Ottoman History Podcast - Turkino

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

Episode 411 Produced and Narrated by Chris Gratien Episode Consultant: Devin Naar Series Consultant: Emily Pope-Obeda Script Editor: Sam Dolbee with additional contributions by Devi Mays, Claudrena Harold, Victoria Saker Woeste, Sam Negri, and Louis Negri Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Leo lived in New York City with his family. Born and educated in the cosmopolitan Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he was now part of the vibrant and richly-textured social fabric of America's largest metropolis as one one of the tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews who migrated to the US. Though he spoke four languages, Leo held jobs such as garbage collector and shoeshine during the Great Depression. Sometimes he couldn't find any work at all. But his woes were compounded when immigration authorities discovered he had entered the US using fraudulent documents. Yet Leo was not alone; his story was the story of many Jewish migrants throughout the world during the interwar era who saw the gates closing before them at every turn. Through Leo and his brush with deportation, we examine the history of the US as would-be refuge for Jews facing persecution elsewhere, highlight the indelible link between anti-immigrant policy and illicit migration, and explore transformations in the history of race in New York City through the history of Leo and his family. This episode is part of our investigative series Deporting Ottoman Americans. « Click for More »

In January 1935, an article ran in a handful of American newspapers as a sort of funny human interest piece. Perhaps the humor would be lost on the reader of today. Quote, Albert Levy, Bulgarian, his wife, Sophie, Spaniard, and Mr. and Mrs. Leon Negri, Spanish Jews born in Turkey, were held into court in a wife-beating case. Levy was the defendant, the Negres being called as witness. The magistrate immediately dismissed the case, saying, and here's the punchline, It's not my business to settle international affairs. Let's review.

A group of people appeared in court to adjudicate a case of spousal abuse, and the judge threw out the case because the defendant, plaintiff, and witnesses had funny accents. Then, somebody found that news so bizarre that it was reported in newspapers across the country not as an expose, but rather as comic relief. That was America during the 1930s. Mr. and Mrs. Leo Negri, as Spanish Jews from Turkey, were apparently too exotic for the magistrate.

He simply couldn't take seriously the notion of such a seemingly hybrid identity. But the Negri's community had a single, simple word for describing their identity. Trukino, a word used to describe Sephardic Jews of the former Ottoman Empire. This podcast explores the history of that community during their global migration experience of the 19th and 20th centuries. And it does so through the life of Leo Negri. During the 1930s, he was one of over one million Jewish residents of New York. His wife Flora was a native-born American, as were their children, and his parents were legal immigrants. But he was not.

And after nearly a decade in the country, this fact would come back to haunt him. Just a year after that news item ran, Leo was sitting before an immigration inspector for a deportation hearing at Ellis Island. The result was a legal battle to remain in the US that lasted for years. Over the next hour, we'll uncover his story and follow it all the way to the end. I don't know what happened with the deportation. That's like a blank. Through his life and experiences, we'll examine the history of people who became experts at

blending in because their lives depended on it. They were a very small minority within the Jewish communal dynamic. These are not people who are thinking in depth about what does it mean to be Sephardic. And how they fit into the shifting landscape of race and politics in American cities. How do you capture the persistence,

the resiliency of white supremacy and racism and economic exploitation, and at the same time respect the singularity of a certain political moment. I'm Chris Grayton, and this is Deporting Ottoman Americans. In our last installment, we followed Hassan and the early Arab diaspora out to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. we followed Hassan and the early Arab diaspora out to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. For our next few episodes, we're headed back to New York City, where his and so many immigrant stories began. What follows is the story of a man who went by many names.

His family and friends in America knew him as Leo. He had been born in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul and adopted the name Léon, which was a French equivalent for his birth name, Yuda. Yuda, son of Michon, aka Leo Negri, was one of roughly a million people who lived in one of the largest and most diverse cities of the early 20th century. In a photograph from his teenage years, he looked like just another adolescent with a fez and a mustache. And he might not have stood out in the rapidly growing metropolis of New York City either. growing metropolis of New York City either. By 1920, over a third of the city's population was foreign-born, and Jewish immigrants constituted much of that population. However, Leo Negri belonged to a distinctive community within a community, and like Leo himself, they could be

identified by different names that emphasized different aspects of their identity. In their own language, they sometimes adopted the curious label of Turquino. Turquino is a term that in its origins, at least as we see it in the mid and late 19th century, basically means Ottoman citizen in Ladino. Now when Ottoman Jews come to the United States in the beginning of the 20th century, that term takes on a more narrowed meaning and they use the concept of Turquino to refer specifically to Ottoman-born Jews and their descendants.

