Four years ago, I wrote an essay discussing André Aciman's memoir, Out of Egypt. Aciman grew up in a large, extended Jewish family in Alexandria in the late 1950s and early 60s. Alexandria was then a highly cosmopolitan city, with a population from a multitude of ethnic roots. His family was forced to leave in 1964, when Egypt expelled nearly all non-Arabs, citizen and non-citizen alike. Aciman was 14 years old when they left. Out of Egypt is a haunting memoir of growing up in a happy but lost world. I notice that I've referred to it frequently in subsequent posts.
Salonica -- now bearing the Greek name, Thessaloniki -- was another cosmopolitan city at the beginning of the twentieth century. A coastal city in the Ottoman province of Macedonia, it had a population of Turks, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Bulgarians, French, and Spanish. The Jewish population was especially large, their ancestors having moved to Salonica after 1492, when Spain and Portugal expelled their Jewish residents. The Jewish immigrants were ambitious and highly educated, and were welcomed to the Ottoman Empire by the Sultan, who mused: "They say that Ferdinand [Spain's king] is a wise monarch. How could he be one, he who impoverishes his country to enrich mine?"
Leon Sciaky was born in Salonica in 1892. His memoir, Farewell to Salonica (1946), begins with his early recollections of growing up in a large house with a large garden. His father was a successful, well respected, and well liked businessman. Leon appears to have been an introspective but not shy young boy, highly affected by the beauties and curiosities of his house and garden, and highly imaginative in the solitary games he played. Once he began school, he made friends with children from all ethnic groups, and became fluent in French in addition to the family's Ladino (a Jewish dialect derived from ancient Castilian Spanish); he also spoke enough of Salonica's other languages to get around, as did many of the city's residents.
From the early chapters of the memoir, it's clear that Leon lived in an intensely close, extended family, as did Aciman in Alexandria. He was loved, and lived a secure and enviable childhood.
I had grown much like the weeds around the odd corners of the garden of the big house, drawing upon its cloister-like serenity the stuff that went to make my dreams and fantasies. Mine had been a world so filled with wonder and exciting fancies that I had not missed the companionship of other children.
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| Leon's classmates at Le Petit Lycée Français. Leon is the second boy seated from the left. |
He found his grammar school boring and stifling, but when he began high school, he attended Le Petit Lycée Français -- a highly innovative school for its time (or for any time, I'd say). The instructors were approachable and friendly, and enjoyed answering questions. Students in the multi-ethnic student body were taught to study as a group, rather than being pitted against each other competitively. Virtually all of the students were bright and curious and Leon found them enjoyable to work with.
And it was at the Petit Lycée Français that Leon began satisfying his intense curiosity about the outside world, the world that was beginning to amaze even Salonicans with its railroads and electricity and steamships. The world beyond the safe, comfortable, non-challenging world of Salonica in which he had grown up. The world of the "Frenks," as the Ottomans called all Westerners, not just the French.
Leon's closest friend at the Lycée was a Turkish boy named Shukri, a boy as quiet, as intelligent, and as thoughtful as Leon himself. They spoke often together about the books they read, mainly French classics, and about their school classes. Only once does Leon recall Shukri having spoken about the Ottoman Empire's place in the world. Everyone in the West is upset about the plight of the Christians in Macedonia, Shukri noted. "But the shame we feel, who shares it with us? We see our country on the brink of ruin, reviled, and spat upon. Enemies surround us and are in our midst. Who shares with us our humiliation?" He hoped for an awakening by the common man in Turkey.
By the time Leon was sixteen, the centuries-old Ottoman world was breaking up, as Shukri foresaw, with the revolt of the "Young Turks." Five years later, in 1913, the Great Powers decreed the partition of Macedonia, with the southern part, including Salonica, awarded to Greece. In 1915, Leon and his family left Salonica, never to return, and settled in New York.
America was exciting, Leon found, but disconcerting.
Reared in the atmosphere of courtesy and hospitality of the East, I found both teachers and pupils shockingly intolerant of anything that deviated ever so slightly from what they had been accustomed to. Their readiness to ridicule foreigners -- their names, their accents, and their civility -- struck me as singularly coarse.
He later decided that this was the cost of democracy -- he noted how young people from every social and economic class played together as equals. He regretted the cost, but approved of the result.
Salonica became, as it is now, a Greek city. Other ethnic groups were forced to assimilate or leave. The dwindling Jewish community was finished off during World War II, when the Germans sent virtually all the Jews north to extermination camps.
Leon and his wife spent most of their adult lives in upstate New York, where he taught in progressive schools and ran summer camps. He died in 1958. Three years after his death, I passed through Thessaloniki by train on my way to Athens. I rejoiced that I had finally arrived in Greece. I had no idea of the tragedies that the city outside the railway station had endured.
Rebecca West and Robert Kaplan, in the two books I've read and discussed over the past couple of weeks, emphasized the cruelty, harshness, and stupidity of Ottoman rule. They accurately described the effects of that rule on the Slavic minorities -- and for Kaplan, also the Greeks -- who suffered under that rule. And Leon does not minimize the hardships suffered by the peasants, both Bulgarian and Turkish, in the rural areas of Macedonia surrounding Salonica, peasants whose grain his father purchased each year for shipping. Many of these hardships resulted from the greed and corruption of the local Turkish "beys," or landowners, whose soil the peasants worked -- the exorbitant taxes and fees the beys imposed.
But for Leon's family, and the rest of the very large Jewish community in Salonica, Turkish rule was, in some ways, more a blessing than a curse. For all its arbitrary cruelty and corruption, the Ottomans had never been a nationalistic Turkish empire. It was an empire that embraced a large number of different ethnic groups. Jews, among others, were allowed considerable autonomy and self-rule. While resistance to Ottoman rule was already developing outside the city, within Salonica itself Leon recalls almost complete peace among all the groups.
Leon recalls especially the quiet warmth and peacefulness of Turkish households, the rituals of hospitality that were more than rituals, that truly expressed welcome to Leon and his family. The flip side to this devotion to traditional values was the stagnation that Leon fought against, the resistance to new ideas, to change in general. Leon's every instinct from childhood was to burst out of this cocoon, this lack of interest in new ideas and new inventions. He found a congenial home in America.
But even in America today, young people who leave behind the close ties of their home towns for the excitement and progressiveness of the large city often look back with nostalgia to the unquestioned values and friendly rituals of their youth. So it's been with André Aciman. So it was with Leon Sciaky, as he looked back and said "farewell" to Salonica.
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