Sam’s passion for an idealized Salonica of the past. Sam’s nostalgia was passed on to his only child, at least for a time. Suzanne would be the rare member of the next generation of Levys, Sa’adi’s grandchildren, to perpetuate the devotion of her parents to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, serving the organization as a teacher in El Jadida (Mazagan), Morocco, from 1928 to 1932. In so doing, Suzanne was honoring an institution that her own grandfather first welcomed to Salonica and following in the footsteps of her aunt Rachel, who was also posted by the organization to Morocco—though some five hundred kilometers to the east—twenty-eight years earlier.9 As much as Sam looked to the next generation, he also looked backward, especially to the legacy of his father. For years, Sam worked to translate excerpts of Sa’adi’s memoir. He published translated segments in Ladino in 1907 and again in the 1930s, and in French in 1933, pairing Sa’adi’s original words with inventive commentary.10 But for Sam’s labor, I would not have found my way to the Levy family history. 64 LEON The youngest son of Daout Effendi, Leon Levy (1891–1978), announced his engagement to Estherina Alaluf in the pages of a French-language newspaper published in Salonica, on November 13, 1916. Sadly, the happy announcement was dwarfed by news of the months-long battle then raging between Allied and Bulgarian forces at a bend in the River Crna, on the Macedonian front. But while the war was bloody, for Leon it was profitable. In late 1916, Leon was hired by the British Expeditionary Force Canteens, a unit meant to supply “for officers and men cheap shops, good rest and recreation centers, and for officers excellent hotels. From the Expeditionary Force canteens the soldier could buy cigars, cigarettes, chocolate, sweets, and all kinds of canned goods, duty free, and at prices far lower than those of the London shops. Whisky, wine, and beer could be bought duty free, under some restrictions.”1 Leon’s relationship to the British Expeditionary Force Canteens entitled him to drive a truck in Salonica, which was a wartime luxury.

Load more