The Sassoon name
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Where the name comes from: the Hebrew for joy, a Baghdadi line two and a half thousand years old, and the road from the Tigris to London.
The Raperport line
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My maternal line — the documented Rapa-Porto rabbinic branch that spells the name Raperport — traced from Renaissance Italy through Poznań and Lithuania to London's East End. It has a site of its own at raperport.com.
The name Mühsam
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A battlefield rescue at Leuthen, a town that said no, a winter walk to Berlin — and a surname bestowed by Frederick the Great, 1785.
The Buchenwald bluff
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Kristallnacht, a Gestapo headquarters in Breslau, and the great-grandmother who talked her husband out of a concentration camp, 1938–39.
The Cable Street cinema
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A shtetl-born immigrant's picture palace in the East End, the widow who ran it for eighteen years, and the night the Blitz took it, 1912–1941.
The Farhud
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Two days in June 1941 that broke two and a half thousand years of Jewish Baghdad.
Kings & queens
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The nine crowned ancestors in the direct line, by tradition and legend — King David among them.