Turkish Cezve

Trieste, Italy, 1976.

My Aunt Carola and I were sitting at her kitchen table in Trieste talking about our family’s history when, unexpectedly, she said, “Giorgio, let me read your future.” She turned her espresso cup over on its saucer three times and looked into the coffee sludge at the bottom. "Good future!” she said to me. “You will be very lucky in business and also in love, even though you’ll first have some troubles in the love department!" She put down the cup and looked satisfied that she had changed the subject.  

My curiosity got the better of me. "What was that?” I asked.

"It’s called Kaffesatzlesen. . .reading the coffee grinds. . .something that I learned from your grandmother in Smyrna. She taught us to read the future from the Turkish coffee. Your father Moritz never read your future?"

“No,” I replied.

On my return from Samos, I had stopped in Trieste to visit my Italian relatives. My questions had crystallized after a week on the island. I wanted to get more details about Dad’s history, to write out a genealogical tree, and to understand who was who back in the days. Why did Dad emigrate and why so far away? Was Uncle Albert’s suicide related to his never returning? How come Dad went from being the adventuresome man of Carola's youth to the friendless loner of his death? Did anything happen in Smyrna or Samos that he didn’t tell me? Were my relatives hiding a family secret?

The Montanaris welcomed me warmly. They were happy to see me again, asked to hear all about Samos and their nephew Leon, and wanted to learn of my plans. (Upon return to the US I would be off to a postdoc at MIT, but law school had not yet crossed my mind.) As we walked into the enclosed rose garden, it looked as though time had stood still; the dried oak leaves were still on the table where I had last seen them five years earlier.

The first evening, over espressos, I pulled out my notebook and, together with Aunt Carola, drew out a detailed genealogical tree of our family. Many more names emerged, of great-uncles and great-aunts, of members of Grandma Regina's family, and of many more distant cousins than I knew I had. In addition to Leon in Baltimore, I discovered cousins and their children in Israel, England, Italy, and South Africa. Talk about wandering Jews.

Initially, Carola did not budge. “I told you that your father went to Argentina to seek his fortune, that's all. There are no mysteries. . . Albert killed himself because he saw that the family business was going bankrupt. . . Nothing major happened in Smyrna, other than three quarters of the city was burned down by the Turks in 1922. Everyone had to go to live in Samos, but beyond that, niente. . . Your father changed when he realized that so many family members had died in the Second World War and, shocked, he withdrew from us. . .

Oh, Giorgio, you have so many questions!”

Uncle Bruno perked up in German, trying to add some light. "Maurizio had worked hard to get us the visas for Argentinien before the war. Visas for you and me and Muki and Regina, erinnerst Du dich, do you remember, Carola?" he asked her. "We could have gone to South America when there still was the time." Then he turned to me. "Your father, he had made all the papers ready for us." And back to her, "You remember, no, Carola?"

Carola’s jaw clenched. After a few seconds she said, sternly, "That was not practical, Bruno . . . Please, let's not start again! What? We were supposed to pack up and take Mamma all the way to Argentina? And Muki was a baby then."

Bruno looked at me and said, this time in her defense, "You know, Giorgio, that was before Mussolini was killed in 1943 and the Germans came into Italy. Mussolini was not so bad against the Jews and we didn’t think that we needed to escape. . .” His voice trailed off and I could barely hear him, but his pained expression said it all.

I decided that I needed to ask some pointed questions. “When I was in Samos,” I said, “I saw on Grandpa Leon’s grave that he died in 1926, two years after Dad emigrated to Argentina. . .”

“Yes, that’s right,” replied Carola.

“But Dad didn’t return to Samos to attend Grandpa’s funeral?”

“No, Moritz did not come back until 1935, after Albert committed suicide.”

“So . . . after Grandpa died, Uncle Albert was left alone in charge of the company?”

“Yes, your Great-Uncle Karl had already come to Trieste. He and his wife Hannah brought along their five daughters and their one son, Simon. It was impossible to find marriageable Jewish men on the island, so they all came here.”

I was happy that we were finally having some sort of a dialogue (which I am remembering the best I can), so I kept up the pace. “Why Trieste?” I asked.

“Well. . . our whole family had Italian nationality. Did you know that Giorgio?”

“Italians?” I said, surprised.

“Yes, until the end of the First World War we were all subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But that ended in 1919 and we became stateless . . . So, the Italian government offered us Italian nationality, and we all took it. That is why we could all come to Trieste. We had the papers.”

Another revelation. Dad never told me he was – or at one point in his life, had been – Italian. But at least that explained why I found myself in Trieste and not, say, Shanghai. I kept going. “So, if most of the family had left Samos by 1934, when the wine cooperatives were formed, Uncle Albert was running the company all by himself?”

“Yes, running the company became very hard on him,” replied Carola. “Clara and I were no longer in Samos either. We also came to Trieste to find husbands. And Dan was not good at business. . .Dan was a dreamer, a romantic.”