Devin Nahr is chair of the Sephardic Studies program at University of Washington. He explained to me how Turquino came to refer to a subset of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora in the Ottoman Empire that was forged in the fateful year of 1492. Yes, the year of Columbus's voyages, but that was also the year of the Alhambra Decree, in which Spain banished Jews who did not convert to Christianity from the Iberian Peninsula. Along with the forced conversion and expulsion of Iberian Muslims, this represented the culmination of what came to be called the Reconquista. After their expulsion, tens of thousands of Iberian Jews ended up in the newly ascendant Ottoman Empire, where they were a welcome presence in its growing Mediterranean ports.

Their descendants remained for centuries and many developed a unique diasporic identity, Their descendants remained for centuries and many developed a unique diasporic identity, continuing to speak a language resembling Spanish and often adopting Hebrew, Arabic or Latinate surnames, like Negri. One of the markers of this particular community was indeed this language that came to be called either Judeo-Spanish, Judeo, which means Jewish, or Ladino. And this was a language that did not exist in the Iberian Peninsula prior to expulsion, but it's a language that was produced from the Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire once they migrated there. Son chiquitico Son tequiado

No tengo quince años Me va a morir Que va a ser mi madre What will my mother do? The cold and the hunger will not kill me. University of Michigan historian Davy Mays studies Sephardic migration, not the first exodus in 1492, but rather a later wave that involved our protagonist Leo Negri and countless others. What I call the modern Sephardic diaspora, and that is the late 19th and early 20th century movements of Ladino-speaking Jews from Ottoman and formerly Ottoman lands to Western Europe, to the United States, and to Mexico in particular and beyond. What's particularly interesting to me is the end of empire and how do people who come from a sort of imperial

background make sense of this change into nationalizing states. The most important centers of Sephardic life in the late Ottoman Empire were the city of Salonika, now in Greece, and Leo's hometown of Istanbul. His experience there was emblematic of the broader Sephardic experience at that time. He was educated in a school run by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, a Paris-based organization founded

during the 19th century to protect the rights and promote the education of Jews around the world. Ottoman Jews educated in these schools were subjected to a certain kind of civilizing mission. They were educated in French and introduced to Western pedagogy. This education might not have been wholly different from that received by many Ottoman subjects who enrolled in schools run by European and American missionaries, or those educated in the new modern high schools opened by the Ottoman government during the last decades

of Ottoman rule. In Istanbul, Leo Negri was part of an emerging middle-class urban community that along with the communities of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and various others were increasingly global in their outlook. They possessed a new awareness of Europe and the Americas, and they also had a new sense of imperial citizenship in an era of constitutional revolutions. Sephardic Jews were vigorous participants in the cultural and political life of the late Ottoman Empire. But like everyone else, they found the political terrain changing beneath their feet after the First World War. The Ottoman Empire was fragmenting into a number of different states, including the Republic of Turkey,

and the people who called themselves Turkinos suddenly began to feel more alienated from their Turkish identity. Turkinos suddenly began to feel more alienated from their Turkish identity. As Istanbul became less cosmopolitan, New York City might have seemed like the next best thing. So, like on the Lower East Side of New York, where many Ottoman-born Jews congregate, the Judeo-Spanish press in the United States will refer to that area, like the area around Rivington Street say, as the center of Turkino life, or the center of the Kolonia Turkina, of the Turkino colony. And there, what's very interesting is they're using imperial language as well,

to think of themselves as an outpost of Ottoman Jews still connected to their imperial Ottoman metropole. On our website, we've got images from an article in the New York Tribune from 1912, On our website, we've got images from an article in the New York Tribune from 1912, profiling New York's small community that it described as Jews who know no Yiddish, a convenient umbrella for the Turkinos, as well as Sephardic Jews from the Balkans and Mizrahi or Arabic-speaking Jews. This community was living between the Ashkenazi community and the Italian community, in the author's judgment, because of their need for access to olive oil, a feature that was shared among their different subgroups but distinctive from Eastern European Jews. The article clearly embodied some of the common anxieties about immigration during that time,

warning of this tiny community living largely separate lives from the surroundings of the city, congregating in their own cafes being their chief form of social life. But it also noted the many immigrants who had naturalized in the rapidly growing numbers of those in the process of naturalizing. It depicted this community of several thousand as being made up of largely poor single men struggling to pay rent and working odd jobs. The Turquinos specialized in jobs like selling candy at movie theaters and shining shoes. About a hundred were polishing boots on Delancey Street for two cents a shine, usually without permits, meaning that they continually risked run-ins with law enforcement.

