Dad’s Story

On the plane back to the US, 1976.

I had plenty of time to reflect on Dad while on the plane back from Europe to the US. My visits to Samos and Trieste had been rich in clues. No one had said anything definite about a family secret or some fight that led to Dad’s estrangement from his family in the Aegean. But I connected some of the dots; not all, but enough of them to get a sense of what happened.

I gathered from Aunt Carola’s stories that while still in Smyrna before 1922 and perhaps in Samos after the Turks conquered the city that year, Grandpa Leon traveled on business with my father. Dad was his oldest son and I can imagine that Grandpa was grooming him to take over the Goldstein & Galanis wine company. It is not a stretch to imagine that Grandpa would not bestow the leadership to any of his four daughters, so he had to choose among his three sons. Dad was his eldest, Albert came next, and finally Dan. Family lore has it that romantic Dan had no head for business, so it had to be either Dad or my Uncle Albert.

Aunt Carola described Dad as highly educated; he had an Abitur degree from the German High School in Smyrna. The Abitur is the matriculation certificate for entry into university. He was a polyglot: when I knew him, he spoke Spanish, German, English, French, and even touches of Greek. I remember that when the occasion called for it, he would quote Schiller or Goethe off the top of his head. Carola also described him as an adventuresome and inquisitive young man. She spoke of his curiosity about Swedish Gymnastics, later renamed Pilates, and she specifically remembered his interest in the recent invention of the Gillette razor blades. He had said to her that he wanted to be Gillette’s representative in the Levant.

As I found out when I traveled to Izmir in later years, the Goldsteins had several businesses in Smyrna before becoming vintners. There was something of great interest to Dad in his hometown. I do not know what. That is one of the dots left disconnected – maybe it was those Gillette razor blades, who knows. Then, around the early 1920s, the Goldsteins left behind their home and businesses in Smyrna, went to Samos, and into the wine trade. Dad went along to the island, but he never set roots there. He obviously still had some pull toward Izmir because Aunt Carola said that he went back and forth for the two short years he remained in the Levant. Yet the Turkish takeover of Smyrna put an end to whatever independent plans he was concocting in his hometown.

That left the wine company in Samos. I do not think that Dad was interested in the wine business, especially if he had to run it from the backwaters of a small island in the Far East Aegean. He became torn between his father’s wish to see him take over the G&G Company, and his own wishes to explore something else. Whatever it was, however, would have to be in some place other than the Levant.  

Things must have come to a head, because in 1924 Dad left Samos for good. He went to Buenos Aires, and except for one visit back in the wake of Uncle Albert’s suicide, he never returned. He did not even come back for his father’s funeral in 1926. Another dramatic clue of the break is that, in 1949 when I was born in BA, instead of giving me my grandfather’s name Leon, as Jewish tradition would suggest, my middle name is that of his brother Albert.

Every time I asked Aunt Carola whether something had happened between father and son, she stopped the conversation or changed the subject. She would not talk about it. During my first visit to Trieste, in 1971, Aunt Clara had sounded like she wanted to go into some more detail but Aunt Carola cut her off.

It all leads up to my concluding that there was a hurtful split between Dad and Grandpa.

I do not think that Uncle Albert’s suicide in 1935 had much to do with Dad’s leaving his family. By then, he was long gone. The explanations of Albert’s suicide are all over the place and none of them relate to Dad. Aunt Carola told me that her brother Albert was a “sensitive man” who became upset when he found out that the Goldstein & Galanis Company was in serious financial trouble and blamed himself. Her husband, Uncle Bruno, said to me as an aside that before his emigration from Samos to Trieste, Great Uncle Karl had used some of the company money for personal reasons and that, rather than tattle on his dear uncle, Albert killed himself. My Aunt Clara thought, rather scandalously, that poor Albert suffered from a venereal disease due to frequent visits to the whorehouses of Samos, that he had slowly become poisoned with arsenic medicines, and that he could take it no longer. My cousin Loni, Aunt Clara’s daughter in Rome, believes that the whole Goldstein clan was “strange,” that depression ruled the household, and that Albert was a victim of the family malaise. Gabriel Tsepis, the Company’s accountant and bookkeeper, whom I met during my week in Samos, told me that Albert’s could not have been a suicide but that someone had done him in. Wanting to avoid a blood libel, he would not say whom he suspected. Uncle Albert’s suicide, like much of history, remains shrouded in mystery. Every storyteller has his or her own version.

