WHEN THE sultan came to Salonika, Da-vid Levy was waiting. As befitted an Ottoman official and president of a local Jewish organisation, he greeted Mehmed V at the port when he landed in the summer of 1911. The next day, as the sultan was preparing to leave, he gave David a pair of diamond cufflinks. Yet all this pageantry was the wheeze of a dying world. Soon the Ottomans lost Salonika (now Thessaloniki) to the Greeks; their empire crumbled. And David, once dignified with the Turkish honorific effendi, would die in Auschwitz with much of his family in 1943.
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