That article also noted that they enjoyed higher than average rates of literacy in one major Ladino newspaper in New York called La America. The pages of La America, published by a Sephardic immigrant from Bulgaria, Moise Gadol, spoke to the extent to which the Turkinos were regarded as a community within a community. They felt marginalized by the Ashkenazi majority, which projected onto the Sephardim many of the same race and class-based stereotypes that Anglo-Saxon Protestant America put on the Jewish community as a whole. The early Ladino press reveals serious intra-communal divisions that left the Turkinos unsure about their belonging within the emergent Jewish American community. They were a very small

minority within the Jewish communal dynamic in the United States. If you have maybe two and a half million Jews coming from Eastern Europe, mostly speaking Yiddish, you have maybe 50,000-60,000 Ladino-speaking, Ottoman-born Jews. Even though it was becoming a prime destination for Jewish immigrants, New York wasn't the first stop for many Sephardic Jews. Within the modern immigrant experience, language, religion, and race really mattered, and people like Leo occupied a unique position. With the exception of the U.S., Canada, and Brazil,

all major destinations for migration in the Americas were predominantly Spanish-speaking countries. From Buenos Aires to Havana to Veracruz, Sephardic migrants could find welcoming ports where the lingua franca was not so different from their own. And there are stories that I think are probably apocryphal at this point. They can't possibly be true, but almost every immigrant who tells often her story as opposed to his story talks about coming off the boat in Veracruz in Mexico, in the major migration port in Mexico, and looking around and saying,

I didn't know this country was populated all by Jews, because they heard Spanish and assumed that everyone there must be Jewish, because the only people they'd heard speaking a form of Spanish before were Jewish. Latin American countries were attractive destinations for Sephardic migration, and in some cases, their purported Iberian heritage made them desirable immigrants. Mexican officials actually wanted, in particular, to encourage the migration or the immigration of Sephardic Jews to Mexico

because they deemed them as being assimilable, as being Spanish. Yet perhaps the real advantage of being a Turquino They deemed them as being assimilable, as being Spanish. Yet, perhaps the real advantage of being a Turquino was that it was easier to blend in. The Iberian ancestry of migrant forebearers centuries prior was inextricable from their Jewish identity in Ottoman Istanbul. But when Leo Negri sought to go elsewhere, his vaguely Spanish appearance and accent meant something different. They meant that he wasn't easily identifiable as Jewish. And this would prove valuable during an era in which migrants from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean were searching to find some way, anyway, to enter the U.S. after the federal government closed the gates. Ottoman-born Jews, because of the interesting constellation of culture and geography,

and I've heard this from oral histories, from people speaking to me from earlier generations, saying that we were the only people in America, and pardon my language, who could be, depending on where you were and say what street of Harlem you were walking down, could be denigrated as a Qayyik, a Spik, a Dago, and an Ali Baba. Leo Negri had three basic identities he could claim. His country of origin, Turkey. His religion, Jewish, which also mapped on to the racial category of Hebrew in the U.S. at the time. And his language, Spanish. But for white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite of the United States,

none of these were particularly welcome elements. The history of Jewish immigration fit the notion of the American dream almost too well. In a world full of persecution, pogroms, and ghettos, Jews had found a home in the U.S., and though they entered near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, they seemed to be thriving. Maybe not everyone. As was common in migrant groups of that period, roughly a quarter of European Jewish immigrants would leave the U.S. But nonetheless, the Jewish American community was emblematic of America's changing demographics and the fight for equality. You can't understand sort of the eugenics movement without understanding

a sort of white populace, a white elite that's concerned about the sort of upsurge in intellectual activity among African Americans. Eugenics occurs at the same time that this cultural renaissance of arts and letters, the Harlem Renaissance occurs. University of Virginia professor Claudrina Harold sees the nativist sentiments and eugenics movement of the 1920s as inextricable from the threat posed by the mobility and political transformation of African Americans and other historically marginalized groups. Jewish Americans were definitely part of this picture. Here's Victoria Saker-Wiesty.

