The story of a frayed and diasporic Sephardic Jewish family preserved in thousands of letters -- letters to share grief, reveal secrets, propose marriage. The letters were the fragile tissue that held the family together from the 12th Century to today. The Levy family lived in the bustling port city of Salonica for centuries. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the 20th 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.
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