Ottoman History Podcast - All's Fair in Love and War

Episode Date: June 20, 2026

Lafky entered the United States as a teenager on false pretenses, when her cousin presented her to immigration authorities as his legal wife. A decade later, when her real marriage devolved into a messy divorce, her husband used her prior illicit entry against her, reporting Lafky to immigration authorities and triggering a legal battle that lasted for years. Lafky's deportation file revealed that it was not her first ordeal. A survivor of the Greco-Turkish War, she, like many Ottoman-born Greeks, she had already lived many lives on a journey that brought her from the shores of Asia Minor to Athens and the United States. In this episode, we explore the stories, sounds, and sentiments of the Ottoman Greek diaspora in the wake of the Great Catastrophe and the Exchange of Populations through the extraordinary life of a single mother in New York City and her battle with the American deportation state. This episode is part of our investigative series Deporting Ottoman Americans.    « Click for More »

Welcome to Deporting Ottoman Americans, an investigative mini-series from the Ottoman History podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. This series tells the stories of people born in the Ottoman Empire who face deportation from the United States. It's driven by original archival research by yours truly, supplemented by the work and voices of scholars specializing in the history of Middle Eastern Diaspora and American Immigration. This episode, episode four of the series, is titled All's Fair. in love and war. I won't be talking about the patient, kind, unconditional sort of love often celebrated at weddings, but rather the paradigm of relationship as power struggle more applicable to cases of divorce. The old adage, All's Fair and Love and War, is rooted in the observation

that romantic love can be a take-no-prisoners fight to the death with a rival or even a partner, much like an all-out war. But if love is a battlefield, the law is a weapon, which men have often brandished to maintain the upper hand. This podcast centers on a man, weaponizing the law against a woman he once claimed to love, until death do they part, and her ensuing battle against the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the forerunner to USCIS and ICE. In 1936, a young woman named Lefke faced removal from the United States, and the person who reported her to the authorities was her former husband, who fought for years to have her deported. Lefke's struggle, as recorded in the archives, illuminates the vulnerable position of immigrant

women during the Great Depression. Yet her story is much more than that. As prior to Lefke's deportation, she washed up in America as a refugee of a literal war, remembered by Greeks, including the descendants of over one million Ottoman-born Greeks, like Lefke, as the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Between the lines of her deportation file is an incredible micro-history of Greek diaspora, in those tumultuous times, which traces a path from late Ottoman Smyrna to post-war Athens and Depression-era New York in a vivid global account of survival, of love and of war,

in the early 20th century. Join us. Even if you were a queen, you would not possess such grace. Tettus Dmitriadis sings in this iconic gem of a musical Golden Age from 1926. Amman Elenio, oh little Helen, he exclaims in abjection. For you, I'll go and kill myself. It's a classic, dramatic, Greek sonic artifact, but it also belongs in an expanded notion of early 20th century Americana that embraces the immigrant experience. Born in Ottoman in Istanbul, Dimitriadis recorded this melodramatic tune in New Jersey, and his most famous recording of a popular song called Miserlou, found its way into the American musical canon in the form of an infectious

instrumental hit by pianist Jan August that has been adapted time and again, including in a surf rock cover by Dick Dale, which became the title music for Quentin Tarantino's breakthrough film Pulp Fiction, and was subsequently sampled by Will I.M.'s hip-hop group, Black-Eyed Peas. Miserlou is Greek music, American music, and one could argue Ottoman music as well. Dimitriadis was a pioneer of musical genres like Rebettico, which incubated in Ottoman cities like Istanbul and Smyrna and were born in the underground of the Greek diaspora. It's an example of how the exodus of over a million Ottoman Greeks during and after the First World War didn't just change modern Greek culture, but in many ways defined it.

In the nightclubs of Athens and every other place they went, Ottoman-born Greek artists rose to stardom and made recordings that circled the globe. globe, like this haunting song which mirrors the style of a Turkish gazelle. This is one of my favorite, absolute all-time favorite recordings from the post-catastrophe era. What we would call in Greek a maness, a vocal improvisation on a poetic form, on a couplet, a rhyming couplet in the Greek language. It was recorded by the legendary Rita Abadzi, who was born in Asia Minor around 1914 and came to Greece as a refugee as a child. It's one of the most heart-rending performances that we have from that era.

The lyrics say, "...preepennaut to scefite canis, "...that be in mavrigis and sfein' name his name... So one must always bear in mind the hour of death, that he will enter into the Black Earth and his name will be erased. That's Panayotis League, reflecting on how the voices of performers, like Rita Abadzi, who survived the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,

and the Asia Minor catastrophe echoed the experiences of their communities. I've always thought of it as such a fitting reminder of what those people went through and that they were able to produce such extraordinarily beautiful and virtuosic art, even in the literally in the shadow of the catastrophe. League is an ethnomusicologist and performer, and I invited him for an interview as someone who could speak to the heart of the Greek diaspora experience in the most effective sense. tend to view the artistic product of those refugees

and through this sepia-toned, you know, romantic haze because they produced amazing music. The balance of the recordings that we have and the photographs that we look at of artists like Panayotis Tudas, Rosaskinazi, one of the great voices of the Greek-Ottoman tradition, even though she was a Turkish-speaking Sephardic Jew, people like that,

those were made in Athens and in other places in Greece after the population exchange. So we tend to imagine it as this lively continuation. On the one hand, this continuation of that world, the sophisticated artistic world that they had been kicked out of. And on the other hand, this romanticized kind of like tough guy, you know, underworld, you know, hash den running from the police, playing,

you know, this kind of thing, which both of those things were real. But I think the reality, people moved rather fluidly, I think, between those. And we must not forget the people like Rosaskinazia, and all of her contemporaries. They were singing these songs about being a refugee, about being destitute, about drugs, about knife fights. They were also doing these amazing improvisations

on classical Ottoman poetry, but they were also singing tangos and waltzes, and they were doing all those things in Turkey. The Ottoman-born musicians, who settled in Greece and the United States, carried with them a variety of musical styles from a world of Mediterranean cultural exchange, ranging from classical forms to more grungy and innovative genres like Rabatiko.

