Leon Sciaky

Farewell to Salonica

Durch die Augen von Leon Sciaky dürfen wir miterleben und vielleicht auch verstehen lernen, wie eine multikulturelle, scheinbar stabile und tolerante Gesellschaft in feindliche Lager auseinanderfällt und zerbricht. Seine Memoiren beschreiben in kurzen Kapiteln das Leben um 1900 in Salonica, dem heutigen Thessaloniki. Sciaky zeichnet mit einem liebevollen Blick auf die betroffenen Menschen den Alltag in dieser sich auflösenden Stadt nach. Mit grosser Trauer schildert er die unverständlichen Ereignisse, welche ihn für immer geprägt haben. In dieser Ausgabe von Paul Dry Books ergänzen Fotografien aus seinem Nachlass den Text und ein Glossar erklärt die wichtigsten Begriffe. Zudem schliesst ein kurzer Essay seines Sohnes Peter über das Leben seines Vaters in Nordamerika das Buch ab. Farewell to Salonica eignet sich gut als Einstieg in die hochkomplexe Geschichte dieser Stadt bzw. dieser Region. ap

Klappentext:

In this warm and moving memoir, Leon Sciaky describes his childhood before the First World War in a prosperous, loving Jewish family in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki in Greece). Under the Ottoman Empire, the city's diverse communities – Jews, Muslim Turks, Orthodox Greeks and Bulgarians – met, traded and lived alongside each other in a day-to-day atmosphere of mutual respect and tolerance. Salonica was also a point of contact between East and West, and Sciaky describes the impact of Western "machine civilisation" on the older, more human ways of the Orient. However, this tolerant society was under the constant threat from nationalist feeling among the peoples of the Empire, and Sciaky describes living through one of the earliest terrorist attacks of the 20th century, when in 1903 Macedonian nationalists launched a series of bomb attacks, demolishing the Ottoman Bank in a forerunner of 9/11. The revolt of the "Young Turks" was planned in Salonica, and the book describes how the hopes of liberation it brought were tragically dashed as it lapsed into Turkish nationalism.

This book is a fascinating insight into a lost society, in which an older tradition of mutual respect and tolerance was finally overcome by the pressures of modern nationalism and war, the after-effects of which are felt in the region to this day, told by one who lived through it all.

Über die Autorin / über den Autor:

Leon Sciaky was born in Salonica in 1893, and emigrated to the United States in 1915. After studying engineering, he ran a pioneering children’s camp. He and his family moved to Mexico in 1953, where he died in 1958.

Preis: CHF 24.50
Art: Broschiertes Buch
Erschienen: 2016 (1946)
Verlag: HausPublishing
ISBN: 978-1-909961-23-4
Masse: 272 S.

zurück