Dad’s short visit back to Europe in 1935 came in the wake of his brother’s suicide. By then the fate of the wine company, which had been sold to a cooperative, was beyond Dad’s control. Maybe Dad felt guilty for not having remained in the Levant and led Goldstein & Galanis when there was still time to save both the company and his brother. Yet the tragedies of the company’s and Albert’s endings did not keep Dad in the Old World and he returned to his life in BA.

Then there was the business with the unused visas to Argentina. Much to Aunt Carola’s annoyance during my visit in 1976, Uncle Bruno reminded her that in the early 1940s, as the war in Europe was already in full blast, Dad had been able to obtain Argentine visas for everyone. Carola and Bruno had a painful argument about emigrating. She had obviously been against it and they did not leave when they still had time. Several Goldsteins might have been saved had they taken up Dad’s offer: Uncle Dan, my little cousin Muki, perhaps even Bruno’s parents. None of them would have been picked up in that café in Piazza San Marco and murdered.

Sure, Aunt Carola was hurt by Dad’s silence after the war, but her hurt was compounded by guilt and grief. It is likely that Dad was also traumatized by learning of the tragic losses at Auschwitz. And perhaps he regretted that he did not try harder to get his family to emigrate. But I don’t think that’s the whole explanation. I think that, in an uncanny parallel with his sister Carola on the other side of the world, Dad also suffered grief and guilt, in his case, survivor guilt. Perhaps these feelings were deep, as they evoked the earlier break with his own father and the suicide of his brother.

In the end, having been repeatedly hurt and for too long, he gave up on his family. He followed the events of the Second War in the Argentine newspapers. He clipped stories and pasted them in that album I threw away. But he must have despaired when he received the news of the murder of his brother Dan and of his nephew Muki. He remained in BA far away and alone. The Levant of his birth gave him nothing but ruptures, ashes, and graves. The only connection to his early life was an album with photos of his father’s and brother’s tombstones in a Greek cemetery.

When in his fifties he met Mom, his decision to marry her must have been momentous. It must have been life changing to break out of the shell of his isolated bachelorhood. And then, to have a son when he was fifty-six was nothing short of a miracle. He tried to make himself a new family; yet tragedy hit again. Mom died and he was left a widower of sixty-eight with a son of eleven. A son, who as the years moved on, became more distant. My adolescent rebellion, which may have reminded him once more of his rebellion against his own father forty years earlier, must have hurt badly.

I lived with him through his depression and his two strokes, and I saw him die in 1968, when he was seventy-five. He never talked to me about his losses and griefs. He came from a generation of stoic men. No psychotherapy for them. They were men who did their duties as breadwinners and fathers, and who were buried with their secrets.

I can only imagine Dad’s helplessness in the last years of his life. My poor father, I thought on the plane back home, feeling deep sorrow for him . . . for both of us. If we could only have talked about this.

So I made a decision then and there that I was not yet done with Dad. I wanted to dig ever deeper and earlier. My next trip would be to Izmir, to the old Smyrna of his birth. Like an archeologist, I uncovered there more layers of his past.

***

One of the most remarkable photographs I have unearthed in my never-ending search for Dad was taken in 1935, upon his visit to Samos after Uncle Albert’s suicide. I did not find it in my box of pictures, but it appeared in Rome, courtesy of my cousin Loni, who must have inherited it from her mother, my Aunt Clara.

 A very somber group, Dad, Grandma Regina, and Uncle Dan are sitting left to right at a wooden table in front of a building with a tiled overhang roof. From the visit to the G&G wine factory, which Cousin Leon and I made during my trip in 1976, I recognize that the threesome is sitting inside the old warehouse’s walled patio. They are all dressed for a formal occasion. My best guess is that the photo was taken after Uncle Albert’s funeral. Dad is dressed in French cuffs, tailored suit and tie, smoking one of his pipes, with his fedora occupying a rickety chair in front of him. His sharp elegance contrasts with the more rumpled looks of his mother and brother, both of whom seem dazed. Dad does not look of the place. It is as though he is saying that he no longer belongs; that he has not belonged for a long time.