Ottoman History Podcast - Family Papers and Ottoman Jewish Life After Empire

Episode Date: November 20, 2019

Episode 434 with Sarah Abrevaya Stein hosted by Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein speaks to us about the journey of one Jewish family from Ottoman Salonica in the late nineteenth century to Manchester, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and beyond during the twentieth century. In her new book Family Papers, she reveals the poignant continuities and changes that accompanied the Sephardic family's movement from an imperial world into a national one through stories of displacement and genocide, endurance and survival. She also discusses the cache of family papers that allowed her to provide this uniquely intimate vantage on large-scale historical transformations. « Click for More »

The cousins, all grandchildren of Saadi Besalel Ashkenazi Alevi, had lived under Ottoman, Greek, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Indian, and Brazilian rule. They had witnessed the 1917 fire in Salonika, the Balkan Wars, the First and Second World Wars, and they had emigrated in multiple directions, some more than once. When Saadi died in 1903, his grandchildren were mostly old enough to carry memories of this old world figure into the late 20th century. Their own children grew up in a global diaspora, with no one speaking Ladino, the family's historic mother tongue. Hello and welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. Today, our guest is Sarah

Abrevia Stein, who is reading from her new book Family Papers, A Sephardic Journey Through the 20th Century. Sarah Brevia Stein is the Saidi and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Levy Center for Jewish Studies and also a professor of history and the Maurice Amadeo Chair in Sephardic Studies at University of California at Los Angeles. She has written and edited many books, including Extraterritorial Dreams and Plumes. She has also previously been on two episodes of the Ottoman History Podcast. Sarah, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us again.

Thanks for having me. So this is a book about a lot of things. Empire, nationalism, death, life, displacement, rootedness. Even Yogurt and James Bond films find their way into the stories. But it's all through the lens of a family with roots in Salonika in the late 19th century, and what those roots mean as members of the family move far away, as we see them end up in Manchester, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and beyond over the course of the decades. We see ideas that now seem sort of eccentric, a non-Zionist Jewish city-state of Salonika, for example, that one of the family members proposes after World War I.

We also hear names of places that fill our hearts with dread, places like Drancy and Auschwitz. All of this is to say that the book is a unique mix of, I think, stunning scope and striking intimacy. And I want to start by asking how you began. Of course, you've been thinking about Jewish history, citizenship, empires for a long time. But could you talk about what brought you to the family history of Saadi Basila al-Ashkenazi Alevi? Yeah, wonderful question. Thank you. For me, stories have to start with evidential stories, that is, historical documents and the people whose lives are encaptured fully or partially within them. And so this project really began as an archival journey, a documentary journey. journey that actually began with Saadi, as he was known by his contemporaries, who was a 19th century man of letters, printer, editor, and firebrand who enjoyed enraging the religious

elite of Salonika, whom he alienated and who actually excommunicated him for his critique of the rabbinical establishment. I had engaged in a translation of his memoir, which with my colleague and former teacher Aaron Rodrigue, which we understood to be the first memoir written in Ladino, Judeo-Spanish. And it had been written on a slender notebook, a very inexpensive notebook, by hand, by a scribe. And this notebook, as I described in the book, had made its astonishing way from Salonica to Paris, to Rio de Janeiro, to Jerusalem, and over the course of generations and through a family. And when I finished the project with Aaron Rodrigue translating Saadi's words, he was known as Saadi by his contemporaries, I was left with the question, how had this notebook made that

journey? And what had become of his descendants? And so I began working my way geographically backward following the path of this notebook and trying to determine who it was who had ferried it thus. And the first discovery was of family in Brazil that had donated the manuscript to an archive in Jerusalem, and who had in their possession a unique and large body of family papers, which they very generously gave me access to. A family and private archive that they still hold that spans itself about a century. I was fascinated by the papers, but then I had to keep looking. And that launched me on really a decade's journey to put their story in the context and conversation with the family members they corresponded with for so long. And what kind of papers are we talking about here? How many?

