Holocaust Review: Matarasso: Jewish Salonika

 

Isaac Matarasso. Talking Until Nightfall. Remembering Jewish Salonika, 1942-44, translated by Pauline Matarasso. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020. pp. 269 + 8 black and white plates + 2 maps.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

 

More than twenty years ago I started to collect books, articles, and newspaper reports about Salonika, hoping to write books especially about young children experienced the awful events of the Shoah that befell the inhabitants of that once proud Jewish city in northern Greece. There were hundreds of pages of interviews available online and hundreds of articles dealing with the historical problem of what children could understand about what was happening to them and their families. Much of the documentation came from survivors who wrote down what they remembered long after the bulk of the Jewish population was transported to death camps to be murdered. These were traumatized memories.

The more I collected data and tried to give my projected book a shape, the more I realized that I could not write it. Not just because it was too painful to keep feeling and thinking through the stories these elderly people recalled of their disrupted childhoods. But there were too many people attempting to do the same thing, and they were children or other relatives of the survivors, and it was their story, their duty to tell what happened to their families, not mine, not the outsider’s. I could listen in and try to feel their pain.

When possible, I still collected information, and have dozens of ring-binders full of essays, interviews and formal histories printed out from the internet.  Recently, I found a book that seems to be very much what I wanted to put together. Not exactly about the experiences of young children, but the formal and informal; writings of one man and his family, and edited by someone who—I am astonished to say—says what I wanted to say about memory, trauma and contextualizing personal memories—and often uses the very expressions I would have wanted to write.  I am so glad that someone could write this book and that by some miracle it made its way to a bookshop here in Hamilton, New Zealand. It is the kind of book that will help me do the only thing I can possibly do, keep reading and writing about the Holocaust in various forms.  It stands as a model of clarity, accuracy, conviction and empathy.

Talking until Nightfall has Isaac Matarasso named on the book jacket as author, but only inside do we find that while his writings form the core of this book, three others bring those documents to a larger public as translator, editor, commentator and illustrator.  Part I “An Urgent Conversation” and “Note on the Texts” is by Isaac’s granddaughter Pauline Matarasso. Parts II, III and IV are the memoirs, chronicles and essays by Isaac Matarasso, each of which is introduced by a poignant and perceptive commentary by Pauline, who acts as the witness of the witness.  Part V, “During Your Lifetime and During Your Days” by Isaac’s son and Pauline’s father Robert Matarasso. Finally Part VI, “Listening to the Witnesses” by François Matarasso.

In other words, there are three generations of the Matarasso family who have made this collection of essays into one of the finest and most important witnesses to the destruction of Jewish Salonika. Salonika was a city with a long and honourable Sephardic past which disappeared in a matter of months, with barely any survivors, a city which had been looked up to as the model of what a modern, functioning Jewish civilization could look like when the first Zionists visited it at the start of the twentieth century: Jews not just as religious thinkers, intellectuals, professional people, artists and merchants, but also as longshoremen and other manual workers , all living in more or less harmony with Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims.

Salonika was thus a special place where what David Shasha and José Faur thought of as Religious Humanism, a Sephardi civilization that flourished in an openness to other civilizations. That all this came crashing down, beginning with the  take-over of the city by the Orthodox Greeks during the First World War and then by the ruthless actions of the German Nazis during the Holocaust, was a disaster not for the inhabitants of Salonika or for the Jews everywhere, but for the whole world.

Isaac Matarasso was the kind of cosmopolitan, sophisticated and yet humble European who represented everything the Nazis were not. What he wrote about his experiences stands witness to his sense and sensibility, his loyalty to family and culture. What his children and grandchildren say about him guives hope that, despite all that has been lost, not everything about Jewish and European civilization has been forgotten and may continue on into future generations.

It is hard to write a précis or summation of this book because the critic finds himself wanting to copy it all out again, wanting to use the same words and expressions which the Matarasso family here uses; and yet the reviewer would lose the closeness and the emotional intensity they have for their respected and beloved ancestor.