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Tell Us About ... A Memoir

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Contents

Prologue.........................................ix1. The Family....................................12. The Bronx.....................................293. "Return With Us Now"..........................634. "No Ship Like Friendship".....................915. Taft..........................................105Epilogue: Murray.................................115Acknowledgments..................................119

Chapter One

We were a family of five: my father, Joseph Beja; my mother, Eleanor Cohen Beja; my older sisters, Rachel—the oldest child—and Rebecca; and me. To Rae and Bette (those were the names they chose to go by; I was just Morris) and to me, our parents were always Papa and Mama.

Papa was born in 1897 on the island of Chios, then part of Turkey, although he was Greek. Mama, Greek as well, was also born in Turkey, in 1900 in Smyrna, now Izmir. (I've long gotten a kick out of the fact that the two most traditional sites for the birthplace of Homer have been Chios—"rocky Chios" in the Odyssey—and Smyrna.) My parents were Sephardic Jews: that is, descendants of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century.

Papa came to the United States in 1916, at the age of nineteen, on his own, on the ship the Vacilefs Constantino. He was one of eight surviving children (five boys and three girls) of Morris Beja and Miriam Issachar. In the order of their birth the children were Ralph, Esther, Julia, Joseph, Isaac, Jack, Matilda, and Seymour. I was told that Ralph and Jack left Chios to avoid military service, but I never heard that about Papa. I do have a digital copy of his draft card during World War I (and one for World War II as well).

Apparently Morris was not a very good or conscientious father or husband, and after a time Miriam followed her children, all of whom immigrated to the United States: I remember being told that he "sent" her to America. Like the vast majority of Jews who came through New York City in those years, my family all stayed there. In the early decades of the twentieth century, one quarter of the population of the city were Jews, although relatively few of them were Sephardim.

Miriam died in New York in the early 1930s, before I was born. I'm not sure if the youngest child, Seymour (born in 1908), had come with her to America or later. Her husband never left Chios, and Uncle Seymour later recalled realizing, when he left home in his early teens, that he would never see his father again. Many emigrants from various lands did not abandon the notion that they would some day return, after becoming well-to-do in America. For Jews, that attitude was rarer, for they often fled oppression as well as poverty. My parents didn't speak much of oppression, but neither were they of a generation when it was easy or common to go back to their origins. My father did not return to Greece and Turkey for a visit until he was in his late sixties; my mother never did.

The history of the Sephardic Jews is fascinating. One of the most intriguing aspects of their culture is the way they kept the language of their ancestors for hundreds of years. Or a form of it: what is variously known as Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino (a term sometimes referring to the liturgical language of the Sephardim, influenced by Hebrew), or Judezmo. So while my parents were born in Greece and Turkey, and they knew Greek and Turkish, what they always spoke in our home was a form of Spanish—a form that sounded old-fashioned, the way I suppose Elizabethan English would sound to a contemporary American. Once as a child I was in a butcher shop with my mother while she was conversing with another customer, a woman from Puerto Rico. The woman said in genuine admiration that Mama's Spanish sounded "aristocrático."

Down through the generations and centuries Spanish took over even for the descendants of the expelled Portuguese. There is a town in Portugal named Beja, and Beja is a fairly common name in that country, or at least not uncommon. Mama and Papa never spoke or, I believe, thought of themselves as Portuguese, but as Spanish. They would talk, often proudly, about Spain—for example about Christopher Columbus (in our world, everyone knew he was Jewish)—but I can't recall their ever mentioning the town of Beja. Still, I assume my father's ancestors came from there, subsequently wandering in exile over the Mediterranean, often welcomed by the Ottoman Empire, so that—four hundred years after the expulsion—Bejas lived in Chios. The earliest record I have found of someone named Beja on the island dates from 1821, during the Greek War of Independence. In that year the Turkish authorities rewarded one Moses Beja—Moses, Moshe, Morris: in other words, my name—for, I'm afraid, his cooperation with the Turks. They did so by presenting him with three Greeks as slaves. He promptly freed them. I interpret that latter fact as evidence of two things: my ancestor was after all a nice guy, and he was also not stupid, and realized that he had to continue living on the island.

I'm sure actually that there is no connection, but anyway Beja is also the name of a north African multi-tribal group of people that included the Hadendoa of Sudan. The Hadendoa warrior was made famous by Rudyard Kipling as the "Fuzzy Wuzzy," in his poem by that name, narrated by a British "Tommy":

    We've fought with many men acrost the seas,
      An' some of 'em was brave an' some was not:
    The Paythan an' the Zulu an' Burmese;
      But the Fuzzy was the finest o' the lot....
      So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
      You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man....

That's me all right.

For my father's mother's surname, Issachar, I can only point to the existence of that name in the Bible: in Genesis 30:18 Jacob's son by Leah is called Issachar, and in Joshua 19:23, for example, we hear of "the tribe of the children of Issachar."

The Sephardic population of Greece, and of the world, was delivered a horrible blow by the Holocaust. The center of that population, Thessaloniki (or Salonica), with 50,000 Jews, was almost entirely deported to Auschwitz, and murdered. There were Bejas on Chios at least into the 1930s; I have seen varying reports about whether there were any left to be victims of the Nazis, but apparently one family with that name was removed from Chios in 1943—presumably to a concentration camp. Every once in a while during my childhood someone would visit our home who had numbers tattooed on his or her arm.

Long after I left the Bronx, and after both my parents were dead, Ellen and I traveled to Chios, and then to Izmir. I had never been to either place before our visits in the early 1990s. Being there brought home to me all the more forcefully what I have long realized, above all while making notes for this memoir: that I regret not having asked many more questions about my parents' childhood world than I did, and not having listened so much more carefully when they talked about their memories. In Chios, I didn't even have an address. By then, Uncle Seymour was quite elderly, and he couldn't remember much...