The Diario: The Daring Escape of Two Sephardic Jews from Turkey to America During World War I. Alfred Ascher, Albion-Andalus, Boulder, CO. Soft cover, 2023. 80 pgs.
Daniel Santacruz
Fasten you seatbelt. This book will take you on a journey fraught with adventure, intrigue and danger.
Written in Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, by the protagonist, Alfred Ascher, it tells the story of his journey, along with his older brother Albert, from Smyrna to New York City in 1915.
This pioneering diario, or diary, the first in Sephardic literature to tell a tale of escape in Ladino, will be treasured by both speakers of the language and aficionados to first-person accounts.
The author has a penchant for details, which greatly enrich the narrative from beginning to end. The first sentence of the book—“It was the morning of Tuesday, August 10th [1915] that I left my parent’s home, accompanied by my dear brother Albert, for this remarkable journey”—sets up the reader for a five-month litany of hardships that would break the determination of many. But not the Ascher brothers. Home was Smyrna, now Izmir, where he was born 23 years before he made the trip.
The perfacio (preface) is a heart-wrenching goodbye to his parents, siblings and extended family, accompanied with apologies and regrets for his escape from “the hand of this Barbarous Turk.’” We don’t know who he’s referring to with this statement, but it could be a vague generalization of Turkey, a country involved in several conflicts at the time the author left the country. Other than that, he doesn’t explain the reasons for the trip.
Along the way he met contrabandists and other Turks and Greeks—“bandits of the lowest class”— looking for greener pastures, as well as a French consul in Greece who signed their passports so they could leave the country, and two other Sefardic Jews trying to reach New York City.
Hunger, hours-long walks looking for the right boat, lack of money, fear of being robbed, storms, rain and hail were the order of the day many a time.
Finally, on December 25 they disembarked on Ellis Island, a port of entry in the New York City Harbor that during its years of existence saw the arrival of millions of immigrants.
He concludes his diario by thanking God and the United States for saving his life.
Gloria Ascher, niece of the author and Professor Emerita of German, Scandinavian and Judaic Studies and founding Co-director of Judaic Studies at Tufts University in Massachusetts, translated the diario into English, which appears opposite the Ladino text.
The book is illustrated with photos of Alfred in his later years in Massachusetts, a photo of both Alfred and Albert’s family in Smyrna in the early 1900s, and an early 20th century postcard featuring the Gulf of Karatash, Smyrna. A facsimile of several of the original pages appears interspersed in the text.
The translator’s introduction is a detailed account of how the book came to be. According to Ascher, the diario was given to her by Alfred’s son, Robert, an Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Cornell University, which he discovered among the possessions left by his sister Lorraine Lonstein, who died in 1996. Robert Ascher wrote the foreword to the book.
The discovery of the diario, whose existence was known to few, triggered the interest of the three generations of the Ascher family and made them part of the project. The older generation, for example, contributed their knowledge of Turkish and geography to clarify passages of the work, and the younger generation, through a WhatsApp group, helped shed light on other aspects of it.
Alfred’s life came full circle in 1965, fifty years after his departure, when he returned to Izmir and met the surviving members of his family.
He died in Massachusetts in 1986.
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