From Smyrna to Worcester

Recently, at the wedding in Newton, Massachusetts of the daughter of some close friends, I found myself sitting next to Gloria Ascher, who taught German and Scandinavian literature and Judaic Studies at Tufts University for years. I had somehow imagined that, like many Jewish professors of German and Yiddish, she had grown up speaking one of those languages, but it turned out that her mameloshen was Ladino. In fact, it turned out that she was the academic mentor of the bride, who is finishing graduate work in Sephardic culture at a Midwestern university.

We were talking, as academics do, about current events like World War I, when she asked whether I had seen the book she herself had recently published, a World War I–era diary composed in Ladino by her Smyrna-born uncle, together with her English translation of it. I hadn’t, but I quickly tracked it down. As it turned out, the narrative, “peppered by wit and humor,” as Gloria puts it in her introduction, was less about World War I than about escaping its grip. In 1915, her uncles, Albert and Alfred, were desperate to get out of the Ottoman Empire before they were interned as enemy aliens (since they had one way or another acquired French citizenship), or worse, inducted into the Turkish Army. The diary tells the story of how, with the aid of some slippery underworld types, they were smuggled across the border to Greece, where they hoped to make a go of it, which was harder than they had anticipated, until the war ended—which they imagined would be very soon.

The brothers looked to the French embassy in Athens for help, where a friendly consul arranged a meager monthly stipend for them. But it wasn’t long before they met a Jew from Salonika who persuaded them to accompany him to America. They didn’t have money for tickets, though, and the French consul, whom they had the chutzpah to approach, wouldn’t “grant us even one centime” for the trip. In the end, they were lucky:

Albert met a friend from Rhodes who had to sell a shipload of onions. Unable to sell it himself, he asked Albert to try to sell it, promising him a commission. Thanks to Albert’s success in selling the shipload of onions, we could now leave.

It was a rough voyage, but it ended happily, in New York Harbor, on Christmas Day, 1915. The diary ends with the brothers’ departure from Ellis Island (which wasn’t very busy during World War I), to ultimately happy and successful lives in America. The book concludes with a photograph of the diary’s author, sitting outdoors on a summery day sometime in the late seventies or early eighties in Worcester, Massachusetts, sporting a jaunty beret, smoking a pipe, and reading Reader’s Digest.

We almost didn’t have this book. The diary languished in an attic until 1996, when Alfred’s daughter, Lorraine, died and her brother, the Cornell anthropologist Robert Ascher, found it among her possessions. Some years later, William Lonstein, Lorraine’s son, contacted Robert, “asking to see Alfred’s account of his trip to this country.” What prompted him to do so? “William’s memory of his mother mentioning such an account was sparked by his teenage son, who, while watching the 2012 Summer Olympics, asked about their family’s roots. The curiosity of Alfred’s great‒grandson thus reawakened in his grandson the memory of the Diario’s existence.”

Robert subsequently gave the diary to Gloria, “the Ladino speaker in the family,” who with her translation, has brought it to the attention of the rest of us.

At the conclusion of her lengthy dedication of her bilingual edition of the diary Gloria Ascher pays special tribute to her uncle Alfred:

Finally your Diary is coming out

into the world, in English, too!

It’s also reuniting our family—

They’re writing to me—you know who?

Albert’s grandchildren! And other Aschers

all over the world! What a pleasure!

I see you smiling down at us!

May all become family who read this treasure

I can’t say that reading this century-old diary has made me feel like a member of the far-flung Ascher family, but I’m very glad to have run into one member of it and to learn the unusual story of two of its forebears.