What Kind of Past

Remarkable records and coincidences help tell and correct the story of a Balkan Sephardic family split between Ottoman Monastir (now Bitola, North Macedonia) and New York City. A son witnesses murder, seeks refuge at a French-Jewish school in Tunisia, emigrates to Canada, vanishes, and appears in New York. The father, a secular leader of a Jewish neighborhood under the Ottomans, remains in Macedonia, remarries, and raises a second family, while witnessing the Illinden Uprising, the Balkan Wars, World War One, and finally the destruction of his community during World War Two and the Holocaust.