Wednesday, July 9, 2025

28 - The Old Neighborhood: The Jews and Other Neighborhood Wonders

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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28 - The Old Neighborhood: The Jews and Other Neighborhood Wonders

Next to Christakis’ house on Deligiorgi Street stood the modest old house of Isaac and his older brother Aaron, two Sephardic Jews of Thessa...