FAREWELL TO SALONICA

by Leon Sciaky

Date: 2007-12-02

‘Among the wide variety of memoirs published this year, some of the most interesting are from small presses. Haus must be congratulated for Farewell to Salonica by Leon Sciaky (£16.99), which first appeared in America in 1946 but has never seen the light of day here. Born in 1893, Sciaky was a Sephardic Jew whose family were grain merchants in Salonica for 400 years. They emigrated to America just before the first world war. It is nostalgic, beautifully written and illuminating for its evocation of how an apparently stable, multicultural provincial Ottoman city collapsed into the tangle of Balkan rivalries that still beset the region.' THE SUNDAY TIMES - 2 December 2007

'Leon Skiaky was born in Salonica in 1893, when the city was still a provincial Ottoman town. His family were grain merchants, Sephardic Jews who had been settled there for 400 years and still spoke Ladino at home.  In concise, elegant prose, he describes in this memoir a childhood of Oriental pace and comforts, surrounded by Muslims and Christians, in which Turks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks appeared to live in harmony.’

THE SPECTATOR – 10 November, 2007

‘Evoking with haunting accuracy the sights, sounds and smells around the turn of the 20th century, Leon Sciaky charts the changing fortunes of his extended Jewish family of traders.’

THE JEWISH CHRONICLE – 2 November, 2007

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