You know, unlike African Americans who faced all kinds of enacted legislative discrimination, Jews were pretty free from that kind of civil inhibition, but they faced tons and tons of social and informal discrimination in schools and social clubs and the professions where they lived. In the 1920s, parts of New York City like the Lower East Side, Harlem, and much of Brooklyn were enclaves where new migrants like Leo felt safe. They were full of Jewish people from all over the world, kosher food, synagogues, and schools. There were relatives, albeit sometimes distant ones, through whom one could find work and businesses that were also often owned and run by other Jewish Americans. But once people tried to

leave those enclaves, it was another story. They faced persecution and serious pressure to assimilate or hide markers of difference. The 1920s were a period dominated by the growth of segregation, anti-Semitism, eugenics, immigration quotas, and deportation. And these were all related phenomena.

They were methods that the elite could use to maintain socioeconomic dominance and control the makeup of American identity. But if the white elite believed they were losing control, perhaps they were, or at least never had as much control as they believed. Immigration regulation suggested as much. After 1924, the number of immigration visas offered to prospective Jewish migrants was far fewer than the demand. In fact, the primary target of the immigration quotas was Jewish migration from different countries from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and the Middle East. As a Turkish

national, Leo Negri would have had a hard time getting a visa given that Turkey was allotted just a couple hundred visa spots each year under the quota system. But that wasn't enough to stop him. While visa quotas did reduce the inward flow, they also gave rise to a new issue that remains as present today as ever. A large population of undocumented immigrants. Here's Devi Maize again. doing in research is finding all of these stories of people who are able to sort of manipulate the system of various countries trying to exclude them in order to enter that country.

Our protagonist had left Turkey as Yudanegri, and he lived in the US as Leo. But for a brief moment of his life, he went by yet another name, Ramon Franqui. That was the name on the fake Cuban passport he used to enter the United States in 1928. There was a whole industry in the circulation of fake papers, and consular officials were sometimes in on this. During the roughly four years between that time and when Leo left the Ottoman Empire in 1924, he lived in Havana, Cuba. There was a loophole for those individuals who were coming from certain countries in Latin America, including Mexico and including Cuba. And so there is a rerouting of migrants who wanted to go to the United States instead going to Cuba. There were articles in the Ladino Press of New York

advising people initially to go to Cuba in order to enter the United States. So this is a very simple loophole. But in doing so, to try to cover up that they were Jewish. Documentary evidence reveals very little about his time in Cuba other than the fact that he was working as a peddler. He only had some distant relatives there. His parents were in Turkey, and a brother in the U.S. was the one who bought him the fake passport in 1928. It was much easier to enter the U.S. as a Cuban than as a Turkish citizen. And though Leo Negri was Turkish, his Sephardic background meant that

he looked and sounded like Ramon Franqui. Sephardic Jews in particular, in places like Mexico or in Cuba, passed as Spaniards, or as Mexicans, or as Cubans in coming to the United States. Their names didn't highlight that they were not indeed originating from those places. And because they spoke a form of Spanish already, they spoke Ladino, most American immigration officials would be unable to distinguish between the Spanish of Mexico and the Spanish inflected Ladino of somebody from Edirne who had been in Mexico for several months and was then going to the United States. Illegal immigration was the natural consequence of the visa quota system. In the book Impossible Subjects, Mei Nye documents how these policies gave rise to the notion of the illegal alien,

the migrant whose very movements were criminalized. That's a commonplace notion today, but during the 1920s, it was something novel, and immigration regulations were not necessarily a big deterrent. This may have been especially true for Jews, who weren't migrating only to find a better life or make money, but also as a consequence of continued anti-Semitism in Europe. Libby Garland has documented the phenomenon of Jewish illegal migration during this period in a book entitled After They Closed the Gates. Each wave of pogroms triggered new waves of migrants,

and the rise of Nazism doubled the demand for somewhere to go. Jewish migration didn't stop, it simply became more difficult and stigmatized, which put people like Leo in a vulnerable position. From atop the Low State Theater building, your American Jewish Hour! The B. Manischewitz Company world's largest mat matzo bakers, happily present Yiddish Melodies in Swing. Once in the U.S., Leo continued to go by his real name. Almost immediately after arriving, he was introduced to Flora. Her Romanian-born father sold candy and cigarettes in an office building near Washington Square Park.

