What Kind of Past
Youcha, Joe
Remarkable records and coincidences help tell and correct the story of a Balkan Sephardic family split between Ottoman Monastir (now Bitola, North Macedonia) and New York City. A son witnesses murder, seeks refuge at a French-Jewish school in Tunisia, emigrates to Canada, vanishes, and appears in New York. The father, a secular leader of a Jewish neighborhood under the Ottomans, remains in Macedonia, remarries, and raises a second family, whil...