The texture of their lived experiences, which is often lost in the historical narratives of war and displacement, is preserved in the fragments of migrant life captured by interwar Arab recordings. And that's why the recordings that survive are regarded as treasures today and have been widely celebrated and circulated in numerous compilations, as well as collections like the Kunavis Archive Virtual Museum. But that wasn't always the case. There was a large period of time where that music was very socially unacceptable. I think it would have been politically an extraordinarily radical act for a young Greek

person from Athens or Thessaloniki in the 70s to decide, hey, I want to study Turkish classical music. Some people did, and they met with a lot of resistance. Now there are literally hundreds of talented young musicians throughout Greece who, what their primary musical activities playing the classical music of the Ottoman world or things that are offshoots from it. And there's a lot of people in the U.S. too, who are of Greek descent or who aren't, who really consciously identify with the artistic ethos of that time in that way. I would also say that the communities of people who actually are descended from refugees from that time. They also,

in my experience, are interested in that art music world, but they've by and large grown up in this community that for the most part, even in instances where the language has disappeared, where people don't really speak Greek comfortably or don't speak Turkish, they still, from earliest childhood, have entertained themselves with the same kind of dance and music forms that people did 100 years ago. So it's a very, very intense, very important part of who they are. Of all the images in Greek music from that era, the dark, soulful eyes of a lover, Mavramatia, are among the most salient. And in a stack of deportation cases, mostly involving Greek workers, semen, and smugglers, not young women, they were the first things

that drew my attention to Lefke's file in the U.S. archives. Wearing a stylish hat and brooch, peering directly into the police camera's lens with large, defiant eyes, in spite of the degrading name placard pinned to her chest, she could be the subject of any number of rebetical ballads, and she didn't just look the part. Lefke's life story contained enough drama and sorrow to fill out an entire evening set. What I know about Lefke comes from a slim deportation file, including verbal testimony from a hearing at Ellis Island in 1936. Described as a housekeeper in her mid-20s, she was called in upon sworn testimony by her

estranged husband that she was an illegal alien. She didn't speak English well, and her interrogation was conducted via interpreter without a lawyer present, and immediately something was lost in translation. When asked if she had ever been married, she stated that she had been married once before in the Ottoman Empire, and that she had a son resulting from that marriage, living with her mother back in Greece. The father was dead, and the would-be marriage was in fact nothing of the sort. When I was 11 years old, I was kidnapped, and about a week after, my mother found me, and I was already married, Lefke explained. That was in 1922, as near as I can remember, she said.

Deportation hearings usually contain tales of woe, but the three sentences, account of a stolen childhood in Lefke's file is among the worst I've seen. Lest one assume that child marriage was normal in Ottoman Greek society, it's worth stating that the Ottoman marriage law of 1917 set the minimum marriage age for women at 17. Marriages did sometimes happen earlier, but most people would have understood a kidnapping of an 11-year-old that resulted in a pregnancy in criminal rather than marital terms. In fact, the time and place of the abduction noted in her deportation file revealed that Lefke was a vulnerable child living in a conflict zone, and what she experienced might even

have been a war crime. Lefke was born around 1911, in the town of Sokia, or Sokhe, a few hours south of Smyrna or Izmir by train. She was one of many Ottoman Greek subjects caught between nation and nationality during the Balkan Wars and World War I, in which Greece and the Ottoman Empire were adversaries. After World War I, the Greek army occupied Lefke's region, a battleground in the ensuing Greco-Turkish war, which ended in what Greeks remember as the Great Catastrophe. Here's Panayotes League again.

The writing was on the wall, and the Western powers were intervening in various ways to play their cards and to get the biggest pieces they could of the pie that was about to be cut up after the First World War. One of the things that happened was the Greek army and the Greek armed forces invaded the western coast of Turkey, occupied a lot of the large urban areas, particularly Izmir, with the plans of annexing all these lost former Byzantine territories, that what we call Merali there, the great idea of anarchy, sort of unification of all the former Greek lands. The Turkish forces withdrew into the heart of Anatolia. The Greek army

was encouraged unwisely to follow and try to stamp them out once and for all. Back in Greece, after a series of chaotic political turns, the influential prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, who led Greece into the war, was voted out of power by a war-wary electorate and fled to France. The purge of Venezalists left the army in disarray, as a rival Turkish government in Ankara, led by Mustafa Kemal, future Ataturk, made military gains on multiple fronts. Local resistance to foreign occupation coalesced into a national movement, and in the spring of 1921, the Kemalists scored their first victories against the Greek army, advancing westward over the years that followed.

Lefke's home region remained in a buffer zone occupied by the Italian army as part of its own post-war claims. But as Italy began to prepare for withdrawal in 1922, her hometown was left to a struggling Greek army. Turkish gains continued, and by early that fall, had taken the entire region. Various things happened. A lot of atrocities were committed by both sides, by all sides.

