Book – Books – Books on Cyprus
Or: The best protected woman in Cyprus
By Heidi Trautmann
A small red car stops at the restaurant HAMUR close to
the Ledra Palace Crossing and Ahmet Cavusoglu, the owner, hurries out to open
the car door for a lady stepping out of it carefully and he leads her towards
me: Elsie Slonim 95 years of age. We sit down at a table in the shade of a big
tree protected from the noise and heat.
I had missed the official book launch at the Goethe
Institute in Nicosia on June 12 in cooperation with the Austrian Embassy and
her editor and friend Jürgen Strasser, so I found out her address and asked her
to meet me for a personal talk. It was a memorable morning to meet the woman
who came to Cyprus in 1939 with her husband whom she had met on a steamer going
to New York and whom she married a little while later in Chicago; he was the
manager of a plantation in Cyprus and had decided that she was the right woman
for him.
Elsie’s life starting from her birth in Chicago in
1917, her youth in Austria, being submitted to the aftermaths of WWI, and the
horror of WWII, is an adventurous rainbow spanning from America, via Europe to
the Eastern Mediterranean countries Israel and Cyprus. In her book “Lemons from
Paradise” (the German version is “Rosen aus der Sperrzone – Verwurzelung
verboten”) she recounts the story of her family as far back as her
grandpartents who lived in Hungaria and later Rumania, she recounts the many
stations of her own life as a young woman under the strict ruling of her
father, the traditions of the early 20th century when a woman had to
do what her father or husband told her.
Coming to Cyprus, still under British reign with the
social rules of colonial British society, Elsie Slonim had to find her position
in a strange country, fight her way out of personal isolation to find
recognition in the cosmopolitan Limassol society; that was not easy and my
heart went with her when I read her book.
Witness of the past in times when there was no fridge
to have, no cars easily available, when she had to take a horse to visit her
friends, witness of the birth of Israel, the many Jewish refugees that were
sent from one coast to the next, being a
refugee with her family from Cyprus in WWII, actually being torn apart all the
time. Finally she was witness to the war in Cyprus in 1974 when she and her
husband refused to leave their house in Nicosia and survived in their bomb
shelter in their garden, the house Elsie is still living in today, the house in
No man’s Land right in the military zone of the Turkish army.
Elsie and I agreed that we will meet again at her
house that is surrounded by roses and is still the way it was in 1974, nothing
has changed. Then
she will tell me more.
„Rosen
aus der Sperrzone – Verwurzelung verboten”
ISBN No. 978-3-9503295-1-3
Plattform Johannes Martinek Verlag,
Perchtoldsdorf/Austria
„Lemons from Paradise“
ISBN No . 978-3-9503295-2-0
Plattform Johannes Martinek Verlag, Perchtoldsdorf/Austria
The books are also mentioned at Amazon
The books can be obtained at
the Khora Bookstore
Muzaffer Pasha Cad
near the crossing to Ledra Palace
Tel 00 90 (0)392 228 9557