In this enchanting and moving memoir, Leon Sciaky describes his childhood before the FirstWorld War in a prosperous, loving Jewish family in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica (nowThessaloniki in Greece). Under the Ottoman Empire, the city's diverse communities - Jews,Muslim Turks, Orthodox Greeks and Bulgarians - met, traded and lived alongside each otherday-to-day in an atmosphere of tolerance.Farewell to Salonica offers a fascinating insight into a lost society in which an older tradition ofmutual respect was finally overcome by the pressures of nationalism and war, the after-effects ofwhich are felt in the region to this day.

Leon Sciaky, whose family were prosperous Jewish grain merchants and descendents of the Sephardic Jewish exodus from Spain in 1492, grew up in the vibrant city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki) in Macedonia in a remarkably polyglot world where Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Bulgarian, French, Spanish and Hebrew were all spoken regularly in the city's busy streets and quays. In the early part of the book, Sciaky's recollections are achingly nostalgic and lyrical and describe an intimate and affectionate family existence where every day the young Sciaky would eat with his parents and his adored grandfather Nono on the oriental divan, exchanging stories and jokes. But in retrospect, the city was doomed to destruction and as early as 1902 when Leon Sciaky experienced an earthquake, he remarked: 'One's very conception of solidity, one's feeling of security was suddenly destroyed'. Soon after, the young Sciaky witnessed the earliest examples of terrorism and a downward spiral of violent attacks. His account of the end of a world is powerful and intense; when, as a young boy, he saw the look of terror in the face of a refugee peasant, he likened it to 'the animal dread of cattle in the slaughterhouse'. Farewell to Salonica was first published in America in 1946. It is a beautiful and touching memoir, which also offers a unique political and historical insight into the complex history of the breakdown of the Turkish Empire. The Sciakys left for America in 1915 and like them many non-Greeks left Salonica following the Balkan Wars and World War I. All but sixteen hundred of the city's fifty thousand Jewish inhabitants perished in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

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 centre of the Ottoman empire and a cultural centre 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.