Loose Ends

Samos, 2005 and Milan, 2018.

I want to tell you two more things before I wrap up the story of the quest to get to know my secretive Dad. The first is a day’s visit to Samos in 2005 and the second is my discovery of Carlo Goldstein, yet another unknown cousin. Carlo is a young opera conductor from Milan. Unless he has a son, he is likely to be the last of the Goldsteins.

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Samos had stayed in my imagination for many years after my first visit in 1976. I returned almost three decades later, this time with my wife Sandy. I wanted to again visit the Cemetiere Juif with my family’s graves. But what I really wanted was to reconstruct that album of Dad’s, the one I had trashed in 1968, containing the photos of tombstones with Greek epitaphs. I felt that recreating the album might atone for the remnants of my guilt.

In 2005, Sandy and I were on a two-week Aegean cruise, which spent one day in Kusadasi on the Turkish coast. Kusadasi is about an hour’s sea voyage from Samos. The cruise ship’s purser booked us a crossing to the island on a large public ferry that had been made private just for us. The empty ferry’s crew outnumbered us ten to one. On the trip over, the friendly captain, convinced that we were VIPs from Washington DC, pulled out the stops of obsequiousness. He showed us around, invited us to the bridge, and fed us pistachios, Turkish delight, and Jack Daniels.

After hearing from the skipper that he lived in Izmir, Sandy warned me not to tell him any details of why we were so keen in getting to Samos. “Keep in mind,” she whispered half-seriously, “that in 1922 his grandfather may have tried to kill your grandfather.” Wise advice in those parts of the world. After Sandy’s gentle warning of ancestral antagonism, our story to the skipper had nothing to do with Izmir, never mind Smyrna. We had heard that Samos was worth a visit and, since we were nearby, had decided to come. He didn’t believe it one bit, but smiled approvingly and served us bourbon on the rocks.

We got off the boat onto the sunny quay of Port Vathy and flagged down a taxi driver to take us to the Greek Orthodox Cemetery. I did not recognize the cemetery. It was now enclosed by a tall wall, and we went in through the front gate. The place was about the size and shape of a football field with narrow paved alleys forming a perfect grid. We walked up and down the alleys and looked at hundreds of tombstones. No Goldsteins. A middle-aged couple was tending to the grave of a young man, whose photo suggested was their son. They told us that, due to the shortage of space the Church turned over the graves every seven years or so. Our hearts sunk upon hearing this. We split up and walked carefully up and down, and left and right twice more through every alley, but with no luck. Not a trace of the Cemetiere Juif or of the chain-linked fence that I remembered from 1976.

As we were about to give up heartbroken I noticed that, from the inside, in one corner of the cemetery but not in the others, the tall wall seemed to cut in for a few yards before cutting back to resume its long enclosure of the graveyard. I suddenly had an inkling of what was going on and shouted at Sandy to leave the large cemetery. As we were both running along the outside wall to the corner, we saw it at the same time: no chain-linked fence now, but a tall iron gate a few steps up from the street, shut tight by a large padlock. To the left of the gate was a Star of David with “1926” in the center and, under it a sign in blue Greek lettering:

ΙΣΡΑΗΛΙΤΙΚΌ ΓΕΚΡΟΤΑΦΕΊΟ

With my scientist’s rudimentary knowledge of the Greek alphabet, I decrypted the sign as saying something like Israelitiko Nekrotapheio, Israelite Cemetery. The year inside the Star of David was that of the death of Grandpa Leon. Overcome with emotion, Sandy and I held each other and cried. Beyond the gate, inside the small enclosure, were two graves surrounded by overgrown weeds. We were unable to go in but through the weeds could make out Stars of David and more Greek lettering in each. In one grave, I could make out the inscription:

ΛΕΟΝ ΓΚΟΛΔΣΤΑΙΝ

1859 - 1926

That was the grave of Grandpa Leon. In the other one, I could make out the name:

AΛΒΕΡΤΕ

This was the grave of my Uncle Albert, the one who died by suicide. Albert’s name was followed by a long epitaph, which a Greek friend later translated from a photograph. Something about, “May you find in death the peace that so escaped you during life.”

Facing the two graves through the cemetery gate took me back to the photos that I had thrown away fifty years earlier in BA when, up on the closet ladder, I first spotted them in Dad’s hidden album. I photographed the graves and I now have that album back in my hands. My guilt has been replaced by sadness, a purer sentiment.

There is now a third grave in the cemetery, that of my dear Cousin Leon. He passed away a few years ago and left instructions that he wanted to be buried on the island. In the photo below, Leon my Grandpa on the right and Leon my cousin on the left, flank my Uncle Albert.

The Israelitiko Nekrotapheio will be well tended going forward, now by Cousin Leon’s sons Sam and David. They have inherited from their Dad his love of Samos and go there every summer.