The emblematic event, from the Greek point of view, of this series of events was the burning of the city of Izmir, or Smyrna, which was a majority non-Muslim city, huge Greek-Armenian Jewish population. And a very large number of people died on all sides, but particularly the Christian inhabitants of the city. And that event has come to stand for this, what we call the great catastrophe in Greek, immigali catastrophe, the loss of quote-unquote Hellenism, Asia Minor Hellenism, the Middle millennia-old Greek presence. Ordinary people like Lefki appear in narratives of the war as faceless victims of mutual atrocities in competing nationalist accounts. Sexual violence often occurs during

war, and in the Greco-Turkish war, both armies were accused of using rape as a weapon against civilians of the opposing nation. Based on the name she provided, the father of Lefke's child, her abductor, may well have been a soldier in the Greek army, perhaps one of the local irregulars, who were blamed for much of the violence inflicted upon Muslim civilians. Or perhaps he was just a man who took advantage of the chaos. In a war that witnessed numerous violations of international norms, what Lefki endured was no less a violation, but her story didn't quite fit within the national narratives,

and neither did the majority of civilians who were not involved in combat. Both the Greek and Turkish governments promoted a picture of wholesale destruction after the war. For example, a map circulated by the Ministry of Education in post-examination. post-war Turkey depicted the locations of villages that were burned by the Greek army. On this map, there's no counter depiction of the Ottoman Greek subjects who remain peacefully in their villages alongside Turkish neighbors. Yet whether they were displaced by the war or not, ordinary people would become fundamental to the terms of post-war peace, which resulted in the compulsory mutual expulsion of former

Ottoman citizens between the New Republic of Turkey and Greece. With Greece's defeat, refugees poured out of Western Anatolia, finding shelter on nearby Greek islands. Lefke's widowed mother and her family were among the many refugees who followed that path, becoming part of what is known to history as the exchange of populations. I hate this term. I think it's an absolutely perverse and cruel mockery of the real kind of exchanges between populations that were happening for centuries before.

That's Panayotes League again, reflecting on the experience of refugees like the Ottoman-born artists who reshaped Greek music. So at the peace talks at Lausanne in Switzerland, there was a misguided attempt to solve these kind of problems that were supposedly based on religion. And so the idea was all of the Orthodox Christians residing in Turkey would be quote unquote repatriated to Greece, and the Muslims in Greece would be repatriated to Turkey, with some exceptions of certain populations. This was a tremendous disaster. It was a humanitarian disaster. It was a humanitarian disaster. It made worse the already existing humanitarian disaster, which was a consequence of the Second Greco-Turkish War.

And it was a deeply traumatic experience for everyone who were, like anyone who's a refugee, who's uprooted from where they were from. It had an effect, of course, in Turkey, but in a giant country with such a large population, the percentage of people whose lives were affected was much smaller. However, in Greece, the population of Greece increased overnight, almost literally overnight. There were something like a million and a half refugees who flooded into Greece. It completely changed the face of the nation, particularly urban areas like Athens and Thessaloniki.

The failed political project that birthed the Asia Minor catastrophe was the grand idea of Greek reunification and expansion. But with the defeat of the Greco-Turkish war, Ottoman Greeks became integral to the rebuilding of Greece in another sense. The exodus of Balkan Muslims and the general death and displacement of the war period had emptied parts of the countryside. And many of the refugees in Greece, especially those who came from a rural background,

were settled in poor remote provinces on more newly acquired territory to build new village communities. On the website, I've posted another map from the period, this one in Greek, showing malaria rates in the refugee settlements that ranged as high as 90%. Suffering from poor living conditions

and lack of opportunities, many fled to the cities. The initial reception by Greek or Athenian society at large was not a very warm one. I mean, these were people whose physical presence, and by extension, their sounds and their smells and their language, were a painful, a stark painful reminder of the utter humiliation that the Greek nation had just gone through. I mean, if you can imagine from the perspective of someone who had grown up with this idea of the dream of reuniting all of Greekdom, and to taste it, to see, to read in the newspaper that

we've taken back. Smirney, the Greek army is in Constantinople, the second room. And then all of a sudden, just a few months later, this terrible tragedy, human and political tragedy from that point of view had happened. They were treated very terribly. They were discriminated against in horrendous ways. Some didn't speak Greek as their first language, right? Because they came from parts of Anatolia where people were speaking Turkish. Absolutely. In fact, there's a, the community of Greek Americans in New Haven, Connecticut, a big percentage of them were monolingual Turkish speakers from the interior of Anatolia. I mean, imagine what it must have been like for those people to get off the boat in Athens, supposedly to be reunited with their cultural kin and to be treated

like, you know, like trash and then finally make their way here. Today, there are institutions like the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens, which I visited for research in 2024, where scholars have worked to preserve the oral histories, memory, and culture of people who are the ancestors of upwards of one-fifth of Greek citizens a century later. But as Panayotis League just described, many of those refugees were not welcomed as fellow Greeks, and only in more recent decades did their lived experiences and the Ottoman world they both left behind and carried with them become part of mainstream historical consciousness. There was also another side to the story. Even as Greece gained territory during the late 19th and early 20th century, it lost population to emerald.

immigration. In the decades leading up to the great catastrophe, some 300,000 Greek immigrants arrived in the United States alone. Large numbers also settled in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, as well as Europe in the Mediterranean region, including Egypt, where a wealthy mercantile diaspora took shape. Emigres sent money back to Greece, and as in other countries with large percentages of their population residing abroad, migration transformed the lives of both men and women, fueling anxiety about social change. That phenomenon is elegantly captured by a folk song performed by Dimitris Perdycopoulos, an Athens-based musician from Rita Abadze's generation, but the other end of the Hellenic world,

born in a small town on the Ionian Sea. This track, which showcases a traditional Kalamatin style, was recorded in Greece and distributed in the U.S. by Columbia Records. The titular line is, Suipa Mama, Padrepsime, I told you mama, marry me off. In most versions,

the persona of the singer is clearly female, but in this rendition by Perdicopoulos, the gender is neutral and perhaps implicitly male, totally changing possible interpretations. There's a line, Stacena mimidosis, which when taken from the perspective

of a Greek village girl sounds like a plea to not be given to a stranger, or perhaps a wrong family, signified by the word Xena, meaning strangers. It gestures to a classic conflict between family wishes and romantic desire echoed in many folk tunes from the period. However, the word Xena has another meaning, foreign lands, and sung from the vantage point of a Greek man in the 1930s, the alternate reading is a choice between staying in Greece and starting a family or leaving to work in the United

