Suphern, New York

In 1961 I met my father’s side of the family.  Up until then, they had been trapped in Bagdad, but that summer, they escaped to New York, where one of my uncles lived.  My parents had left Iraq before I was born and had settled in Iran.  As Jews, they could not return to Iraq after the formation of Israel in 1948, because my father was accused of being a Zionist, so his property in Iraq was confiscated and our family was declared stateless.  Most of the rest of the family was trapped in Iraq, so I hadn’t met them. The government of Iraq refused to allow Jews to leave the country, fearing that they would go to Israel. A few of my mother’s family members had escaped to Iran or Israel, but for the most part, my father’s family was imprisoned by accident of birth.  To me, the Iraqi relatives remained spectral until 1961. 

Iran, in contrast to the other Moslem countries in the Middle East, was open to all refugees. My mother’s relatives, who had managed to get out of Iraq, used smugglers to get them across the border to Iran and then either stayed in Iran or traveled on to Israel.  According to some estimates, by 1949, approximately 1000 Jews were being smuggled out of Iraq a month.  Iran was a relatively undeveloped country, in the 1940s, but its capital, Tehran, was also a fairly cosmopolitan place, with Russian and Armenian refugees, and even non-Jews from Europe.  As I was growing up, my piano teacher was Italian and my ballet teachers were Russian.  There were international restaurants where European food was served, and there was a fair amount of international trade.

That summer of 1961, my father planned a trip to New York to see his family, and he took me along.  That year, the Iraqi government had eased the regulations regarding emigration, and my father’s family managed to leave.  It was the first time I met my great-grandmother, my aunt, my uncles, and cousins.  My grandmother had visited Iran on her way to New York for medical treatment once when I was nine, so I had seen her, but all the others were new to me.  It was odd to meet these people who were familiar and strangers all at once.  I had heard about them all my life, but had no sense of who they were beyond the fact that they existed.  Now here they were, eliciting some primal memory, yet totally unknown to me, except by name.  They spoke Arabic and French.  I spoke Farsi, English and Arabic, but my Arabic was odd to them, being at least twenty years out of date compared to their evolving language.  Language, like history had moved on, and they found some of my expressions quaint.  My Arabic had also incorporated some Farsi into it which was incomprehensible to them, but for the most part we understood each other.  We just came from different cultures, even though we were all one family, so the barriers were more cultural than linguistic.

My uncle S was my father’s oldest brother.  He had escaped with his wife, son and daughter.  He had another son who had managed to get an exit visa as a student and was studying at MIT.  S needed to find a way to earn a living to support his family, and as a middle aged man with limited English, his prospects were dim.  He tried importing and exporting, but his overhead invariably exceeded his income.  He had rented a one-room office in Manhattan, and he dutifully took the subway down from Queens every morning, sat in this office waiting and hoping for business to take, but it never did.  I was not sure what that business was, except vaguely having to do with exporting goods, but what and to where, I did not know. 

S had been in lumber and shipping in Iraq, and even as a Jew could make a comfortable living, because he was better educated than most, could communicate in French, could serve as a conduit with the outside world, as narrow as that world was for Iraqis.  New York was a different matter.  French was no asset, and the world was enormous.   He saw an advertisement in the business section of the New York Times for the sale of a lumber mill in Suphern, New York and thought this might be a business he could manage having owned a lumber mill in Iraq.  As the owner, he had managed the business, while others did the physical work.  He had been the boss, the overseer, the brain behind the enterprise.

One Saturday, S, my father and I boarded a bus from Port Authority to Suphern.  The drive north took us out of the city on rapid highways, until we were in fairly dense woods.  To me this was the America of travelogues.  New York figured prominently in a lot of movies and was active and frenetic, but the highway exemplified America to me.  I remember seeing travel films of America, describing the beauty of the mountains, the forests and so forth, but for me the miracle of America was its roads, its buildings, its infrastructure.  All countries have nature; what they don’t have is the ingenuity to create the structures of civilization.  So I was impressed by the highways, the clean small towns we passed, which were more developed with houses, stores, offices, than the dirt roads and dusty villages such a trip would entail anywhere in the Middle East.

We arrived in Suphern and were met at the bus stop by the mill superintendent.  He looked at my father and uncle in their suits and ties and I could tell he thought they were ridiculous.  This was a working mill, not an enterprise that was operated from behind a desk.  The superintendent was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, had rough hands with permanent jags of grime, and was obviously unhappy at having to show us around on a Saturday.  And who brings a gussied up teenage daughter on a business trip.  Regardless, he showed us around the operation and deigned to answer questions.  He needn’t work hard to impress these clueless men with their accented English who obviously knew nothing about American enterprise, had never rolled up their shirt sleeves or gotten their hands dirty.  The contempt was palpable.  S looked around trying to find a way to make this business work for him.  He was a dignified man trying to understand a situation that was foreign and hostile, but into which he needed to insert himself.  He had to have a means to earn a living.  Yet the lumber business he knew in Iraq did not resemble this lumber business at all. 

