Part II: Dad – Old Wine Bottles

Samos, Greece, 1976.

Upon graduating from Harvard and ahead of my postdoctoral stint, I went back to Europe and stopped in Samos for a week. Samos is the Greek island where Dad had lived after the Turkish troops put his home Smyrna to the torch in 1922, and before he emigrated to BA in 1924.  He had been in his late twenties when he lived there fifty years earlier. That was my age on that trip and I thought that I might be able to see the island as Dad’s contemporary. It was the start of a life-long quest to understand my cryptic father and put together the pieces of his life. I wanted to know him and to love him again as when I was a boy.

Samos was an overnight ferry ride from Piraeus, the Athens harbor. I arrived early morning at Port Vathy, the island’s main village. My cousin Leon Idas, born in Athens and at the time living in Baltimore, was waiting for me at the quay. As a child in the 1930s, before he became a Greek partisan in the Second World war (when his mother  Marie and his father Samuel were deported and murdered at Auschwitz), Leon used to go to Samos to spend summers with grandparents and uncles. He had fallen in love with the island so, later in life, he bought himself a place there. It was a gorgeous apartment overlooking the half-moon bay of Port Vathy. He spent his winters in Baltimore and his summers by the Aegean of his memories.

I immediately recognized Leon as the ferry approached the dock. He was a short and stocky guy, smiling and waving at me. He wore large designer sunglasses and a colorful Hawaiian shirt, sort of like Jimmy Buffet playing Zorba the Greek. Leon was fifty-one that year, to my twenty-seven, a difference in age that is true of pretty much the many cousins I have discovered on Dad’s side. Since I was born when Dad was fifty-six, my aunts had already had most of their kids a generation earlier and many of my cousins feel like they are young uncles or aunts. Leon’s age however turned out to be beside the point. He had a youthful personality, going on about the island, himself, the visit, and the plans he had for us. Anything and everything caught his curiosity and attention. I liked him instantly.

On the way to his apartment, I told him that our Aunt Carola in Trieste had mentioned a wine factory owned by our grandfather Leon. Could we please visit it if it was still around?

“Of course!” he replied. “It’s still there and it’s part of my plans this week!”

Samos lies about a mile from Turkey across the Mycale Strait, and two hours South from Izmir. Because of its proximity to that city, after the fires destroyed its predecessor Smyrna in 1922, the island received a large influx of refugees, including the Goldsteins.  

Port Vathy, Samos’s main town is nestled in an expansive azure bay on the northern coast of the island. It is hard not to fall in love with the island’s Aegean climate and laid-back culture. The village sits at the edge of the bay, its houses starting at water's edge, and in iconic fashion, creeping up the surrounding hills in a palette of white walls covered in bougainvillea and clay-tiled roofs. The sun is hard at midday and the shutters get closed after lunch for a lengthy Mediterranean siesta. At the top of the hill sits the Greek Orthodox Church, its cross pointing upward as though it’s holding on to the blue heavens. I had the feeling that if the cross were to be removed, the church and all of the tiny houses under it would stumble into the bay.

What I did mostly was walk up and down Port Vathy, wandering its narrow streets, climbing its ancient stone steps, and looking for Dad in every corner, in every old tree and face. I tried to guess whether an oak in the park, a bench on the waterfront, or the worn-out cobblestones of the quay might have been there when Dad lived on the island half a century earlier. I longed to find him, absorb him, extract him from the place. His ghost and I sat together under trellises of red flowers, sipping milky ouzo, and watching the passing scene. We looked at the colorful fishermen's boats in the harbor, at the horse-drawn carts, and at the men with big moustaches. We watched the weathered women in black with baskets on their heads, bent over, holding on to their walking sticks and guiding their donkeys to market. We sat in silence, Dad’s ghost and I, with not a word said. He was always quiet, my father, but by then I had come to accept him as he was. We did not need to talk. Sitting there with him was a gift.

Leon and I also spent a lot of time recounting the history of our clan from Smyrna, and their passage through Samos. My cousin filled in many specifics that Aunt Carola had left out, like stories of the calamity of Smyrna’s destruction, and the fate of many of our family members. One day, Leon walked me to the Goldstein homestead. It was a large two-story affair on the quay itself, so that stepping out meant staring straight at the Aegean and at dozens of multicolored fishing boats bobbing up and down in the imbat, the wind that blows daily off the sea. He showed me that our family’s wine factory and warehouse were across the harbor, on the same quay. I could easily imagine Dad going from his home to the factory in a few minutes by carriage, or at most on a twenty-minute walk.

