The Thread

In 1917, a great fire destroyed much of the city of Salonika — the Thessaloniki of northern Greece — burning the old Jewish quarter that had existed since the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 and found refuge in Ottoman territory. The fire is the beginning of The Thread, and the families it traces — Dimitri’s Greek Orthodox family and Katerina, an orphan girl who survives the fire — carry the weight of what the city was before and what it becomes after.

Thessaloniki in the early twentieth century was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Mediterranean: Greeks, Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, Armenians living in a density of cultures that would be progressively destroyed by the century’s catastrophes. The population exchange of 1923 removed the Turkish community; the German occupation of WWII destroyed the ancient Sephardic Jewish community — 50,000 people sent to Auschwitz, almost none returning.

Hislop’s most historically ambitious novel follows the two families across eighty years, from the fire to the post-war era, tracing through their experience the transformation of a city that was genuinely plural into something much less so. The textile trade that runs through the novel — cloth, thread, weaving — is both the economic backbone of the story and its central metaphor: the threads that connect people across difference, and what happens when they are cut.

Reading Guides

• Victoria Hislop Books in Order
• Where to Start with Victoria Hislop
• Books About Greece

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Thread apart: Thessaloniki’s history — its fires, its Jewish community, its occupation — is rendered with real depth; The multigenerational structure is handled with confidence; and The Jewish community’s fate during WWII is treated with appropriate seriousness. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Thread give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Thessaloniki as one of the great lost cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean. The destruction of the Sephardic Jewish community in WWII. How cities lose their plurality over time through disaster and politics. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Victoria Hislop’s prose in The Thread is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The scope occasionally overwhelms the intimate family story. Some characters in the large cast are less fully developed. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers visiting Thessaloniki; fans of Jewish history and WWII; Hislop readers

Thessaloniki’s Sephardic Jewish Community

The Jewish community of Thessaloniki was one of the oldest and largest in the world. When the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, a significant number found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, and Thessaloniki — then Salonika — became their most important centre. By the late nineteenth century, Jews constituted more than half the city’s population. The Jewish Sabbath was so central to commercial life that the city’s port effectively closed on Saturdays.

The German occupation that began in 1941 destroyed this community with devastating efficiency. Between March and August 1943, approximately 50,000 Thessaloniki Jews — nearly the entire community — were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Fewer than 2,000 survived the war. The community that had shaped the city for four centuries was exterminated in less than six months.

Hislop treats this history with appropriate weight. The Jewish family at the novel’s centre — their participation in the textile trade, their specific relationship to the city’s Greek population, their vulnerability to the German deportations — is rendered with enough specificity to function as a form of commemoration for a community that has no other memorial in English-language popular fiction.

The 1917 Fire

The Great Fire of Salonika in August 1917, which destroyed much of the city including the old Jewish quarter, is The Thread’s opening catastrophe and its structuring trauma. The fire, which burned for thirty-two hours and left 75,000 people homeless, destroyed centuries of urban fabric and disproportionately affected the Jewish community, whose oldest neighbourhoods were in the path of the flames.

The fire is also the thread’s origin in the novel’s central metaphor: Katerina, the orphan girl who survives it, begins her story in the textile trade, and the thread that connects her to Dimitri and through which the novel traces its multigenerational connections is both literal and metaphorical — the textile that ties people across the decades of destruction that follow.

Hislop’s Most Ambitious Historical Canvas

The Thread covers more historical ground than any other Hislop novel — eight decades, from 1917 to the post-war era — and engages with a history that is substantially less familiar to her primary readership than the Greek-island material of The Island. The confidence with which she handles this material, and the specific detail with which she renders Thessaloniki’s Jewish community, the population exchanges of the 1920s, and the WWII deportations, represents the full development of the historical method she first deployed in The Island.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Hislop’s most ambitious novel — a multigenerational saga set in Thessaloniki that traces the destruction of one of the Mediterranean’s great cosmopolitan cities across eight decades of disaster.