States and possibly never return. Pericopoulos thus repurposes a timeless theme to touch on socio-economic economic change in Greece, asking, what if I get sick, mama, who will take care of me? Instead of staying in their towns and villages, Greek men were emigrating for work, creating a marriage crisis for young sons cast out to the sea as well as the daughters who stayed behind. And therefore, that song we just heard catered to two markets, the domestic market for traditional folk songs and the homesick Greek diaspora. After the war, the family of our protagonist, Lefke, settled in Piraeus, the main maritime outlet for Athens, as well as the crucible of the rebetico music scene that took shape in the taverns, coffee shops, and hash dens

of the bustling port. For any single mother, it would have been a challenging place to raise a teenager, like Lefke, who would not remain in Greece for more than a year. She soon left her young son with her mother and set out for the United States as a third-class passenger on a Greek steamliner called the Themistocles, which had not long before routinely conveyed passengers between Smyrna, Piraeus, and New York. Her passport contained a paper from the American Consul, certifying that she was the wife of an American citizen, who was in reality her first cousin. Lefki and her cousin traveled to the U.S. at a time when new immigration laws had just created a system of remote visa processing by consulates abroad. There was no precedent for the type of

verification work consular staff were being asked to do, and they weren't always doing it well. If Lefke's cousin even had to resort to bribery or fraud to secure the documents at all, it would not have involved a particularly elaborate or devious plot. On arrival, he did all the talking. In American immigration inspectors, ask Lefke nothing. In other words, Lefke was smuggled into the United States, but the arrangement was not necessarily unusual. Patriarchal laws and social norms made it easy to pass women and girls off as accompanying family members of men, whether they were or not, and notions of female dependency practically required it. Women who arrived alone could be turned away and even deported on the basis that they were, quote, likely to become a public charge, meaning not an economically productive member of society, or at least the type valued by lawmakers. According to the sensibilities of the time, it would have been more problematic for Lefki to

arrive alone. Yet, being someone who entered the country by such means set Lefke's life on a precarious course, because the same legal system that enabled men to traffic women like checked luggage criminalized, unmarried women almost by definition, as middle-class Americans came to view immigrants, especially unemployed men and working women as threats to social order. After the First World War, immigration policy in the United States took an exclusionary turn, with the 1917 and 1924 Immigration Acts discussed in previous episodes of this series. The racially biased visa quota system was engineered specifically to exclude newer groups like Greeks. The sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild published a study of Greek immigration on the eve of the First World War,

And in 1926, he published a book called The Melting Pot Mistake, which argued that the United States could not absorb the immigrants it received over recent decades without dire social consequences. The native citizen of the older American stock, Fairchild wrote, seemingly in reference to himself, finds it difficult to think without a shudder of what the situation would be in this country today if there had been no check to Oriental immigration for the past 100 years. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was a race-based exception to otherwise liberal immigration policies, but in the 1920s, its logic extended to the very groups from Europe in the Mediterranean region

that had begun to arrive in large numbers. Fairchild's pessimistic view of immigration was part of. parcel of the same political zeitgeist that informed developments like the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece. And in fact, he specifically cited Ottoman Greeks as an example of the impossibility of assimilation. The Ottoman Empire had been a melting pot of its own for different ethnolinguistic groups. But in the city of Smyrna, Fairchild wrote, the Turkish-Greek and Armenian languages, not to mention innumerable minor tongues, have been spoken for many generations. Yet he noted no, quote, Smyrna blend has taken shape. The empire that existed for half a millennium

remained a veritable babble. This casual appraisal was questionable. Despite the new reality of the post-war world that brought a compulsory exchange of population, there was a history of deep cultural convergence between Muslim and Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire, and genres like Rebettico were proof of that. But Fairchild's generalizations about Greeks were so widely held at the time that they would have been difficult to question. Though many Americans threw their support behind the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, as they saw Greece as a cradle of Western civilization and democracy, a century of contact since had led many to view Greece as a cautionary tale

of decline and decadence, and they partly blamed the corrupting influence of the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and a vaguely defined oriental nature that had seeped into Greek society. Fairchild singled out Greeks as hopelessly wedded to the so-called Padron system, referring to arrangements in which a middleman, usually of immigrant background himself, facilitated migration by brokering labor contracts for unskilled workers. Padrones of Italian, Greek, Chinese, Mexican, and other foreign origin helped orchestrate the mass migration, the fueled American industrialization, and the construction of railways during the late 19th and early 20th century.

The problem with the contracts, from the vantage point of regulators, was that they were seen as unfree labor, akin to slavery or human trafficking, and the, often very young people brought to the U.S. to work through these contracts were certainly vulnerable to every manner of exploitation. But of course, trafficking, enslavement, and exploitation were at the heart of American history. There was nothing culturally specific to individual immigrant groups about the Padron's system. It was an American phenomenon, and some of its early opponents were the same thing. themselves Italians, seeking to curtail the abuse of fellow Italians in America. For people like Fairchild, however, immigrants were the foundation, not victims, of the enduring underworld of

traffickers in American cities like New York, that in turn justified restrictive immigration policy. In the melting pot mistake, he wrote, The outlook of the Greek father who regards his 10-year-old son simply as a source of financial gain through the operation of the Padron system is too far removed from that of the typical American to leave any hope for adjustment through compromise. The pioneering social worker, Grace Abbott, also fixated on Greek immigrant men, but contrary to Fairchild, portrayed them as redeemable,

arguing that they possessed qualities, which made them potentially good Americans. It was unreasonable to seeing Greek men the failure to emulate, quote, the glory of ancient Greece. However, the social conditions in the U.S., according to Abbott, had brought out the worst in those who settled in cities like Chicago, where they lived in communal bachelor households she described as non-families. Without children, wives, and sisters, these Greek men, some of whom were practically children themselves,

imbibed the raw vice of the city. Instead of a wife or daughter, they relied on hired housekeepers and other women who offered services that lent themselves to suppose debauchery. And some, she suggested, engaged in homosexual relationships. Abbott used the Greek case to argue that the solution to the, quote, immigrant problem was what she called normal family relationships. And that solution, of course, required more Greek women, not those in the mold of the old country, who lived in what she described as Oriental seclusion,