Where are they? Well, by my count, it's nearly 5,000 documents, but of a range. 5,000 documents, but of a range, primarily letters, but also including photographs, medical papers, legal documents, address books, expired passports. And this is all in the family vault. And this is all in the family hands. That's right, in Rio, and in a range of languages as well. The family preferred to correspond in French, but they also used Ladino. And there are documents of all measure in Greek and Spanish and Portuguese and German and Hebrew, reflecting the places where the family had settled and also reflecting the needs that they had. So certain languages would be used for certain purposes, whether they were legal or intimate. So that was an incredible repository. But as I say, it was one link on a chain that led me to seek to reconstruct a global

family diaspora. So maybe before we get to the global family diaspora, we could talk a little more about Saadi. You alluded to him being excommunicated, being a bit of a rebel rouser, firebrand. What did that look like in late 19th century Salonica? Well, Saadi was of and from a family of printers. His father was in the printing business, as was his grandfather. And he inherited a press, although quite ramshackle when he inherited it. And he in turn passed it on to his sons, who he collaborated with for a time. And then they published after his death.

And this family press published a variety of genres. They published newspapers, including the most popular French and Ladino language newspapers of Salonika. They also published books, including spiritual works, a compendium of mystical works known as the Zohar, but also wedding invitations and announcements. Now, their publications, especially the newspapers, were for Saadi voice pieces for his rather strident, but also somewhat idiosyncratic platforms. And one of the causes that he was most fervent about was his worry, his concern that the rabbinical establishment had, let's say, exercised excess power, vast powers

and abuse over the Jewish community of Salonika. And he liked to write about this in his newspaper, which didn't fall on, you know, wasn't received with favor. And so therefore, he was excommunicated with his son, Chaim. And the day that they were excommunicated, according to his memoir, which is not entirely a trustworthy source, but according to his memoir, they were driven through the streets of Salonika by the rabbinical henchmen who wanted to arrest them. And a mob chased them at their heels and they raced through the winding streets of the city until they were saved from physical harm by a friend who intervened. It was a trauma that lasted for him his whole life. And it was actually the trauma that prompts him to write a memoir, which is a way to cleanse his name and tell his side of the story.

We have a sense of how he fits in or doesn't fit in with the local Jewish community. Could you give us more of a sense of what that Jewish community looked like? Sure. Well, at the time that he was writing in the 19th century, the late 19th century, Salonika is a city of about 100,000, and Jews represent about 50% of that population. It's the third most important port of the Ottoman Empire, so it's a vibrant entrepot that's cross cut by not only merchants as one would expect, but consular officials visiting dignitaries from foreign states, merchants from all over Europe, a Jewish community that was internally diverse.

We tend to think of this region of the Ottoman Empire as being Sephardic, but actually it's an internally diverse Sephardic community and Jewish community with many strands. And it was a world in flux. It was a world, of course, undergoing the changes that were reshaping Ottoman bureaucracy and society, building of new roads, the tearing down of the seawall,

the building of new ports. And Saadi writes about all of this in his memoir. And he is excited by some things and he is piqued by others. And I was able to track not only through his story, but through what happens to the successive generations, how they each experienced all of these changes, as you said earlier, on their global changes, their empire-wide changes, but they

are being experienced by this family on an intimate scale. I think what's really evident, both from Saadi's memoir and from family papers, is the sense that they're quite integrated into broader Ottoman society. At one point in the book, you call them longtime Ottoman patriots. I wonder if you could talk about what you meant by that and what that meant for different family members and their relation with the Ottoman state. Well, we must remember that Salonika at this time, the Jewish community is the either the plurality or the majority of this city. So Salonika is an Ottoman city. And it's also in some respects, a Jewish city and Devin N Narr and others have written about this dynamic. But certainly this family, like most Jewish families in this region, felt themselves to be very much a part of Ottoman society. example, one of Saadi's sons, Sam Levy, who takes the helm, as it were, of the family press after

Saadi steps down, although for a time he co-edits with his brothers. He perpetuates a tradition of being a newspaper man, and he's an avid editorialist. And his writing is stridently Ottomanist, although he flirts with other political positions. And he, like many others in the family, will find it to be a personal heartache when their city eventually is to become Greek at the end of the Balkan Wars. And his brother, Daoud Efendi, represented the Ottomans as the head of the passport bureau in the city, which was a significant job. This is not the very highest level of power, but it is at this moment an incredibly important position to occupy because it grants you the power to determine, along with the Ottoman state, who is a citizen and who is not, which of course has

all sorts of ripples for the individuals who will be granted or denied papers. He subsequently becomes the head of the Jewish community of Salonika, a position that he carries into the era of the Greek state. But all the while, I would say the family continues to be bound by a history of fealty to the empire, and very much a sense of themselves as part of an Ottoman fabric. I mean, there's something really poetic about the fact that Dawud Efendi is in charge of passports and in charge of citizenship, because as the status of Salonika begins to change with the Balkan Wars, passports are a crucial way for Salonika's Jews to find a way out. I wonder if you could talk about how the changes

