secondhand Ilias Petropoulos For the Jews of Thessaloniki book

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For the Jews of Thessaloniki Elias Petropoulos

It was to be expected that the experiential legacy of Ilias Petropoulos from Thessaloniki and his passion to engage with what national historiography had rejected for decades would lead him to focus on the Jews of Salonika. However, what 'pushed' him to grapple with the painful aspects of memory was the revival of anti-Semitism in post-dictatorship Greece. This is the historical context of Petropoulos's writings presented in this book. His articles were the cries of a sincere anxiety of an active —perhaps the only one at that time— writer who protested against the voluntary oblivion and the state uses and abuses of History, revealing through his writings aspects of the silenced Jewish past and the everyday life of the multinational city of Salonika.

It is by no means secondary that Petropoulos wrote as a witness of the events, as a non-Jew, speaking from the position of one who belongs to the majority community. In this sense, Petropoulos offers his readers a way to read History and to position themselves, individually and collectively, in the historical flow.

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