The End of Smyrna

Smyrna, 1910-1922.

Entry 345 in the “Book of Certificates of the Community of Smyrna, 1915-1920” says that on July 27, 1919, my father Maurice received a "Certificate of Morality and Honesty." It is written in Ladino transliterated into the Hebrew alphabet. To be able to understand this, you must read dense cursive Hebrew from right to left, sound out the words in Ladino, grasp their meaning, and translate them into a language you know.  Not a simple feat. I can’t do it.

According to my Israeli scholar Dov Cohen, whom  you met in a previous blog, “A Postcard from Constantinople,” the entry says:

"Morality and Honesty Certificate for Señor Maurice Goldstein, aged 26 years, son of Señor Leon Goldstein and his legitimate wife Regina Herzfeld."

I have always known that Dad was moral and honest but this makes it official! There is an identical entry for Grandpa Leon a few months earlier. These were documents one obtained when planning a move to another city to run a business. Recognizing that disaster was approaching Smyrna, Grandpa and Dad were seeking to leave.

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By 1910, there was a veritable clan of Goldsteins residing in Smyrna. Grandpa Leon, Grandma Regina, “his legitimate wife,” their seven children, as well as Great Uncle Karl and  his wife Hannah. They did not yet know it but they were living on borrowed time, enjoying the last decade in their little corner of Europe.

The winds of the First War were blowing toward the Levant when Dad was a teenager. The Ottoman Empire was attacked by the Brits in 1914 and fought the war on the side of Germany against the Entente. The Goldsteins must have nervously observed the unfolding events. No doubt they followed the defeat of the British at Gallipoli in 1915. The Entente’s troops that landed there on the misguided idea of Churchill, were decimated by the Turks under the command of a young general by the name of Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Kemal covered himself in glory, blocking the Entente’s attempt to sail through the Dardanelle Straits in order to bombard Constantinople.

What followed was the rise of a strong Turkish nationalism. Extreme nationalism is never good for the Jews, whether in Smyrna, Argentina, or the US. To nationalists on a mission, Jews are resident aliens. We had better listen to the news and stay tuned to subtle changes in political mood, or we may be caught by surprise. Not all nationalists are anti-Semites, of course. It’s just that nationalists often conclude that the Jews who live in town, even those who were born there, aren’t really loyal to the country, and see us as foreigners.  And the Goldsteins, with their multiple allegiances, must have felt vulnerable, especially after news of the Armenian genocide that started later that year.

As the war was winding down, the new Italian Prime Minister, a young Mussolini, developed dreams of recreating the Roman Empire around the Mediterranean. So, he landed Italian troops in Southern Anatolia. The Brits were not particularly pleased by this and as a countermove, openly encouraged Greek Prime Minister Venizelos to also land Greek troops in Asia Minor.  On May 15, 1919,  Smyrna saw the arrival of shiploads of Greek soldiers. Given that about half of the population was Greek, the army’s arrival was feted as a “liberation.” The local Greeks celebrated with parades, speeches, flags on balconies, and parties. But, given the long history of bad blood between Greeks and Turks, it is not surprising that, on the days after the Greek landing in Smyrna, the new occupiers committed atrocities against local Turkish soldiers. The Turks would not soon forget. 

The Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist at the end of the Great War. The Goldsteins then became stateless and found themselves subjects of an empire that had just disappeared while they lived as foreigners in another empire that was about to disappear. Cosmopolitans that they were, the prescient Goldsteins bade auf wiedersehen to their old selves and, as I explained in a previous blog, “Turkish Cezve,” walked out of the Italian consulate with new identities. They were now lapsed Austro-Hungarian Levantine Jews turned into freshly minted Italians, living in Greek-occupied Ottoman Asia Minor. I am not joking when I say that we Goldsteins do this alien stuff quite well.

Not all was dreadful, though. The end of the war also led to some serious romancing in the Goldstein household. At the end of hostilities, the Turks freed a group of British prisoners from a Smyrna detention camp. One of them, David Lasker, asked around wishing to connect with members of the local Jewish community before returning home. He was promptly introduced to my family and, in the few days when the Goldsteins fed and sheltered him, fell in love with one of their daughters, my Aunt Cecilia. He proposed marriage and Grandpa Leon agreed. Cecilia and David married in Paris in 1919 and moved to Liverpool. It’s because of that amorous encounter that I now have generations of Lasker cousins in England and South Africa.