of both the Balkan Wars and World War I affect the members of this family. Well, Salonika sees so much violence in such a short period of time. From the violence of the Balkan Wars to the First World War to the fire of 1917, it's such a short period. But it is a period in which there are so many soldiers

stationed and passing through the city there is violence there are refugees there are war dead and and victims of war violence there is loss of home and property and this is also a time for this family as for so many others of a frantic assessment of one's dreams. Do you leave? Do you stay? Do you seek a foreign passport in order to insulate yourself to some degree from the changes around you? Do you choose to invest in the post-Ottoman society, that is, Greek society, as Dauda Fendi himself does? These are the kinds of questions, and there are others

that are slightly more fine-tuned. What sort of political stance will you take? What language do you speak to your children? Do you continue to wish to educate your children in a Jewish school or a school of another religion or a public school? These were decisions that the family was making one by one, branch by branch. And they, as a whole, they represent all of these byways that this community took. Some leave and some stay. Some continue speaking Ladino in the home and some do not. Some become Greek patriots and some do not. One is interned in Britain for being an enemy alien in the course of the First World War at the very same time that his first cousin in Salonika

is a war profiteer benefiting from the soldiers stationed there. The next generation, too, will continue to live and manifest all of these changes, which we think of as macro-political, but of course are experienced individually and on a micro level. On that note of people going elsewhere, I wondered if you could read a passage about one of the family members going to Brazil. This is in a chapter called Leon.

What must it have been like for this Ottoman-born Jew to make the 15-day trip to Rio and sail into its passenger port of Prasau-Makaua? It would have taken an hour for Leon's steamship to thread the islands that dot Guanabara Bay, past Sugarloaf, Butafoga Bay, and Flamenco Bay to reach, finally, Rio's urban dock. to reach, finally, Rio's urban dock. Clutching his brother-in-law's shipment of crepe de chine, Leon would have disembarked, stepping into Brazilian soil and quite inadvertently into the world of fashion. Steady movement between Latin America and Europe, along with immersion in the fashion industry,

would define Leon's future. You know, it's interesting because when I began Family Papers, the assumption I brought with me was that this was a family of letters. And they are a family of letters, by which I mean not only printing and newspapers, but also the letters with which they corresponded. But one of the surprises that I reached in the course of this research is they were also a family of fashion and of sewing and of textiles, not in the same way that we see in Eastern European Jewish history in terms of movement into the workshops of, let's say, London or the Lower East Side of New York, but they but sewing and the needle had an abiding role for the women in this family through the century that I follow that both in Salonika and elsewhere, both in Salonika and elsewhere. And it is a force that women use to save themselves from poverty. It's also in other cases, a force that the older generation used to modernize the

women of their city by introducing the women and men of their city, introducing modern dress, and their granddaughter would subsequently, in the interwar period, introduce pants to the women of Salonika. And there are other examples, too, that much like letters and writing, sewing and fabric wound through this family history. You began by saying you wanted to talk about the material nature of the things that led you to telling this story. And it's not just letters, it's also fashion, it's also samples of fabrics that were used. I wonder if you could talk about the photographs, which are such a crucial part of this book. One of my favorite passages is when you're comparing two photos at graves and noticing the changes between them. Well, I respond very intensely to visual documentation, and especially to photographs. And it was very important to me whenever possible,

to give readers a sense of what these people looked like. And it was important for me every time I came across a photograph of someone whose letters I had been reading or who whom I had been reading about, that was such a treasure, especially from the late mid to late 19th century, where photographs of individuals we can identify, who again, were not wealthy necessarily, are so hard to come by. So I was very devoted to this idea of visual documentation. And the book has over 50 photographs, it's quite a lot. The most of them come from the family, from branches of the family that were generous enough to give me permission to use the photographs in the book. But there were But there are whole swaths of time, especially the Second World War, where they did not have visual documentation.