but rather modern immigrant women adapted to the norms and values of American society. Whether Greeks were corrupting America or America was corrupting Greeks, gender explained why America's increasingly diverse cities were not merely natural product, of an interconnected capitalist world, but rather a social ill created by that world. Stereotypes about Greeks served a paternalist form of progressivism that centered on anxiety about the consequences of immigration. That discourse was racial, and ideas about Greek men mirrored white reactions to immigration from Japan and the Caribbean, as well as the great migration of African Americans from the South to the cities of the North, which, as we know

today produced precious cultural movements from the Harlem Renaissance to the Chicago blues. Thematically and socially, Rebettico has been compared to the blues, and the song, My Double-Stringed Buzuki, referring to the instrument that gave Rebatico its distinctive sound, is a great example of why. It's such a beautiful emblem of this world of modern Greek artistic culture, because it's a hybrid instrument that's based on long-necked bull-backed, eastern Mediterranean lutes, with Italian-style mandola neck stuck on it, and it bears a Turkish name, Bozuk Broken, but it refers to different tuning systems.

This 1937 recording by Marcos Vam Vakaris, accompanied by Stratos Payumtze, is dedicated to the instrument and the genre itself, the miserable heartbroken musician's only friend. The anxieties of American voters, which by American immigration law and the assemblage of institutions it brought together, which in turn defined the limited menu of options available to immigrant women,

like Lefki when they arrived. In 1927, Lefke chose what some critics of immigration would have seen as the right thing. A few months shy of what might have been her 16th birthday, she married a naturalized Greek immigrant. They honeymooned in Niagara Falls, and like many visitors, briefly crossed the border to view the falls from the Canadian side and have their pictures taken with the iconic fairy, the maid of the mist. To reenter the U.S., all Lefke's husband had to do was tell the border authorities that she was his wife, just as her cousin had done a few years prior. That innocent, fleeting border crossing would become a key piece of evidence

that Lefki's husband, Evangalos, would use to instigate her deportation some years later. Like his new wife, Evangalos was born in a war-torn region of the Ottoman Empire, in his case, West Macedonia. He left his hometown of Siatista, less than a year before the outbreak of the First Balkan War in 1912. And in New York, he ran a fur shop with his house. his brother. Now, it would be easy to go down a rabbit hole about the Manhattan fur trade. Joanna Carvonidas Nicosi wrote a 500-page dissertation about how immigrants from West Macedonia dominated the industry during the first half of the 20th century. Their ascendants owed in part

to the highly developed and organized fur industry in the Ottoman Empire, where they specialized in material from Central Europe. Unlike most artisans who emigrated to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, West Macedonian furriers were able to parlay their capital directly into prominent positions, turning Manhattan into a lucrative new outpost for merchants from Castoria and Siatista. Evangalos started out as one of those young, unmarried Greek men living in the big city, but by the 1920s he had done well for himself, operating a fur business that was at one point just a few blocks from New York University, where the aforementioned Henry Pratt Fairchild was teaching sociology. And the same year that the melting pot mistake was published, the papers, which were full of xenophobic news items that disparaged immigrants at the time, reported a rather unflattering story about our protagonist's future husband.

In 1926, a young Greek woman served Evangolos with what was known as a heart bomb suit, B-A-L-M, not B-O-M-B, though the case certainly exemplified the Love is War paradigm. A few years prior, he had asked his parents to find him a wife on one of their trips to Greece, and he proposed to a woman over telegram based on a photograph. The bride came to live with them in New York, but after some time he broke off their engagement and violently threw her out, leaving her stranded in the city. The suit cited a crude wisecrack from his letter to the woman's parents, in which he instructed them not to include any underwear in her marriage trousseau. The poor young woman had since taken up residence in Red Hook.

a seedy area of Brooklyn, known for the proliferation of shanty towns and large numbers of unemployed men. Evangalus denied that he had promised to marry the woman and offered a first-class ticket back to Greece, but he lost the case and was ordered to pay thousands of dollars and damages. Evangalus was punished for treating his fiancé like a disposable object, much like the shards of flesh and fur he bought and sold at his shop in Manhattan. But American citizenship enabled him to do something he could have probably never gotten away, with back in Macedonia. The law gave Greek immigrant men power over women back home, power that was augmented by new visa restrictions that made it harder than ever to reach America.

There's no account of how they met, but the year after the heart bomb suit, a vangalos married Lefki, the teenage girl who had come to the U.S. posing as the wife of her cousin, Emmanuel. At the time of her deportation hearing, Emmanuel was working as a taxi driver in Queens, but she had not seen him since her marriage. He had clashed with her new husband, seemingly out of protectiveness for his cousin, though Evangelo's, for his part, claim that the pair weren't even really cousins at all. We can infer from documentary fragments that whether or not there were blood relatives, he must have been more than a cousin to Lefki, a parental figure who did not easily fit into conventional terms of kinship.

Emmanuel was one of the growing number of Ottoman Greek men who hopped on a steamship in Smyrna and went to America in the years leading up to World War I. He left Sokia around the time Lefki was born. In New York, he worked as a bartender in an apartment hotel on the Upper East Side, until enlisting in the Navy when the U.S. joined the war on the side of the Allies. He was naturalized in 1918. A photograph reveals a small man in his late 20s with an already receding hairline. After the war, Emmanuel applied for an American passport.