“So, who remained in Samos? Uncle Albert and who else?”

“Three Goldsteins: Your grandma Regina, and your Uncles Dan and Albert. . .until Albert killed himself.”

The mention of Uncle Albert’s suicide gave me an opening. “You know,” I said, “while in Samos I talked to Gabriel Tsepis, the company’s bookkeeper.” I looked at my aunt, “Do you remember him, Aunt Carola?”

“Yes, I remember Tsepis.”

“Well, he said something about how the village did not believe that Uncle Albert died by suicide.”

“”Nonsense!” said my aunt, annoyed. “Gossip from ignorant villagers! Albert was a very sensitive man. He became depressed when the company had to be sold to the cooperative and sales and profits went down. . .He couldn’t deal with it anymore.”

“So, after Uncle Albert’s death, only Grandma Regina and Uncle Dan stayed there?”

“Yes, and they also came to Trieste. . .but it was not so simple. . .Being Italian did not help them,” she said. “When Italy entered the war on the side of the Germans in 1940, Mussolini decided to invade Greece; although that didn’t work out very well for him. The Greeks quickly kicked out the Italians. But in 1940, the Greek government jailed Mamma and your Uncle Dan in Lesbos for a short while. They were considered enemy aliens.”

I had never heard of Lesbos before. It was yet another twist in my family’s endless migratory travails. “Lesbos?” I asked.

“Yes, but they were in prison there only a short time. They were eventually allowed to come to Trieste and we were all reunited. . .” Her tone then turned sadly philosophical. “Our family was in Samos close to twenty years. . . But the only things left now are the graves of my father Leon and my poor brother Albert.”

I nodded and remained silent. After a while, I pressed on. “There’s something else I wanted to ask you,” I said, feigning naiveté. “Dad did not give me Grandpa’s name Leon as my middle name, but instead gave me Uncle Albert’s name, Alberto. . .Was there something  that happened between Dad and Grandpa Leon?”

That question ended the dialogue. Irritated with my unrelenting cross-examination, Aunt Carola said, "Oy!. . . too many questions and few answers, Giorgio. . .Enough with the past,” she added with finality. It was at that point that she stopped the conversation and offered to read my future from the coffee grinds.

As she did that, a sudden memory of Dad’s beautifully hammered Turkish cezve came to me. I said, “Dad never read my future from the grinds, but he had a pair of shiny copper pots in our kitchen in BA, and occasionally he made coffee in them."

"Aha! You see, Bruno?” said my aunt, turning to her husband. “Moritz had cezve in Buenos Aires. . .Moritz remembered us and his Smyrna!" For the first time that evening, we all smiled in happiness and recognition.

Dad had two cezve, in different sizes, hanging on the wall of our kitchen in BA. Thinking nothing of them and knowing little of his Smyrnioti origins, I put them in the left pile, too bulky to carry with me to New York. They ended up in the trash. I had never seen tasseomancy, the reading of fortunes from coffee residues, but I suspect that Dad had.

(By the way, fifty years ago, Aunt Carola was on the dot with my future. I was lucky in business but, for a long time, not so lucky in love. Then, after two divorces, I met Sandy. That is a tale for another day.)

On my last evening in Trieste Aunt Carola came into my bedroom. She put her hands over my head and, closing her eyes, said a short prayer in Hebrew, "Adonai yishmar-tzeitkha uvo'ekha me'atah v'ad-olam." She translated it into her thickly accented English, "May the Lord protect you on your going out and your coming in, and from this time and forever.

"This is a blessing for travelers that Mamma taught us when I was a little girl," she added. "You know, my father Leon and your father Moritz travelled a lot before Moritz left for BA. They were selling the Goldstein & Galanis sweet wine all over Europe."

She held me for a long time and I got lost in her fantasy that I was her brother, that I was my own father, that she was hugging him one last time, saying goodbye, wishing him Godspeed. Perhaps she was channeling through me her pent-up grief for all her losses and regrets. A moment later she went from holding me to letting me hold her, this time receiving through me the strength and support that she so missed in the beloved brother whom she had last seen sail away forty years earlier and had never seen again.

Early the next day I left Trieste. I had a genealogical chart of the seven Goldstein siblings and the names and locations of uncles, aunts, and cousins whom I never even knew existed. And I had a pretty good idea of why Dad had cut himself off from everyone. Of why he had traveled as far away from the Aegean as possible and never went back. I will share my thoughts with you in the next blog.

***

Sadly, like so many objects that I trashed when I left BA in 1968, Dad’s actual cezve don’t exist anymore. These days, I can readily find online photos of cezve. But looking at photos of such objects is not the same as holding them. What’s missing from a photo is to connect with Dad’s hands from the past. So, a few years ago, I did the next best thing. During a visit to Marrakesh, I bought a classic Turkish cezve in one of the bazaars and brought it back with me to the US. It’s not the real thing, and Dad’s hands did not hold this one. But in the end, it’s less about the objects than about the stories they tell and the loved ones they bring back.