And then I was obliged to fill in where the family archives had a hole. Not everyone mentioned is pictured, but the main protagonists I really did want to represent visually and to pay close heed to how they dressed and how they comported themselves and what they were eating and drinking and wearing. I mean, something else that I thought was really nice was the photographs give you a way of talking about people who don't appear in the letters or who aren't writing the letters themselves. There are people who I couldn't follow, who evaded the documentary trail, or at least whose papers I could not find. And some of those I used visual imagery to counteract that archival hole. So the members of this family spread all over the world in the interwar period, and then World War II happens. What does that mean for Salonika? What does that mean for this family? Well, the World War II is naturally devastating to

the Jews of Salonika. This community has among the highest rates of genocide of any community in Europe. Other Jewish communities will lose more in terms of sheer numbers, one thinks of, for example, the city of Warsaw. But in terms of a percentage of the whole, the losses in Salonika are absolutely devastating. And this family loses scores and scores of family members, entire branches of the family tree will disappear during the Second World War. will disappear during the Second World War. And what is understandable when one knows this history, but is, I think, surprising if you're a newcomer to this history, is that those who emigrated either well before the Second World War

or just at the beginning of the Second World War, emigrated to other parts of Europe to seek protection, to hide or to go to places they felt were more secure. They also fell prey to the Nazi dragnet. So at the time of the Second World War, besides Salonika, Paris is the home to a very large branch of this family. And some have been there since the 19-teens. But some come in the course of the Second World War including some who flee Spain during the Civil War and they will be deported from Paris

in the course of the Second World War. Those from Salonika will be deported from Salonika, of course. So the devastation is unspeakably vast. One member of the family who after after the war, was accounting for the dead, documented 37 members of what he called his intimate family to perish. But he counted those who shared a family name with him. He didn't count the women who had married and taken on new names. And if one extends the family tree in that way,

to really think about all of the generations, it's just simply a staggering number who would die mostly in Auschwitz, although some in labor camps and from disease along the way. It's a devastating story on so many levels. And it's perhaps even all the more devastating because you've uncovered that one of the family members was also a collaborator. Yeah, so I was not prepared for this discovery. But indeed, one of the cousins, this would be one of Saadi's grandchildren, great-grandchildren, excuse me, was appointed the head of the Jewish police in Salonika. And it wasn't merely that he served the occupiers in this fashion. It was also that he was reputed to be a notorious sadist. And there are testimonies in Greek, in Ladino, in Hebrew, in English, as well as written sources

that corroborate his many crimes. He was a sadist who preyed upon the Jews in the Baron Hirsch ghetto of Salonika. He was employed by the Nazis to ferret out Jews in hiding. He was an aggressor of sexual violence against women. The offenses go on and on. There is a very dramatic story of how he attempts to flee deportation himself. Once all the other Jews have left, I'll have to leave some suspense for the reader. It's a very dramatic story. But in the end, he is, after many escapes, he is arrested and will be tried by the Greek state at the behest of the Jewish community and found guilty of his collaboration with the Nazis and will be

executed. And I believe that he is the only Jew in all of Europe to be executed for his complicity with the Nazis in the course of the war. So it's a staggering revelation. And one thing that's quite interesting is that that revelation actually does not come from family documents. It came from other documents that I had to read against those family papers. And so there's a kind of silence in the letters? There is a coded silence, I would say. The first time I read these letters, I missed it entirely. It was only when I had done a lot of research, when I discovered his existence, when I found a lot of other archival documents, including the most importantly, the transcript of his trial, that I was able to reread the family correspondence and understand

that they were talking about this trauma without ever naming him or without ever labeling his crimes. But it is present, not only through the shifting moods of those he was intimate with, his sister who survived, his father who survived, but the extended family who is called upon to help in instances, help look out for the fate of his daughter. World War II irreversibly changes the Jewish community of Salonika. And there's a passage that I wanted you to read that gets at some of these points, some of these changes. This is a passage from a chapter labeled Eleanor. Eleanor's father, Daud Afendi, was born in 1863 when Salonika was Ottoman, when his father Saadi could provoke the rabbinical establishment with the incendiary tools of a printing press and a

violin. His great-granddaughter Lenora was born in 1939, the year the Second World War began. The two bookended four generations, yet they breathed their last breaths in the same claustrophobic space in rural Poland, inhaling a poison invented to eradicate vermin in a chamber designed by German engineers. It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby, here with Sarah Abrevia Stein,

talking about her new book, Family Papers. How does the family grapple with the aftermath of all of this suffering, but not only suffering of survival, the people who were other places and didn't receive letters for years and didn't know what happened of their family. Yeah, this is such a complex logistical and emotional terrain for the family. They are at the end of the Second World War spread across many countries. There are very, very few survivors who go back to Salonika. Of course, the family in Britain is untouched by the violence, although they were touched by the war. The family that had been in Paris is mostly decimated, but there were some who had fled to the south of France just before the war who survived. There is a survivor in Portugal who managed to be, quote-unquote, repatriated to Portugal on the basis of legal documents that he received from the Portuguese consulate in Salonica