General Mustafa Kemal of Gallipoli glory didn’t take warmly to the Greeks landing in Smyrna in 1919. He raised a Turkish army not only to recapture the city, but to take a stand against European ambition to carve up Asia Minor. After several armed confrontations between Greeks and Turks, in mid 1922 Kemalists on horseback appeared on the quays of Smyrna. Before Kemal marched into the city, he sent messengers to reassure the Jews and the Europeans that he meant no harm. The more recently arrived Ashkenazim, like our Goldsteins, didn’t believe him, having been long used to the anti-Semitism of their homelands. Most of them left. The Sephardim, who saw Kemal as bringing a more Turkish government to Turkey, were not overtly worried, and they stayed. After all, they were Turks, and Kemal Pasha promised them full emancipation, albeit in the ironic context of doing so while imposing European fashions and culture. They were sure that better times lay ahead. By the 1930s, when the Turkish Government turned pro-German, the writing on the wall came into sharper focus. The Sephardim also started leaving then, mostly to Israel and the US. There are very few Jews left in today’s Izmir.

Dov Cohen, my Israeli expert on Turkish Jews found that, toward the end of the First War, Dad and Grandpa applied for and received those certificates of “Good Morals and Honesty." I am quite sure that they procured them so they could leave and take the rest of the clan to Samos. My Great Uncle Karl and Uncle Albert had already been in  Samos operating the Goldstein & Galanis wine company since 1910. The rest of the Goldsteins joined them on the island ahead of the Turkish takeover of Smyrna. Great Uncle Karl and his wife Hannah eventually had six kids, all born in Samos. The combined Goldsteins of Samos eventually grew to be close to twenty!

All of the stories of European and American witnesses who lived through the arrival of Kemal's troops are similar.  After the main of the Turkish army entered Smyrna, they sealed off the Armenian neighborhood. Cries, shots, and tales of killings and rapes started coming out of the quarter. After the killings and the looting, part of the city was set aflame. Turkish soldiers - regulars (as the Greeks tell it) or unruly irregulars (as the Turks have it) - put fire to large sections of Smyrna and pretty much burned down half of the city. The flames consumed most Christian neighborhoods but spared the Turkish ones and the Sephardic juderías. The soldiers pursued escaping refugees on to the quays and shot at them while they were swimming toward ships at harbor offering safeguard. There were ships from all nations anchored off the quays watching the horror: American, British, Italian, and French ships. None other than Ernest Hemingway, then a young correspondent for the Toronto Star, was on one of the American ships and reported on the desperate cries coming from the quays at night. For a while the ships were sending tenders to shore to try to save their nationals. Then, as the situation became frantic, they tried to save anyone. There are stories of Italian naval officers at the quay who asked people, "You are Italian, si?" As long as the answer was yes, ja, si, oui, or dah, the poor souls got put on a boat. There are stories of men jumping into the bloody waters to swim to safety being shot harbor-side and dying in a sea thick with floating bodies. There are stories of entire families drowning themselves rather than falling into the hands of their enemies. There are too many gruesome stories. 

Dad, as always, didn't tell me any of the stories. I learned about all of this later from others and ultimately by myself, reading, looking at old photographs, and travelling to Izmir. The entire Goldstein clan survived the catastrophe. Whoever hadn’t already left, showed their valuable Italian papers and sailed to Samos. The Goldsteins watched the end of the Ottoman Empire from their safe haven in Samos. The tragedy of its final curtain probably stayed in Dad’s memory until his death. But he never mentioned it.

Mustafa Kemal went on to greater glory. In 1923 he founded the modern Turkish Republic, thus officially ending the Ottoman Empire and the Sultanate. Kemal changed the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to Latin, secularized the government, and forbade women from wearing the Muslim veil. He changed the name of Smyrna to Izmir. He wanted Western mores brought to Turkey, but by Turks, not Westerners. Ever since those years Kemal has been revered as Atatürk, “the Father of Turkey.” His statue can be found today in every park, on every hill, and in front of every Turkish government building. He is usually depicted with open arms against the wind, dressed in the Western three-piece suits that he much liked. He never wears a fez, the Turkish hat and tassel that he banned. 

Often, on my way to and back from work, I drive past a large statue of Atatürk standing tall in the front yard of the Turkish Embassy in Washington D.C., a book in his right hand and the wind forever flipping the lower corner of his bronze jacket.  Sometimes, if I’m not too busy with the traffic, I look up at him and when I do, an ancestral anger wells up in my chest as I recall the horror that he brought onto Smyrna and to my family’s home more than a century ago. I know that Atatürk is rightly seen as the father of the modern Turkish Republic. I know that his efforts kept the European winners of the Great War from carving up Turkey as they so imperially did with the rest of the Middle East. I know all that. But still, this is personal.

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I found online two sepia photos, dated September 14, 1922, taken from evacuation ships lying in wait in the gulf. One photo shows Smyrna burning. The other one shows the desperate refugees at the waterfront quay. The Goldstein clan was gone by then.

I, however, would stand on that quay a century later. I will tell you about it in my next blog, “Looking for Old Smyrna.”