In that photo, he's well-dressed, wearing a sharp, brimmed hat. The application included a letter of support from his former boss at the Leonori Hotel. Emmanuel also provided translated excerpts of letters from family to explain the purpose of his travel. Over the past year, his mother had been desperately trying to contact him, because his father was, quote, killed at his farm by the Turks in 1918. At the end of the war, Emmanuel was able to send a letter to his family via the Red Cross, which only reached them in March 1919. Words cannot express the happiness when we received your telegram.

the reply read. If our father should arise from the grave, we could hardly feel any happier. We really thought you two were dead. But thank God it is not so. After we receive your letter and address, we will tell you in detail all the horrible happenings in the family. The family begged Emmanuel to return to take care of them and their shuttered farmhouse in Sokia. Emmanuel wrote in his application that he planned to bring his family back to New York. It was approved with a note that, quote, he should understand that issuance does not imply permission to such members of his family who are not American citizens to enter the United States.

Emmanuel had settled in the U.S. during a period of relatively open borders, but the war brought that era to a close, beginning with the Immigration Act of 1917, which completely barred migrants from Asia, vaguely defined, and Emmanuel had the misfortune of being a Greek from Asia Minor. He left for Smyrna in August of 1919, and registered with the American Consulate in indicating that he was home to, quote, settle my affairs and planned to return to the U.S. after, quote, I settle my affairs. There's no record of him returning to the U.S. during those years.

If he remained up to Greece's defeat in 1922 and left the region with the other refugees, like Lefki after the destruction of Smyrna, he and his family must have seen a lot. And even though he was a citizen, he would have had to choose between America and his family in the exchange of populations. In the span of a few years, the young New York bartender had become a soldier, citizen, and head of a fatherless household from a refugee community shattered by two wars. Emmanuel was one of the fortunate few from that community who possessed an escape parachute in the form of U.S. citizenship.

There's no indication that he ever fulfilled his wish of bringing his mother, sister, and little brother to the U.S. It's not even clear that they survived the great catastrophe. However, in October 1923, he boarded a ship in Piraeus with his cousin left, Lefke listed as his 19-year-old wife. She was in fact younger than that, but the pair must have carried a lifetime of trauma, as well as memories of families ravaged by war that would soon be lost to time. So yes, Lefki entered the U.S. fraudulently, and it's possible that she and Emanuel were not even really cousins, as her ex-husband alleged.

But after a war in which so many laws, moral standards, and people were so grossly violated, What did that matter? Or rather, what does it mean that it could have mattered enough to American immigration authorities that they would work so hard to deport not just Lefki, but also her American-born daughter, seemingly at the father's behest. That's right. In the seven long years that she was married to Evangalos in New York, Lefke had another child, and when they separated in 1934, she maintained custody of her daughter as a single woman

in New York City. She had been awarded alimony and child support, but at her deportation hearing in 1996, money was not all that was at stake. Evangilos disowned his daughter, jeopardizing her right to even live in the country of her birth. It's not clear how much love there was in Evangalos and Lefki's marriage, but not long after her daughter's birth in February 1933, it became all-out war. By that summer, Evangolos had begun legal proceedings against her with the Supreme Court of New York, which some years prior had ruled against him in the sensational heart bomb case. From the outset of their acrimonious separation, his lawyer worked to obtain documents which certified that Lefke entered the country posing as the wife of her cousin.

However, officials apparently denied requests to make those documents part of the case. Two years passed between their separation and the moment when Avangalos appeared at Ellis Island to make a sworn statement that led to Lefke's deportation hearing. He didn't just accuse her of crossing the border without a visa, once as a teenager, and again, with him, to see the American side of Niagara Falls. He also lobbed other accusations that are not deportable offenses today, but could be made into them within the moralistic and gender legal world she lived in. Evangelo said of his ex-wife that she was untrustworthy.

He cited the fact that after their marriage, he gave her a sizable sum of money, which she promptly wired to her mother in Greece, who was, after all, taking care of her son. He also said that she, quote, enjoyed the company of men, and since their separation, had unseemly affairs with multiple other guys. The crux of his grievance pertained to alleged infidelity that resulted in the birth of their child. Evangelo said he was positive that he was not the father, and that Lefki basically admitted as much, though she did not in her testimony. As proof, he described an instance in which she was away from home for two days and lied about her whereabouts. She said she was staying with a friend to attend a baptism party, but in fact, she had attended, quote,

a dance with an employee of the Greek consulate, the alleged father. It was a serious accusation, albeit not one taken seriously by the court in their divorce proceedings. But also, isn't it easy to imagine how on a spring day in 1932, with the Greek-American music scene in New York coming into its own, the restless young housewife of a boorish, middle-aged furrier might sneak out to have some fun? Isn't that what the prohibition era was all about? In that spirit, let's enjoy this 1932 rebetico classic,

which would have been at home in any blues club during Prohibition. It's another tune about heartbreak, performed by Greek music icon Rosa Eskenazi, entitled Why I Smoke Cocaine. Whatever transpired in their marriage did not change the fact that Lefke's husband owed her hundreds of dollars in unpaid alimony, in addition to her daughter's child support. And it's hard to ignore the fact that deporting Lefke and her daughter would save Evangalos the equivalent of many thousands of dollars in today's terms. The court had awarded her enough to make rent in the 1930s,

which was all the more precious in the context of the Great Depression. When Evangalos married Lefke in 1927, the New York fur trade was at its height, but after the stock market crash in 1929, the industry tanked and by 1936 had contracted by somewhere around 40%. Decline in America reverberated in Greece, where a dramatic loss of remittances left people like Lefke's mother and family on hard times. Both Lefke and Evangoulos were strapped for cash. Lefke didn't know exactly why she was brought in for a hearing at Ellis Island, but when immigration authorities interrogated her, she raised the issue of unpaid alimony. And when asked

what led to their separation, she had a totally different view. She plainly stated that Evangalos suffered from an untreated venereal disease. She even expressed willingness to go back to him if he would have her, and if he could be cured of his affliction. When asked why she should be allowed to remain in the U.S., a question posed at every deportation hearing, Lefke said simply, I have a child born here, and I was not to blame for the illegal manner in which I entered the United States. The immigrant inspector on Lefke's case, however, recommended that she be deported to Greece with her daughter. Upon her statement that she could not pay for the journey, he further recommended that the U.S. government foot the bill.