in the course of the Balkan Wars. I say, quote-unquote, repatriated because he was being sent, so-called, back to a country he had never lived in. And there is a family in Brazil. And there is so much trauma. The survivors who come home from the camps are physically, emotionally in terrible condition. And what adds a wrinkle to their story is that they are the close relatives of the man who abetted the Nazis. And this is significant because they had gone to Bergen-Belsen instead of Auschwitz because they were family of the Jewish council. So they have the added complexity of being stigmatized for their relation to this taboo figure. It takes so long for information to travel within the family. They fear the worst, but they understandably cling to hope. They are misled by false information at times,

which seems to promise that this person or that person had survived. There is the arresting fact of their naivete in some cases. The man in Brazil that I've been referring to, Leon Levy, he fancies himself fairly well informed and does his best to correspond with as many people as he can during and immediately after the war. But he is still harboring a hope in the months after the war ends that he will be able to seek out his father's body for burial in the Jewish cemetery of Salonika, not only failing to understand the function of the gas chambers, which he had heard about, but not only failing to entirely understand that, but also not knowing that the cemetery of Salonika had been decimated in the course of the conflict by the Greek municipality

who dismantles it with the permission of the German occupying authorities. Then there are cousins who are farther afield from the conflict, one in Portugal, one in Brazil, who say who are communicating with one another, who might not have been in touch for decades since they were children, but now who are driven together in grief and in the desperate search for information. In time, there will also be a quest for reparations by some but not all members of the family. And this, of course, is another way of dealing with the trauma. There are so many answers to this question of how they confront it. I mean, one thing that's quite interesting is who goes back and who doesn't go back to the city of their birth. I wondered if you could read this passage about Leon returning.

their birth. I wondered if you could read this passage about Leon returning. This is in a chapter called Julie. The first post-war homecoming was Leon's, which eventually happened in 1959 after multiple postponements due to financial and personal hardship. Leon traveled on a Greek passport by way of Paris. He had been a year shy of 40 the last time he was in Salonika, when his parents and siblings were alive and the city's Jewish core vibrant and intact. At the time of his 1959 return, he was a man of nearly 70 years. Salonika was much smaller when Leon left in the 1910s, a city of 158,000 people. By the time of Leon's post-war visit, the number of residents had exploded to half a million and the city itself had been grossly altered by fire, war, and genocide,

by waves of refugees, by aggressive urban redesign. Yet for Leon, Salonica was haunted by the past. I feel profound emotion on returning to my hometown after an absence of more than 43 years, Leon reflected. Everywhere I look, our birth city is transformed. To a distant cousin who had not yet returned to post-war Salonica, Leon confessed, I can't find my way around anymore. There's a way that in a lot of these passages, there's a buildup of intensity because we've been acquainted with these characters from such a long time before, and you get a sense of the kinds of changes that they've witnessed over time. Was that something in your mind as you were writing it, that there's almost like an orchestral buildup to these crescendos where you offer kind of a sweeping view of the changes that are all of a sudden there? That's interesting. Well, I should explain that I made a narrative

choice in the book to organize the chapters around individuals. And for the most part, there are reoccurring characters characters but there are also some who command only a single chapter there are a few unique cases that command only a single chapter and that narrative device allowed me to follow the fate of individuals through time but also became a way for me to follow history temporally through time, through thinking carefully about what I would not choose to write about and how to order these and who, in a sense, received center stage at what time. I think the challenge for me in terms of the crescendo

was the challenge to not center the Holocaust in this story and not make it a Holocaust story, not because the history of the Holocaust in Salonika doesn't deserve more writing, which it does, but because I was really invested in a longer family arc. And I was invested in the pre-Second World War period and the post-Second World War period, which is often neglected. So I think in terms of a building, you know, it was could be challenging to resist that almost natural build towards the Holocaust and then a denouement after which you're sort of on a downward slide. But that's not how the family functioned. Of course, there is grief and trauma and tremendous loss after the Second World War. But there are continued ups and downs as as, as his life. And so I think that I was trying to find a rhythm of suspense

through the book, that that keeps us wondering what what happens to individuals and to the family next. And that I tried to create that tension tension not only through broad historical events, but through these very private emotional affairs. You mentioned making this choice to structure it around these characters. Did it feel different to write about family than ostrich feathers or citizenship? It did feel very differently. I mean, I've always been interested in writing intimate history on a global scale.

