A Postcard from Constantinople

Transylvania to Smyrna, 1860-1922.

Through a series of unexpected events, Grandpa Leon’s postcard arrived at home in the US in 2005, more than a century after he had mailed it from Constantinople to Germany in 1898. He was asking for a quote on a stamp collection he wished to buy. It was almost a miracle. I had this eerie feeling that he had sent it to me, like a message in a bottle thrown into the sea to be found by a yet unborn grandson. I even felt like answering him to tell him that his son Moritz had taught me to collect and love stamps. I think Grandpa would have been pleased to hear that.

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During my visits to Trieste in 1971 and 1976, Aunt Carola told me as much of the history of our ancestors as she knew and could remember. She started with the two Goldstein brothers, one her father Leon, the other her uncle Karl. The brothers came from a Transylvanian town called Kronstadt; “close to the Hungarian border,” she added. After some digging, I discovered that Kronstadt is the previous name for a Romanian city today called Braşov. In the 19th century, Kronstadt was an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kronstadt/Braşov sits about 300 miles east of the Hungarian border. Close enough.

I had always thought of Dad being descended from German Jews, so my family’s origins in Transylvania surprised me. More digging revealed that German Saxons had lived in Kronstadt since the 12th century and that German Jews appeared there in 1828. While any earlier origins of the Goldsteins are lost to time and to my family's penchant for silence, their presence in Transylvania is a good example of our fate of being strangers in strange lands. One thing that we Goldsteins know about is meandering the world.  It is our curse and it has periodically put us in the crossfires of history.

In the latter part of the 19th century, Grandpa Leon together with his brother Karl, picked up from Kronstadt and left to seek their fortune in Constantinople. Perhaps because of forever prevalent Romanian anti-Semitism, moving to the more hospitable Ottoman Empire made sense. Aunt Carola told me that the Goldsteins were not particularly religious, but as we Jews have learned from history, the brothers’ religiosity was neither here nor there. Antisemites will find an excuse to hate us no matter what. The Catholic Monarchs of 15th Century Spain and their Inquisition hated our religion when they kicked us out. The Nazis in their 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws made the hate about blood lineage, not religion. It did not matter if you were a German Jew who had converted to Catholicism or were an atheist like me. Since I have three Jewish grandparents I would have ended up in a gas chamber.  

But I digress.

At the end of the 19th century Constantinople was, as it had always been and still is, a busy place. It was the commercial center of the Ottoman Empire, an Empire that had historically been quite welcoming to Jews. The Goldsteins, hoping for better shores, sought refuge there, just as in 1492 Jews expelled from Spain had sought refuge in Turkish ships at harbor outside of Seville. At the invitation of Sultan Beyazid II, these medieval Jews sailed across the Mediterranean and landed in Turkey. Another reason to go to Constantinople would have been commerce. Kronstadt had for a long time been a trade stop between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire, so a move to the Bosporus made sense. Constantinople is just one country away from Kronstadt as the crow flies over Bulgaria.

In Constantinople, Leon met my grandmother Regina; they were married in 1885. Yet the Goldstein brothers and their wives didn’t stay long. The city was their stepping-stone on the way to Smyrna, further South on the Anatolian coast. It is there that they settled for the next thirty years. Smyrna was an ancient Greek city founded by Alexander the Great in the 3rd century BCE. By the time the Goldsteins arrived, it had seen its share of war, destruction, rebuilding, fires, earthquakes, plagues, and assorted sieges, massacres, and other horrors. Yet for millennia, Smyrna was also the destination for Chinese goods wandering across the Silk Road on their way to Europe. It was a very good choice for the brothers: a city of merchants.

To better understand what the Goldstein clan lived through in the early 20th century,  I read widely about Middle Eastern history and did a lot of research, especially of the Jewish communities of Greece and Turkey. I located and corresponded extensively with Dov Cohen, a professor in the Center for Ladino Studies in the Faculty of Jewish Studies of Bar-Ilan University, in Israel. Cohen is fluent in Ladino, the Castilian dialect still spoken by Sephardic Jews five hundred years after the Spanish Edict of Expulsion. Cohen is an expert on the history of Turkish Jews and knows his way around the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. Our exchanges were in Spanish; mine in Argentinian, and his, in medieval Castilian. It was surreal but it went smoothly.

To this day, the Turkish Jewish community has deep roots in Judeo-Spanish culture, the medieval Sephardic traditions of its ancestors. The Goldsteins were not Sephardim, with ancestry in Spain, but Ashkenazim, with ancestry in the Rhineland. There are almost no records of Ashkenazi Jews in Izmir (the post-1922 name of Smyrna) and the few that can be found are deeply embedded in the commercial and census files of the city. The records have frequent misspellings of Ashkenazi names such as my family’s.  Cohen searched the census, business records, and real estate registrations of Smyrna, from the mid-19th century to 1922, when, as half of Smyrna was destroyed, the records stopped. 

In the French “Index of Commercial and Industrial Professions of Smyrna, 1896,” Cohen found two Goldstein entries:

The first entry shows that Grandpa Leon was part of a shop by the name Goldemberg Frères, which I suspect is a misnomer. The shop was on the Rue Franque, the main European commercial street of Smyrna. It sold vetements prets, ready-to-wear clothing. The second entry shows that both L[eon] et K[arl] ran a brasserie Autrichienne, an Austrian brasserie, on the waterfront quay. I gather that these businesses flourished and the brothers became prosperous. When Aunt Carola talked about her homes in Smyrna and later in Samos, she always made a point to mention that they were “large.” Dad, who at the time of the Index entries was three years old, was born into a family of wealthy merchants.

