THE three-generational family saga is a well-known genre, as is the Holocaust novel; here, Michael Arditti combines the two, and the effect is to produce a masterpiece of storytelling, and a novel of immense compassion.
The book spans half a century. We start in Salonica, in June 1911. The Ottoman Sultan is visiting a city that is home to a large Jewish population and to the Carrache family, “notables”, prosperous, privileged, and happy. The book ends in May 1964, with the return of the surviving family members to Thessaloniki, where they inaugurate a museum of Jewish life in what had been their family mansion.
In between, we are taken on a gripping journey of the family’s life in France (the notables of Salonica all spoke French among themselves; the Jews in general spoke Ladino) after they left newly independent Greece, and their fortunes and misfortunes in the War period. We are taken only briefly into the camps, and that horror, though present, is kept in the background, which is a wise decision on the author’s part; for in this case less is truly more.
This is a story about loss, and about what survives. In the end, the Carrache mansion is restored, but only two of the pieces of furniture are original, a reminder of the irredeemable nature of the past. What is lost is lost, but, one character, a Gentile Greek, once the beloved of one of the young men of the family, on the final page sings “an old song about love” in Ladino. Arditti, like Larkin, knows that what will remain of us is love.
The Jewish community of Salonica, so large, so prosperous, so settled, so culturally vibrant (and it is always good to read about such places of which we have heard, but do not know enough), is no more, confined to a museum. But it is better to have loved and lost, as another poet said, than never to have loved at all. This wonderful book conveys transcendent truths.
Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Roman Catholic priest and moral theologian.
The Tribe
Michael Arditti
Salt Publishing £12.99
(978-1-78463-364-6)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69