Next to Christakis’
house on Deligiorgi Street stood the modest old house of Isaac and his older
brother Aaron, two Sephardic Jews of Thessaloniki who survived the
concentration camps and the holocaust and returned to the city where they grew
up. They managed to reclaim ownership of their house they were forced to abandon,
amongst thousands of their race during the wholescale deportations of 1943. There
was a vague aura of mysticism in the Ladino songs the radio was playing behind
their half-closed shutters I listened to, sitting on the kerb under their
window in the summer afternoons whilst waiting for Kostakis or Christakis to commence
our games. Neither Isaac, nor Aaron interacted much with our common neighbors.
Neither did I ever come across them outside their house. On rare occasions, I observed
a couple of sad stooping
figures from above our back
balcony sipping coffee silently under the acacia tree in their sunless backyard
overshadowed by our tall building, separated from its light-void by a concrete
fence. There must have been once some light that backyard. They were the odd,
lonely pair of siblings simply waiting for the rest of their little miserable
lives broken down in their youth to expire. How they or their family -surely, they
must have had one, survived the holocaust remained a mystery no rumors could
dispel. Later, having read Primo Levi's "If This Is the Man,"
I could only surmise that they might have been Kapos in a concentration camp or,
merely, by just being young able-bodied men amongst the few fortunate whenever
the dice over human lives was thrown in those hells we read and heard so much
about.
Behind our building, overlooked
by the main balcony of my uncle's family, the first also anonymous alley off Deligiorgi
Street, later named Eurydice Street, there was a house belonging to another
Jewish family, apparently wealthier than that of Isaac and Aaron. The house had
a large courtyard behind iron gates and a well-kept garden with a lawn and
trees, even a palm tree. It was the home of a widow called Victoria, a renowned
resident of the area pre- and post-war, who, according to Father, survived the
camps thanks to her fluency in German, having graduated from the Deutsche
Schule of Thessaloniki. The Jews of the city were not an amorphous
mass. Amongst those I knew of or got to know them there were was Isaac, Aaron,
Victoria, least but not last Miss Varsano, our English teacher, who dazzled us
young boys with her beauty. We even had a Jewish classmate in her English
tutoring classes: the red-haired Levi who escorted us furtively Maccabi gymnasium,
one block from Miss Varsano’s school along Fleming Street, to see some Jewish
kids training in the indoors basketball court. Therefore, I had caught up with few
remnants of the last generation of the Jews of Thessaloniki, a race that for
centuries, since their expulsion from Spain and Portugal, formed a major and
vibrant part of the city –so much so, that it was nicknamed “Mother of Israel”.
Today only the ghosts of the city’s past hover over its streets -as Mazower would
have put it, joined by waves of tourists from Israel visiting for a glimpse in
the past of their ancestors.
In the same 1st alley,
in the basement of an apartment building, one of the first in the block, at the
corner with Deligiorgi Street, there was a carpenter’s workshop, another place
of intrigue for curious children. We were attracted by the pleasant smell of
wood and varnish, by the sawdust we could collect in bags for no apparent reason.
We peeped down the stairs leading to the basement to observe the carpenter's
craftsmanship -as much as was possible to discern through the open door and the
low, dirty ground floor windows with the grilles, against the bright sunlight
outside during the day or through a pale artificial lighting in the evenings. And
there was no piece of furniture the carpenter of Deligiorgi Street could not build-to-order!
Sofas, tables, desks, bookcases, all this with the help of two young
apprentices, with his tools hanging in rows around the walls (hammers, planes,
saws, screwdrivers) -the awe and longing of myself and any aspiring artisan. An
electric saw was the unique mechanical equipment in the workshop, a hunched figure
amidst workbenches, like what I saw displayed in the city’s annual International
Exhibition. The sweet and whirring sound of the planer was pleasing to the
ears; the thwacks of nails hammered an annoying racket, the thuds at the end a
relief. At the piercing sounds of the electric saw we blocked our ears; the
ultra-high pitch tones when the saw blade cut through hardwood knots unbearable.
On few occasions, we were called in inside by the master carpenter to be handed,
a kind of treats, unwanted pieces of wood, short planks and slats for our
wooden swords and weaponry, and rods as possible candidates for our birching at
school. The teachers asked for a supply of them from schoolchildren at the
beginning of each school year. (The brown-noising of a teacher by a few
classmates and their parents, to pre-emptively win favors and good grades,
manifested itself as an untoward eagerness to procure the perfect rod for our
corporal punishments: a necessary component of the educational and disciplinary
process that still in force in my time at primary school, in short, a tool for discipline
through the exercise of pain. The rods amongst the carpenter's scraps were not as
well refined and had no chance in the selection process: the teachers invariably
picked ones from the handful of carpenter dads: smooth and round, straight and unyielding,
tailor-made to some agreed specifications.
The carpenter of Deligiorgi
Street was not the only artisanal producer in our neighborhood. In the spacious
basement of the apartment building at the corner of our alley with Gambetta Street,
a small shoe factory (yes, a factory!) flourished during my childhood. His
middle-aged owner always sported a benevolent smile displaying a couple of
golden teeth whenever he greeted our neighbors and always bowed to stroke the
hair of children, all potential customers for his shoes. One afternoon, I was watching
him from our balcony stacking boxes of shoes of his production in the boot of
his estate car, for sale or distribution, personally, to shops in Thessaloniki
and towns in Central Macedonia. A salesman, a distributor, a craftsman
shoemaker, a cobbler, and the boss of a dozen workers. I had not yet formed any
conceptions about small and large-scale capitalist production and the private
ownership of its means, or the role of a businessman-proprietor and
entrepreneur in it and its place in class society. He gave the impression more of
a kind and soft person than a ruthless boss, in the one and only time we went
down to his basement with Mother to try a pair of black floaters from the shoes
made in that factory. It goes without saying that the range on offer would be considered
unfashionable, even crude, by modern standards. He proffered Mother a generous
wholesale or ‘factory’ discount, whilst the worker who measured my feet and brought
us the suitable size of shoes to try sounded proud with the end-product of his
craft and flouted his skills; or he might have been simply taking guidance from
his boss's salesman book.
But the artificial
light of the basement full of moulds and tools and leather cutting machines,
contrasted with the sunny morning outside, the smells of leather and polish were
heavy, the eight-hour shifts of the proletarian shoemakers tedious and
repetitive, detached from a bright and playful and happy life outside. If I
did not do well in school, I was told by adults in the family, I would be
condemned to do manual labor in a similar and even worse environment. A life
of work in a dull and acridly smelling basement did not appeal to me, indeed;
the human spirit was wasted on repetition and monotony. Worse than working in
the carpentry around the corner!
The pair of shoes we bought were stiff and uncomfortable. We had to return and exchange them. The worker happily had them remolded, but did not go down that basement of the factory to buy its cheap shoes. Besides, Father had a friend in the same line of business: a merchant owner of a shoe-shop call “The Nest” in Vasilissis Olga’s Avenue, who offered a wide range of more fashionable shoes. Thereafter, he became the exclusive purveyor of shoes for me and Father. It would not have been long before the deindustrialization of the city and its gradual shift to a service-based economy. The workshops and small-factories in our area, the carpentry and the small shoe-factory were not spared and were swept away. Their decline of their business until their folding had been a slow and arduous process –for the owners, the wage-laborers and their families in those basements. They remained shut and deserted in their darkness ever after. The fate of the workers, the master carpenter and the petty businessman-owner is unknown. Few if any people in the neighborhood cared about such trivial events.
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