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Published Nov 2019
336 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
An award-winning historian shares the true story of a frayed and diasporic Sephardic Jewish family preserved in thousands of letters.
For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree.
In Family Papers, the prizewinning Sephardic historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family's correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers.
With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.
"A masterful multigenerational reconstruction of a family's life." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A moving, wonderfully written history of a fascinating family that will attract readers of history and those interested in Judaic studies. Highly recommended." - Library Journal (starred review)
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"From Ottoman Salonika to Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and beyond, Sarah Abrevaya Stein follows the fascinating Levy family over five generations. Letters, memoirs, and interviews reveal love and hate, success and shameful secrets both. An extraordinary Sephardic saga, brilliantly told!" - Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels
"By turns intimate and expansive, mournful and celebratory, Sarah Abrevaya Stein's Family Papers mines a remarkable trove of letters to detail the dramatically shifting fortunes of one extended Sephardic clan. As she brings us inside the lives and lines of her border-crossing, multigenerational cast of correspondents, Stein also makes expert use of her skills as cultural historian, textual detective, and savvy social cartographer to map the fate of a fading world." - Adina Hoffman, author of Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City
"Gripping, inspiring, and heartbreaking, Family Papers follows one Sephardic Jewish family from Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece) to the far corners of the world and through the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century...This is history as it should be written now: approachable, yet full of insight, alert to every global resonance, and always insistent on getting as close to the truth as possible." - Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, as well as Professor of History and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA. She is the author or editor of nine books, including Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century and Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce. The recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, three National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Jewish Book Awards, Stein lives with her family in Santa Monica, CA
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