Deportation was not just expensive, but in the case of people like Lefke, it required considerable diplomatic labor. She had been in the U.S. for over ten years. and did not possess a passport. She was born in the Ottoman Empire, and documents that would certify her identity, such as baptismal records, were likely destroyed during the war. Moreover, she had traveled to Greece as a refugee when she was still a child and left the country not long after. Under the exchange of populations, someone like her was automatically a Greek national,

but only if anything about her life could be proven. American diplomats took up the case with the Greek foreign ministry, which was receiving a constant of requests related to deportation. But Lefke's case was not an easy one, and bigger things were happening in Greece. Not long after her deportation hearing, the newly appointed Prime Minister, Ioannis Mattaxas, declared a state of emergency and closed the parliament indefinitely. Among the casualties of the right-wing Metaxas regime were the pioneers of Rabatiko. The new government cracked down on nightlife, censored music recordings with transgressive themes,

and locked many people up on drug charges. Greece was one of many countries in Europe where political turmoil birthed right-wing dictatorships during the middle of the 1930s. Throughout 1937, American officials received no concrete response about Lefke's case. But at the beginning of 1938, Greek authorities finally went to speak with Lefke's mother, whose testimony proved a satisfactory basis for issuing Lefke a Greek passport. The deportation was finally underway. Their American counterparts, probably with a key detail mentioned in her deportation case, that Evangalos, the person who dragged her before INS in the first place, disputed paternity of their child. That would have made it hard to get a Greek

travel document. Some months after issuing the passport, Greek officials followed up with the American ambassador to find out if Lefki had departed yet, the name of the vessel, and when she was expected to arrive. Her file in the embassy records ends there, with a reply that authorities at Ellis Island were, quote, unable to locate her. By the 1930s, the growing deportation state had expanded the scope of the growing carceral state. But it was expensive to detain people like Lefke. And so, throughout her deportation case, she was released on bond.

In such a situation, it was not hard for her to escape the gaze of migration authorities, if she wanted to. But for years after their separation, Lefke's husband kept tabs on her. More precisely, he was stalking her, cataloging her every, transgression. Yet beyond her illicit entries into the country, the only thing Avangalos alleged that was certifiably true was that Lefki pled guilty to theft after pawning a ring that she had held as collateral on a loan to a neighbor, alongside a few pieces of her own. Pawning jewelry was something that women had to do all the time during the Great Depression,

especially those in Lefke's predicament. It was not a deportable offense. It did not meet the vague threshold of, quote, moral turpitude laid out in the law. law. The detail about her pawning jewelry was interesting, though, because around the time of her deportation, she became involved with a man named Albert, who owned a midtown jewelry store with his brother. In an article about a 1935 robbery at their shop, Albert appears with dignified streaks of gray in his slicked back hair, and from his naturalization records, we learned that like Lefke's husband, he was a Greek immigrant from the formerly Ottoman Balkans, specifically the city of Yanina and Epirus.

Elbert lived in the Bronx north of Yankee Stadium on the Grand Concourse, which was booming with construction of modern middle-class housing despite the Great Depression. And after her hearing, he emerged as the only person standing between Lefki and the American deportation machine. When the immigrant inspector on Lefke's case didn't find her at her listed address in the Bronx, he stopped by Evangolos's fur shop in Manhattan to ask if he knew about her whereabouts. Sure enough, Evangalos already knew about Albert and had even followed him out to Brighton Beach, where he believed his ex-wife was secretly living in an apartment near the boardwalk.

Albert wasn't hard to find because Evangalos's child support payments were being forwarded to the address of his jewelry shop. The immigration inspector proceeded to follow Albert to Brighton Beach himself. According to his report, Albert seemed aware that he was being watched. He ran to the subway after closing his shop and displayed nervous behavior on the train. In fact, the inspector hypothesized that the Brighton Beach apartments he visited were a decoy, and that Lefki was living somewhere else nearby. In hopes of helping procure her, Evangalos's lawyer notified Elbert that she would have to

sign personally for any future payments. The coordinated sting seems to have worked. A few weeks later, officers apprehended Lefke and her daughter and brought them to an immigrant detention center. There, they photographed the child to revalidate her travel document, which survives in the U.S. archives. The picture is essentially a mug shop. Lefke's daughter wears a patterned dress made from fabric that on close inspection has playful images of little mushrooms. On her collar is a placard containing her name and an identification number. She looks a little confused and scared, though her expression is partially obscured by the fact that the fold in the document runs directly over her mouth.

The disfiguration adds further weight to the disturbing image of a small American child, disowned by her legal father, awaiting deportation in a government detention facility. I first encountered Lefke's story in the diplomatic archives, where she suddenly disappears with no explanation of what happened. But when I read the other side of her file in the immigration archives, I was relieved to learn that the Department of Justice overturned her deportation once she got her day in court. The district attorney ruled that Lefke's case had been mishandled, perhaps deliberately. The law of the United States ultimately protected her from the institutions set up to govern immigration,

but things could have easily turned out very differently. Perhaps Albert had arranged a lawyer. Legal representation usually made a big difference. Without it, many otherwise innocent migrants were wrong. wrongfully deported or self-deported just to escape detention. The months of delay gained when Albert helped her hide, not to mention the extended period of delay in issuing her Greek passport, were also pivotal in the outcome. Lefki and her daughter could have easily been cast out to the sea again if immigration authorities

and Evangilos were unimpeded in their efforts. Lefke's deportation case touched on many aspects of the times in which she lived. The sorrows of the Greco-Turkish War and the exchange of populations, the challenges of immigrant life in New York, the law as a weapon of patriarchy, the follies of a zealous deportation state, the vulnerability of children and the resilience of the Greek diaspora. Men were an important through line, a father who died young and a man who abducted her, a cousin who brought her to America and a naturalized immigrant husband who tried to deport her, another man who tried to protect her, the immigration authorities who refused to relent,

and the district attorney who stepped in at the end. That story doesn't negate Lefki's own agency. She was the winner in the struggle of love and war. But it reveals how men and the law shaped the options of every immigrant woman in the Great Depression. I started working on this episode more than six years ago, and part of what delayed it is I didn't exactly know how the story ended. If you'll notice, I haven't been using many last names.

