Family Papers:
A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century

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Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s ninth book, named a Book of the Year by The Economist and Mosaic Magazine, an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times, and a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, uses the Levy family’s correspondence to tell the story of their journey spanning generations and the globe. The Levys wrote letters to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers.

For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle life as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree.

With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys’ letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.

Reviews and reactions

“A painstaking feat of reconstruction” —The Economist (Book of the Year)

“The account of this one Mediterranean clan, like the best micro-histories, contains much more than a family story, illuminating the forces that shaped the world we live in now… Stein, a UCLA historian, has ferocious research talents [...] and a writing voice that is admirably light and human… All of this has produced a superb and touching book about the frailty of ties that hold together places and people.”
—Matti Friedman, New York Times

“What light there is in these books comes from the books themselves, from the artistry and intelligence on display — virtues that also distinguish…Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s meticulous recounting of one family’s path through the 20th century.” —New York Times (Editors’ Choice/Staff Picks)

“The ‘Sephardic Journey’ traced in Family Papers is . . . bounded by confident cosmopolitanism and aching loss . . . Stein guides the reader through [her] sources with a restrained but humane voice . . . The result is a book of unusual emotional power and immediacy.” —Sara Lipton, New York Review of Books

“A touching microhistory…Family Papers teaches us something about human ties and modern times.” —Mosaic Magazine (Book of the Year)

“A remarkable book.” —The Economist

“Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century draw[s] on a rich mix of family letters and written reminiscences, government archives, official documents in the family’s possession, photographs, formal interviews with relatives, personal recollections, newspaper clippings, and scholarly publications, all of which…[the author] weave[s] together in a seamless way.” —Larry Rohter, New York Review of Books

“Family Papers is more than a fascinating account…It is also an opportunity to hear a small but poignant set of voices break through the silence that we have faced so far about the Jews of Greece. Stein’s prodigious research, a true labor of love, gives voice to some of those who have been silenced.”—Alexander Nehamas, The Jewish Review of Books

“A fascinating history . . . [with] incomparable sources . . . A masterful multigenerational reconstruction of a family's life.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Stein delivers a tour de force... a moving, wonderfully written history of a fascinating family.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“In Greece’s second-largest city, the Jewish past is visible only in the flickering light of remembrance… Stein skillfully draws a map of this memory-scape and poignantly traces its travails.” —Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal

“Through her exacting investigation of a rich family archive... [Stein] reconstructs the little-known story of Jewish Salonica, a once thriving Sephardi community int he Balkans, and its immersion in the fate of European Jewry.” —Yaelle Azagury, Jerusalem Post

“A masterpiece of historical research that reads like a novel . . . [Family Papers] is an intimate portrait of a family, reconstructed through a massive collection of their letters and documents. It’s also a chronicle of how their fates were shaped by the wars of the twentieth century, scattering the family from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India.” —Sally Abrams, The Times of Israel

“Stein’s original research has been nothing less than prodigious, locating archives and descendants in Greece, Portugal, Spain, France, Britain, Israel, India, Brazil, and Canada.”—Athens Review of Books

“[An] eloquent exploration of migration is Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s Family Papers, a luminous chronicle of a Sephardic family….Stein keeps [the tale] flowing, producing the kind of history—at its core, detective work—that is authentically global in tone.” —Ilan Stavans, Latin American Research Review

“A deft combination of the intimate and the epochal, Stein’s book goes beyond documenting a remarkable, and remarkably dispersed, family correspondence to produce, in her own unique way, a glimpse of the depth and breadth of the modern Sephardi Diaspora.” —Jess Olson, Sephardic Horizons

“A remarkable book.”—Elaine Margolin, Los Angeles Review of Books

“A fascinating history . . . [Stein's] spirited account, which is greatly enhanced by its many photos, makes a fine contribution to the field of modern Jewish studies.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Stein’s masterful book about the Levy family…is a remarkable recovery of history.” —The National Book Review

“A remarkable new book.” —Hilit Surowitz-Israel, Lilith Magazine

“With her book Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century, Sarah Abrevaya Stein implores us to remember all that was lost in Salonica, modern-day Thessaloniki, Greece, which once boasted a thriving Sephardi community.” —Ben Fisher, The Jerusalem Post

“From Ottoman Salonika to Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and beyond, Sarah Abrevaya Stein follows the fascinating Levy family over five generations. Letters, memoirs, and interviews reveal love and hate, success and shameful secrets both. An extraordinary Sephardic saga, brilliantly told!” —Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels

“By turns intimate and expansive, mournful and celebratory, Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s Family Papers mines a remarkable trove of letters to detail the dramatically shifting fortunes of one extended Sephardic clan. As she brings us inside the lives and lines of her border-crossing, multigenerational cast of correspondents, Stein also makes expert use of her skills as cultural historian, textual detective, and savvy social cartographer to map the fate of a fading world.” —Adina Hoffman, author of Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City

“Gripping, inspiring, and heartbreaking, Family Papers follows one Sephardic Jewish family from Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece) to the far corners of the world and through the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century. The author has accomplished something miraculous; by tracking down every scrap she could find, from Manchester and Johannesburg to Rio and Bombay, and reconstructing individual lives and all too many tragic deaths, this master of the craft makes the Levy family’s story everyone’s. This is history as it should be written now: approachable, yet full of insight, alert to every global resonance, and always insistent on getting as close to the truth as possible.” —Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters

“Sarah Abrevaya Stein is a historian—and a storyteller—of consummate skill. In Family Papers, she has produced a lucid, intimate portrait of Sephardic Jews, of ties that bind and memories cherished and elided.” —Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History