By the time the Goldstein brothers arrived, there were three distinct subpopulations of Jews in Smyrna. The majority were Sephardim, who had been there since the 15th century. According to Juifs de Smyrne, a book by Henri Nahum, a physician and writer who came from an old Smyrnioti Jewish family, there were nine Sephardim to every Ashkenazi, and each group had several synagogues. (This is not too surprising. You may have heard of the saying, ”Two Jews, three synagogues,” which conjures scholars of the Talmud who can always see both sides of every argument.) In addition to the Sephardim, there were two populations of Ashkenazim that had arrived in Smyrna from Europe. The first was that of the Ostjuden, the Jews from Eastern Europe who escaped the early 20th century pogroms in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. The other was of the Jews from Western Europe, like my clan.   

Smyrna was strictly divided into Muslim, Armenian, Greek, and European neighborhoods. There were also a few predominant Jewish quarters, juderías as they are known in Ladino. The ancient Sephardic and the more recent Ashkenazi Jews lived predominantly in Karataş, one of the juderías of old Smyrna. I don't think the Goldsteins were observant Jews – with the sole exception, as reported by Aunt Carola, of Grandma Regina. My family’s Jewishness was more cultural than religious. I never saw Dad step into a BA synagogue until 1962, the year of my bar mitzvah. For a while I thought that the clan lived in the Karataş judería of Smyrna. But after visiting Izmir, I do not think so anymore. I’ll tell you some stories of my visit in a future blog.

There was another enclave of Europeans in Smyrna, mostly Gentiles, that self-defined as Levantines: folk who from their countries of origin saw the sun levare, rise, in the Middle East. Originally English and French but also Germans and Austro-Hungarians, they came to do business. When I was a boy in BA, Dad used to describe himself as a Levantine: a European whose family came to live in the Middle East. I think Dad’s self-identity says a lot. I am quite certain that my Smyrnioti family saw themselves as Levantine first and Jewish second. In all likelihood they probably lived in the suburban upper-class Levantine neighborhood, which is full of large houses. Another clue is that none of the Goldstein children went to any of the Jewish schools of Smyrna, such as those of the Alliance Israelite. The Alliance had been established by wealthy French Jews to help civilize their poor and unenlightened brethren in the  Middle East. In contrast with children of the Sephardic and Ostjuden communities, the Goldstein offspring learned their French at the secular Lycee Francaise or at the Gymnasium, the German university prep school.

I bet that the Goldsteins tried to socialize with other Levantines and did not mingle much with the Sephardic Jews or the Ostjuden, both of which were snobbishly perceived as déclassé. Whether the clan was accepted by and mingled much with their English and French neighbors I do not know, but my guess is, not much. The Whittalls, La Fontaines, and Pattersons, all prominent Gentile Levantines of Smyrna, had likely brought along their own prejudices about us Goldsteins.

In the event, our clan settled in an oasis of upper middle-class Levantines, secure for a while but – as always - in the midst of strangers. It was in Smyrna that Grandpa Leon and Grandma Regina had their seven children and it was there, in a small European community surrounded by Turks, Armenians, Greeks, and Sephardic Jews, that they raised them. It was from Smyrna in his twenties that Dad watched the slow but inexorable dismemberment of the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire. The city gave the clan three decades’ worth of respite before they had to pick up in 1922 and go to Samos, ahead of a serious revolutionary by the name of Kemal Pasha Atatürk, the Father of Turkey.

I am sure that Dad picked up in the Smyrna melting pot a fair amount of Sephardic odds and ends, including a smidgen of Ladino, a language that would be of help in Argentina. Maybe he went to BA because its streets were paved in mythical gold. But I also speculate - with no evidence whatsoever - that one reason Dad chose Buenos Aires is because Spanish is spoken there. When I knew him decades later, he spoke Spanish like a native, without a trace of Mom’s European accent.

Perhaps the most beautiful thing I was offered by Dov Cohen, was a postcard he had found with the name Leon Goldstein in a collection of 19th century Judaica which he had bought on eBay. The front of the postcard is stamped “Deutsche Post, Constantinopel, 1898.” The card is addressed to a certain Albert Popping, in Ludwigshafen, Germany. The sender, stamped at the bottom left-hand corner, was Leon Goldstein, whose address was given as No. 9 Sultan Hamam. I looked up No. 9 Sultan Hamam, Istanbul. It is today a small side street near the Galata Bridge in the Golden Horn. My first examination of the postcard, however, revealed a small inconsistency: What was Grandpa Leon doing in Constantinople five years after Dad was born in Smyrna in 1893? Well, I know from Aunt Carola that Grandpa traveled extensively on business up and down the Aegean. It is therefore quite feasible that, having lived there earlier, he would travel back and forth to Constantinople. He may have had a business presence on Sultan Hamam Street, in the hustle and bustle near the wharves of the Bosporus. I bought the card from Cohen without a second thought. Its contents confirmed that I had been right.

With the help of several expat native German speakers, we deciphered the elegant, almost illegible, calligraphy in the back, which Grandpa Leon had signed. Grandpa was interested in buying international stamps, and was discussing price quotations with Mr. Popping, Leon asks for a small sample of stamps and says that, if they are acceptable and the price is right, a contract will be discussed in due course. It’s the stamps that did it for me. Like Dad’s Turkish cezve or his red cufflinks, Grandpa Leon’s philately brought back something else of Dad that I had forgotten. Dad was a stamp connoisseur and he tried to instill collecting in me. He taught me how to release used stamps by soaking the envelopes in water, drying the stamps between blotting papers, and then organizing them into albums. I had a neat little collection of Argentine stamps when Dad died, many with the faces of our mythical leaders, Eva and Juan Perón. My collection, which today would command a pretty penny, ended up, together with so much else from my childhood, in the trash.