Our protagonist Lefke simply didn't have one, another artifact of the patriarchal legal regimes that recorded her life. She entered the U.S. with the Anglicized last name of her cousin, and she used the Greek version in other contexts. Meanwhile, her marriage certificate to Avangelos used her mother's last name. Her deportation file used his. Later she started using Alberts, after they apparently married. Her nickname, Lefke, was the most stable feature of her identity, even though official documents

often contained a completely different name. The other reason I avoided using last names is to give the people in the story a degree of anonymity. They have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who are still out there and deserve to know what happened if they want to, but given the weighty contents, maybe not stumble upon it too casually in our hyper-connected digital world. But here's what I can gather about how it all ended. I knew that Lefki and Elbert were living together in 1940, and Lefke's daughter was listed as his stepdaughter on the census.

But I didn't know what became of her. And the clues I had suggested that she might have died or disappeared. But census records become public record after 72 years, and the 1950 census provided a key piece of the puzzle. Lefke's daughter started going by a different first name, and eventually last name, which of course was common in that era, especially for women, and is another example of how conventional tools and methods of genealogy have a gender bias. Discovering the name change unlocked everything. A few years later, in her early 20s, we see her on a ship manifest bound for Greece

on a planned two-year stay. I don't know what she did there, but a few years after that, she turns up married to another Greek-American in New York. In case you're wondering, Lefke's cousin Emmanuel lived a long but solitary life. On his World War II draft card, for example, in the field of name and person who will always know your address, he indicated none. He passed away about 30 years later in Tarpon Springs, Florida, but I never managed to find him in any census records.

His erstwhile rival, Lefke's ex-husband, Avangalos, is another figure who's hard to track because there were two furriers named Avangalos in New York from Siatista with the same last name, born within a few years of each other. The one in question remarried by 1940, and later in life, I think he moved to Greece. If you're rooting against him, I have bad news.

He lived to be 90. Whatever their differences, voting records reveal that the three men in Lefke's life, Emmanuel, Avangeloos, and Albert, all voted Democrat, at least until Eisenhower's re-election campaign. The story of Lefke and her children had a rather cinematic ending.

I discovered that her son, whom she left with her mother in Greece, eventually came to the United States after serving in the Greek army during World War II. He went by James and worked in New York as an engineer, eventually retiring to Florida. His death certificate listed Lefki and Albert as his parents, but his obituary gestured to what was possibly more emotionally true. Aside from an unnamed grandchild and a daughter in Greece, whose name was mangled by whoever wrote the obituary, he was reportedly survived by his own. his mother living in New York. Only the name given was not Lefke's, rather that of her mother

who had raised him. I think possibly wires got crossed in the construction of the obituary, and it was in fact Lefke who was still alive, but I don't know when or where she and Albert died. Lefke's son was also survived by his half-sister, whose childhood mugshot had haunted me for so many years. And at this time, my best guess is that she's in her early 90s, living in Florida or Queens. I haven't been able to conclusively identify any kin, and at a certain point, this kind of research becomes intrusive. If Lefke's people ever find me, I'm happy to share the materials I have and add new layers to what I've presented in this episode. People don't have simple unified understandings of their family history. The work we do as historians can be affirming, but it can

also be perplexing, disruptive, upsetting, and even unwelcome to people who have a personal connection to the topic. We often see comfort and history that affirms our present, idealizes the past, and papers over intergenerational trauma like a cheap bandage. But I don't think that avoiding the past does anything for our future. And the thing I like most about Rabatico as a musical genre is its embrace and celebration of imperfect people surviving in an imperfect world. The scholars of migration I've talked to over the years always emphasize that the foremost question to ask is what our scholarship means for the lives of migrants and refugees in the politically charged moment of our present. We shouldn't get caught up in a narrative of oppressors and victims,

innocence and guilt, or good guys and bad guys, because the idea that immigrants only have rights if they're good people so often becomes an instrument of their oppression. That being said, I did take Lefke's side a bit in this story because the men who committed her history to record so clearly sided against her. The law rendered them accomplices in a naturalized citizen's attempt to either punish his ex-wife, cheat her out of her alimony, get her back, or all of the above. That's abusive behavior, but all's fair in love and war, which is why we have laws that are supposed to protect against such scenarios.

In 1994, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act with bipartisan support in order to better prosecute and protect against domestic violence. In the decades since, most of its provisions have been popular. However, certain aspects of the act prove controversial in deliberations. over reauthorization. One of the updated provisions challenged by Republican lawmakers was the creation of so-called U visas

for non-citizens who are victims of abuse. This mechanism allows for undocumented people or people whose immigration status may be tied to a domestic partner or guardian to report and escape abusive situations without fear of deportation. Opponents have misleadingly portrayed the provision as an easy visa loophole for undocumented immigrants.

though the heart of the debate stems more from other aspects pertaining to gun purchases by accused abusers. Just as we live in a country where migrants are routinely demonized for political gain, some people lack the political will to defend immigrant rights if they conflict with gun rights. That's all for now, but if you want to learn more, I've included some suggested episodes featuring scholars of migration, past and present, on the blog post associated with this episode on the Ottoman History podcast website. We'll be returning to Lefke's story and the other stories featured in the first three episodes of this series, which have focused on illicit migration. The next installment, which centers on an Assyrian man born in late Ottoman Anatolia, builds

on those episodes to explore the world of human smuggling in Cuba and the misunderstood history of unauthorized migration from Europe to the United States. Join us next time, whenever that is, for the next installment of deporting Ottoman Americans. I'm Chris Grayton. Thanks for listening.