Over Pesah I enjoyed the opportunity to read “Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey through the Twentieth Century” by Sarah Abrevaya Stein (2019, 336 pp.)Seven years before publishing this book, Stein and Aron Rodrigue worked together to edit the Judeo-Spanish memoirs of Saadi Besalel Alevi Ashkenazi (1820-1903), along with translator Isaac Jerusalmi. Alevi was an important printer and free-thinking intellectual in Ottoman Salonica, provoking an excommunication from the local rabbinate as a capstone to a colorful career. His diary, originally cast as an attempt to exonerate himself, contains rich insider observations of 19th-century Salonican Jewish life. Fortunately preserved by generations of his descendants, the text finally saw the light of day over a century after it was first penned.That process, in which family papers by Alevi were kept by his descendants and examined by historians, is what drives the narrative in the eponymous “Family Papers.” Reaching from Alevi through five generations of his offspring, Stein weaves together a novel portrait of an extended family so large that they have now lost a sense of being a single unit and in some cases were not aware of the many branches still existing today. They have dispersed across much of the globe, with Stein following up leads on five continents to gather all the source material.Each chapter is named for one of the descendants - some figures generate only a few pages in only one chapter, while others command attention through many chapters and are felt richly across most of the text. It is a book unlike any other I have read in this genre: at once very readable and extremely diverse in terms of subject material and cultural and geographical points of reference. Stein is a master of endnotes, which reveal that she checked sources from textile importer samples from 1920s Brazil to chilling Holocaust trial records of the agony of Salonica’s dismemberment and destruction.(Rest in comments)