After the cemetery, Sandy and I went across the bay to what I recalled from my visit in 1976 was the site of the Goldstein & Galanis wine factory. The old warehouse, the discarded bottles, and the Muscat-filled barrels were no more. The whole thing had been turned into the "Museum of Samian Wine." We discovered there old wine presses and filters from 1915. Behind a large glass case, the curators had created an exhibit going back to the early 20th century, including some more of my family’s old wine bottles and their books of accounting. Before leaving the island, we also visited the old Goldstein homestead on the Vathy quay. It had been refurbished and, on the lower level, now hosted . . . an internet café.

After a few more hours, we returned to the ferry for the voyage back to Kusadasi. As I came on, I shook the captain’s hand and said, in passing, “Very interesting place, this Samos.” The skipper smiled wisely and reminded me that his bottle of Jack Daniels was still waiting at the bridge.

As we sipped bourbon on the return, I thought of my family’s tumultuous saga. The passage through the world of the Goldstein brothers from Kronstadt/Braşov had been tragic. They escaped antisemitism in Transylvania in 1880 and the burning of Smyrna in 1922. Dad emigrated to Argentina in 1924 seeking better horizons. Two years later Grandpa Leon died on Samos. After that came the expropriation of the G&G wine company in 1934 and Uncle Albert’s suicide in 1935. The remaining clan, which included  several young daughters, moved to mainland Europe, hoping for marriageable Jewish prospects. Ultimately, not everyone escaped the Holocaust blocking their path in the 1940s. My Uncle Dan and my Cousin Muki from Trieste, as well as my Aunt Marie from Athens, were deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and murdered in the gas chambers.

Little could the two brothers of Transylvania have known that the clan of seventeen that they had formed in Samos by 1922 was not as sturdy as they had hoped. By the late 20th century, the brothers’ grandchildren – my cousins – would be widely scattered around the world, in Europe, in the Americas, in South Africa, in Israel. No amount of reading of the coffee grinds by Grandma Regina could have predicted their fate. The gusts of imbat wind blowing over and again onto the delicate panes of the Goldstein homesteads on the bright Aegean quay finally broke the windows. The glass pieces, carried aloft, fell to a thousand separate corners of the earth, never to be joined again. I thought of Dad and how, in those few years that he lived in Samos after the burning of Smyrna and before abandoning the Levant forever, he may have fancied a son with whom he would one day return and share his world. And I did return . . . but only his ghost was there to greet me.

The Goldsteins’ story of misfortunes, I recognized, was a very Jewish story: a tale of emigration, loss, and dispersal. The captain’s whiskey also helped me come to grips with the realization that, regardless of my religious beliefs—or more accurately, my lack thereof—I  was and remain a Jew. It is my tribe, and I too have inherited its curse of loss and exile. We Jews have always wandered from one spot of the earth to another, sometimes willingly, most of the time not. And we have invariably left behind at least one or two graves to remind the rest of the world that we once lived and died there. In a moment of connection across the years, I felt closer to my whole family. And this time my family went all the way back to Abraham and Moses.

Now to my cousin. For a while I thought that I would be the last male Goldstein. There were only three men among Grandpa Leon’s kids in Smyrna: Dan, who was murdered childless at Auschwitz; Albert, a bachelor who died by suicide in Samos; and Dad. Since the other four were women and since I have three daughters, I figured that I was the end of the road for the Goldstein name.  But in 2006, in talking to my cousin Loni in Rome, she mentioned that Great Uncle Karl's only son, Simon, had a son, Carlo. She told me that Carlo lived in Milan, and that he was a musician. So, I Googled “Carlo Goldstein Milano” and, sure enough, found a musician by that name. I looked him up and introduced myself as his second cousin, the son of his father’s cousin Moritz from Argentina. Yes, he had heard something about the South American branch of the family and, no, he wasn’t married and didn’t have a son. We agreed that someday we would meet and compare notes.

In 2018, Sandy and I visited Carlo in Milano. He is an opera conductor and, while he has not yet appeared at the Met in New York, he is increasingly renowned around the world. It is only a matter of time.  Over a lunch of risotto and schnitzel at a cozy trattoria around the block from the Piazza del Duomo, Carlo, whose unruly hair makes him a conductor straight out of central casting, recounted many stories of his grandfather, my Great Uncle Karl, and Karl’s five daughters and one son, Carlo’s dad Simon. The stories added texture to what I had heard from Aunt Carola in Trieste. But he could not help me with my eternal questions: “Did your father or aunts ever talk about my Dad Moritz from Argentina?” Not much. “Do you know why he left the Levant never to return?” Not really. “Was there some sort of family dispute?” I don’t know. The outcome of our lunch conversation was sad but predictable.

After I’m gone from this world, unless he has a son, Carlo will be the last of the Goldsteins. He doesn’t yet have one but he promised that he would definitely call if he ever did.

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The time has come to tell you about Mom and her hidden mysteries