Search results for ""Author Neil Barnett""

The charismatic, near-mythological figure of Josip Broz Tito was many things: an inspirational partisan leader and scourge of the Germans during their occupation of Yugoslavia in the Second World War; a doctrinaire communist but an ever-present thorn in Moscow's side; an oppressor, a dictator, a reformer, and a playboy. He managed Yugoslavia's internal tensions through personality, force of will, and political oppression. It was only after his death in 1980 that the true scale of this feat was understood; the country's institutions and politicians were then revealed as rudderless, and the country created by Tito - a Croat turned Yugoslav - collapsed into a bloody and at times genocidal civil war. These ethnic conflicts were Tito's nightmare, yet, as Neil Barnett shows in this short but engaging biography, they were in many ways the result of his own myopic egomania.

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Leon Sciaky whose family were prosperous Jewish grain merchants, descendents of the Sephardic Jewish exodus from Spain in 1492, grew up in the vibrant city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki) in Macedonia in a remarkably polyglot world where Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Bulgarian, French, Spanish and Hebrew were all spoken regularly in the city's busy streets and quays. In the early part of the book, Sciaky's recollections are achingly nostalgic and lyrical and describe an intimate and affectionate family existence where every day the young Sciaky would eat with his parents and his adored grandfather Nono on the oriental divan, exchanging stories and jokes. But in retrospect, the city was doomed to destruction and as early as 1902 when Leon Sciaky experienced an earthquake, he remarked: one's very conception of solidity, and one's feeling of security was suddenly destroyed'. Soon after, the young Sciaky witnessed the earliest examples of modern terrorism and a downward spiral of violent attacks. His account of the end of a world is powerful and intense; when, as a young boy, he saw the look of terror in the face of a refugee peasant, he likened it to the animal dread of cattle in the slaughterhouse'. "Farewell to Salonica" was first published in America in 1946. It is a beautiful and touching memoir, which also offers a unique political and historical insight into the complex history of the breakdown of the Turkish Empire. The Sciakys left for America in 1915 and like them many non-Greeks left Salonica following the Balkan Wars and World War I. All but 1,600 of the city's 50,000 Jewish inhabitants perished in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

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