商品簡介
"At the crossroads of the Eastern and Western worlds, Salonica—now Greece's third largest city, Thessaloniki—was an oasis in a desert of conflicting powers and interests. A Turkish territory until 1912, the city was an economic center of the Ottoman empire and a cultural center of Sephardic Judaism. In this memoir, Leon Sciaky, the son of a Sephardic merchant family who immigrated to Turkey during the Spanish Inquisition, tells of growing up in the vibrant community that flourished in Salonica at the turn of the century. He introduces the Turkish sheiks and dervishes, Sephardic rabbis, Hungarian revolutionaries, Bulgarian farmers, Greek priests, Kurdish grocers, Albanian woodcutters, and French headmasters who populated this little Balkan world. Although his early years were idyllic, Sciaky's well-respected merchant family could not escape the violence of Salonica's constant lesions and struggles. Situated amidst peoples of different languages, religions, cultures, and national allegiances, Salonica was like a vividly set stage in a drama where these very diverse peoples lived, in peace and strife, vying for power and prosperity."
作者簡介
Leon Sciaky was born in 1894, when the Turkish flag still waved over Salonica. His family left their beloved but turbulent homeland in 1915, settling in New York City. Sciaky lived in America--mainly upstate New York--with his wife, Frances, and son until his death in 1958. He taught at a number of progressive schools and camps and, in his last years, owned and operated a school and camp with Frances.