I would say that's been a sort of unifying theme of my writing. But to tread into the terrain of families and also to read people's private letters to their family members, which is very different than the letters of petition, let's say someone would write to state, which are the kinds of sources that were so central to one of my recent books, Extraterritorial Dreams, is necessarily to feel like you are eavesdropping on a family.

And I felt that those sources and also the fact that family history, Ottoman family history and Sephardic family history is so little understood. I thought that focusing on protagonists, although some are also antagonists, but these central characters who move the story forward was a way to emphasize an intimate story and to make it human scale. Bringing up this word intimacy is interesting to me because it's something that appears throughout the text here and there. And it comes up in a lot of different ways, whether that means that you notice someone is using the same notebook paper that someone from a previous generation had used, or a later observation that you're now included on some of the family emails. There's a real sensitivity of attention there.

And it gives us this incredible insight into the people we're following. It also sounds like it gives insight perhaps to the family in terms of macro level things that they hadn't been able to see or hadn't been aware of. But I also wonder if that was difficult to kind of manage relationships between living human beings who have an interest in this, are connected to this in wonderful ways and in painful ways. How did you manage that? It does raise unique challenges, I think. Of course, there is a very theoretically developed school of oral history, which is subtly attuned to the ethics of interviews and of

collecting information and of pursuing historical subjects. But I think that some of the challenges I encountered were somewhat different from those. because so many of the papers that I was exploring for this project were family owned. So it wasn't even a question of whether I would be interested in reaching out to the descendants to find the present day incarnation of this family history. I had no choice if I were going to tell this story. And that meant getting to know people and building trust and entering people's living rooms and meeting many generations around a table and understanding that they were going to read what I wrote and that it mattered to them and that there were some secrets. Also that I was telling other secrets. There were

things that I didn't write about out of discretion, which may sound odd given that I'm revealing the story of a Nazi war criminal. But there were things that I felt were intimate facts that didn't move the story forward and would be needless to churn up. So of course, the historian makes choices about what not to tell. That's always true. But it was the research itself was very intimate, I would say. And the history continues to feel very alive for me, even though there are branches of this family whom I met, who, quite frankly, aren't that invested in the family history. But they still, interestingly enough, they still steward the papers. So that's very interesting to me, that you might not read them,

you might not be able to read the languages they're printed in, but somehow they matter to you, or you understand that they matter to history. As a physical object, they matter. Yes, right, right. Can I ask for one more reading? This is in a chapter called Saadi Silvan. Four generations, a century, and a distance of some 7,000 miles

separate the Saadi with whom this book began and the Saadi with whom it ends. The first Saadi spent his entire life in Salonika, traveling no farther than Vienna, where he went only once as a young man. The second Saadi, Saadi's great-grandson Saadi Silvan, spent a fractured early childhood in transit across Europe and came of age in Brazil. Remarkably, these levies were connected, not only by blood and name, but also by their Judaism and their Sephardic culture, and by their commitment to tradition. They were also connected by that most fragile of materials, paper. Saadi poured his memories into a small, inexpensive notebook that would outlive an empire, wars, genocide, and the dispersal of his descendants. Saadi Salvan was more a man of science than of letters. Still, he had the wisdom to preserve the papers of his father, Leon, who used the simple

act of letter writing to bind the branches of the extended Levy family, grafting connections that would not otherwise have been made. The two men shared two names, each one altered by time, migration, and the dissolution of a concentrated Sephardic cultural solution. As Saadi al-Levi became Saadi Silvan Levi, a Jewish family undertook a century-long journey from an Ottoman to a nationalized world, across political borders, languages, and generations, and athwart a global diaspora. Through it all, the past continued to matter.

The women and men in the extended Levy family were fiercely independent creatures of their eras, but they were also descendants. Sarah, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. It's really been a pleasure. You say early on in the book that it's about a place and a community that no longer exist, but what's remarkable about the book is how vividly the place and community come alive. We'll have a bibliography of relevant works and photos on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. We also encourage you to join us on our Facebook group, Ottoman History Podcast, where you can share any comments

or questions you have with us. That's it for this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. Until next time, take care. Thank you.