Eventually, we got on the bus back to New York City.  On the trip back, S and my father talked about the pros and cons of the business as though it were still a viable possibility, but I think we all knew it wasn’t.

A few years after this expedition, S moved to Iran and started to work with my father.  His family remained in New York, and in an ironic twist, he was sending them money from Iran, not the typical immigrant story.  He lived with my parents, and it was a harmonious time for my mother, because as long as S was there, my father reined in his bad temper.  This mystified me, since my father rarely respected anyone and could barely tolerate another presence in the house.  I was living in New York then, going to college, so my exposure to this new family configuration was infrequent.  One summer when I was visiting, I asked my mother about S living there for so long, and my father’s reaction.

__Your father loves and respects Uncle S more than anyone in the world.  He’s the only person he will tolerate without criticism.  He even accepts criticism from him.

I was baffled.  My father wasn’t inclined to suffer anyone on the basis of his seniority, so it wasn’t the mere fact that S was older.  My mother continued.

__You know S suffered a lot at the time of Israel.  He was arrested and tortured.  We were sure they were going to hang him.  He was in prison and the others who were accused of being Zionists were being executed.  They pulled his nails out to make him admit he was a Zionist.  They had him dig his own grave, lie in it while they covered him with dirt.  Only his face was exposed.  He suffered a lot.  Papa has always felt bad that S had to go through that.  At that time, we sold everything we had and sent the money to Bagdad to pay for his defense.  It all seemed useless.  There was no such thing as a fair trial.  He had the best lawyer, but the judges weren’t listening.  They were just sentencing people to death.  They couldn’t get enough of death.  The people were crazed with death.  The English had left and there was no order, and the Jews were the obvious scapegoats.

__How did he escape?

__He got really lucky.  The judge he had was a good man.  He listened to the case and at the end he said he just couldn’t condemn a man to death on the evidence that was presented.  He wouldn’t be able to face his God.  What had this man done?  He just didn’t see it. So S basically escaped with his life because he got the only judge in Iraq who wasn’t crazy for blood.  So many others weren’t lucky.  They would round up their families at dawn and bring them outside their house to watch their fathers and husbands get strung up in front of them.  It was a great spectacle.  Such savages.  S was just very lucky.  For years afterwards we sent that judge presents, money.  Whatever Papa made, we sent. 

Up until hearing this grim tale from my mother, I hadn’t really given much thought to my uncle.  Before he had moved to Iran, I went to him when I needed money my father sent  for college, still in that one room office in Manhattan.  Sometimes I would go to the apartment in Queens and visit with his family, but for the most part we were strangers trying to seek commonality.  I probably wasn’t too different from the mill superintendent in my assessment of him as a has-been, a bit ridiculous, because he couldn’t make it in New York.  I was a callow teenager, and that’s what I thought when I thought of him at all. 

I vaguely sensed he found it hard being separated from his family.  I knew it was difficult for them, living in New York, then in London, trying to find a way to be a family despite the distances, pretending they weren’t torn apart.  His youngest daughter went to school in New York, then in Europe for a while, until they could all figure out where home was, if there ever was going to be a home.  His youngest son was at New York University, studying to be an engineer.  His oldest son, the one who had come by himself and gone to MIT, had had a nervous breakdown and required treatment.  Through all this, S doggedly worked, a foreigner everywhere.  My parents had lived in Iran for about twenty years at that time, and could speak Farsi, but S found it hard to learn at his age.  He sat in my father’s office and worked dutifully at whatever he could, missing his family back in New York, sending money.  When I think of it now, I realize how used up he must have felt, but he never conceded that he was unemployable, useless.  He quietly worked and determinedly earned the money to keep them all going.

Even after my mother told me what he had endured, I rarely gave him much thought.  Now that I am about the age he was when he first moved to New York, he haunts me with his quiet dignity, a man trying to keep his family intact, trying to maintain standards, equipping his children for life because that was his job.  I have children now whose safety I pray for every day.  I cannot imagine taking my family to an alien land and starting anew.  I remember him exchanging jokes or clever lines from Voltaire with my father, always with sad eyes, but desperate for normalcy, desperate for laughter.

I have always believed that one chooses one’s life.  Even as a child, I felt I mastered my own destiny.  As I have aged, I have realized that we don’t make those choices only for ourselves.  There is an accumulation of people in our lives who are affected by our choices, and even when we make free choices, we are not only affecting our own lives, so our choices are less free than they used to be.  And the accident of being born under tyranny can limit choices tremendously.     

*My sister found this article about Jews fleeing Arab countries; it has a lot of detail about what was happening in Iraq in 1948 and after.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-expulsion-that-backfired-when-iraq-kicked-out-its-jews/