Because the history of our family is closely tied to the politics of wine growing on Samos in the twenties, we spent a lot of time talking about that. When the Goldsteins moved to Samos, establishing a beachhead in the late teens and completing the move in 1922, grapes had been grown on the island for centuries. The favored Samian grape is the Moschato, a luscious, yellow fruit that yields, after over-ripening plus a few years aging in oak, a sweet dessert wine called Vin Doux. To this day it is possible to buy sweet wine from Samos in the good wine shops of the world. Grandpa Leon; his brother, my Great Uncle Karl; and his son, my Uncle Albert, became wine merchants. Stavros Galanis, their Greek partner, was a landowner and wine expert. Together they formed a winemaking company called Goldstein & Galanis and advertised their product throughout Europe in posters written in French. According to Aunt Carola Dad did not get too involved with the family company. He lived in Samos for two years and even after 1922 kept going back to Izmir for other business. Two years later he left for BA.

Under the wine system in existence when the Goldsteins arrived in Samos, the merchants bought grapes at harvest directly from the countryside vineyards, and processed them to bottled wine ready for export. Apparently the system caused great discontent among the small vineyard owners, who were normally members of one extended family, or at best, of a small village dedicated to grape growing.  The growers felt that their bargaining power was much diminished by the merchants' abilities to negotiate individual prices with different growers, and year after year, their complaints turned into protracted negotiations. By the early thirties a few of the grape-growing villages of Samos, tired of the yearly price haggling, started organizing and agitating for a cooperative. In 1934, the Greek government made it compulsory for all growers to join one of a few dozen local growing co-ops and to sell to newly formed co-op-owned wineries. The merchants, such as G&G, in turn, boycotted wine production for about a year, but to no avail. The times were changing for the Goldsteins, and in 1935 they sold out to the cooperative, effectively ending their short flirtation with wine-making.

Nineteen thirty-five was the year that Uncle Albert died by suicide and it was the year that Dad visited Samos from his home in BA. I think that these events, together with his not joining the wine business, are clues to Dad’s break with his family and his emigration to Argentina. Yet the G&G winemaking operations have remained for me a romantic high point in what is otherwise a family saga full of tragedies. I love to imagine that I come from an illustrious family of Greek vintners.

Another day, Cousin Leon suggested that I go to a café by the harbor and strike up a conversation with Gabriel Tsepis, an old man in his eighties. Tsepis’s face was brown and wrinkled, marked by a grey moustache and a sideways beret. We communicated in French as best we could, and he eventually confirmed that, five decades earlier, he had been the bookkeeper for my grandparents' winery. ''La Maison Goldstein et Galanis," he called it proudly. I am not sure he understood that I was the son of Moritz, the oldest of the seven siblings from Smyrna. But he could tell that I was a Goldstein on some sort of a quest.

He became animated when I mentioned Uncle Albert’s suicide. “That was not a  suicide,” he said slowly. “Rumor in the village had it that he was done in by someone.”

“Who?” I asked, suddenly very interested. But he would rather not say and I did not insist. 

Tsepis pointed me to the Greek Orthodox cemetery and urged me to walk there, that he was too old to do it otherwise he would, but that I should go. So I did, and at one corner, found a chain-linked fence and a sign that said "Cemetiere Juif de Samos," Jewish Cemetery of Samos. The enclosure held only two graves. I stepped over the chain and as I stood there I realized that these were the tombstones that I had seen years earlier in Dad's mysterious photographs pasted in the old album I found hidden in his closet. My grandfather and uncle were buried there. I guessed that on his one visit back to the Old World in 1935, Dad had taken photos of his father’s and brother’s Samian graves with him back to BA. But, as was his wont, he hid them in the upper reaches of the bedroom closet and never showed them to me. And I, in an adolescent huff, trashed them.

In the last few days of my visit, Cousin Leon and I visited the old Goldstein & Galanis Wine Company. Since the sale of the firm in the 1930s to the island cooperative, the buildings now housed a modern winemaking and bottling operation run by the wine collective. Behind it, Leon and I found a courtyard adjacent to an abandoned warehouse that had belonged to G&G.  Piled in a corner among the cobwebs and covered in dust was a mountain of small bottles with the Goldstein & Galanis logo imprinted in the glass, their Vin Doux labels still pasted on. We had a few of them cleaned and filled with Muscat wine that was still aging in an oak barrel. Some of the bottles had the old 1920’s labels written in French, “Vermouth Vieux de Vin Muscat de Samos.”

I have three of those relics and display them proudly in our living room.  We opened one when my oldest daughter Thalia was born and let her baby lips taste the sweetness of her great-grandfather’s wine from sixty years earlier. The bottles’ great beauty is that they carry, in their bas-relief and labels, the coat of arms of my family’s company and its complete name: Grandpa’s, Dad’s, my, and Thalia’s name.