Her mother passed away before Leo even reached the U.S. Flora and Leo dated for two years before their marriage, and they had three boys by 1936. Leo worked and participated in community life best as he could, and people like Leo needed their community. During the Depression, he rarely had full employment. His family was often dependent on neighbors and relatives for help, and they were also dependent on relief from the state, which in New Deal America kept many families afloat. It isn't as if Leo didn't have employable skills. For his time, he was highly educated. At the Allianz School in Istanbul, he had picked up French. Add to this Turkish, Ladino, and English,

and you can get a sense of how worldly Leo Negri was simply by circumstance. When he appeared before immigration authorities, he listed a lot of jobs he was able to do. He described himself as an unemployed painter, but he was also ready for work as an electrician, porter, shipping clerk, or interpreter. That's not what was on offer, though. At one of his deportation hearings, Leo explained the bind that his undocumented status created when he tried to find a regular job. Quote, I look for work and they ask me if I'm a citizen, and when I tell them no, they refuse to take me. His family of six, including Flora, the three kids, and his sister, received $36 of relief every two weeks. Leo was often without work, and the work

he could find took a toll on his body, 5'9 and 130 pounds in his early 30s. Previously, he had undertaken New Deal-era relief work, but it had left him unable to do outdoor manual labor. He had worked on a city project to drain some swamps, during which he developed rheumatism or chronic pain in the joints. Later, he briefly found work with the sanitation department removing snow and garbage from the streets. But that ended with even more severe health issues. On an icy winter day in January 1937, he fell off a truck and hit his head, fracturing his skull and sustaining a serious concussion. In total, he was in the hospital for over a month as a result.

As workers' compensation, he received $8 a week for about three months. Ten months after his injury, he was still experiencing periodic disease spells. When asked during his hearing if he would, quote, accept the privilege to voluntarily deport, Leo stated, quote, I have no money, so I cannot leave myself. The home relief keeps my family up. Leo Negri's deportation case stretched on for a few years, during which he tried to find a way to become an American citizen. What allowed him to buy so much time is that he did not have a passport or any document certifying his nationality.

He may have admitted that he was not Ramon Franqui, but he had no way of officially proving that he was Yuda Leon Negri, born and raised in Istanbul. And in such cases, the U.S. government had no way of completing the last phase of a lawful deportation, because every prospective receiving nation also had its own immigration and visa policies. If the U.S. could prove that Leo was indeed a Turkish national, it could expedite the deportation. Precisely because of this possibility, Leo knew it wouldn't have been wise to travel with documents in hand,

so he had left his ID and real passport in Cuba with his stepsister's husband's brother, a peddler with no fixed place of business. In January 1939, more than two years after his initial deportation hearing, American diplomats located Leo's documents where they had remained in Cuba with an even more distant acquaintance. Leo's passport, issued less than a year after the official establishment of the Republic of Turkey, is a fascinating artifact. A bilingual document in Ottoman Turkish and French, it would have likely appeared much more suspect to American authorities than Leo's fake Cuban passport.

It was issued with the validity of only one year, meaning it expired while he was still in Cuba. On the first pages, the original name of the issuing body was written, which was the Government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. This was the name of the first entity claiming to be the legitimate government in Turkey in 1920, which was not internationally recognized until 1923. At this point, the name changed again to the Republic of Turkey. And Leo's passport attests to this transition,

and the government's apparent desire to reuse its old stock of passports. The words government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey were crossed out in blue pen and replaced by Türkiye Cumhuriyeti or the Republic of Turkey, handwritten in Ottoman Turkish. And the language itself was a reminder of the historical change indexed by the document. By 1939, when the American authorities got hold of it, Leo's country of origin didn't even use the alphabet it was printed in anymore. Leo's Ottoman identity card and Turkish passport were solid proof of his nationality,

but they wouldn't be enough alone to travel to Turkey. The passport had long since expired. Turkey had to issue a new one. And during that period, the Turkish government was loath to do so for any member of a non-Turkish minority. Life for the Sephardic community under Ottoman rule had been pretty good. But in the Republic of Turkey, the seeming foreignness of Sephardic culture troubled Turkish nationalists. The 20s were a time in Turkey of intense nationalism and intense nation-state building. And the sort of Spanish heritage and the use of Ladino and the knowledge of the Spanish language was being held up as a reason why Jews could not or were not assimilating or productive members of this new Turkish nation-state.

During the 1930s, Turkish Jews were forced to adopt Turkish first names and surnames. As scholar Meltem Türköz has put it, Isaks became Orhans, Avrams became Ertugrus, and Sabbatais became Sumers. If Leo was headed back to Turkey, he'd have to take on yet another name, at the very least. But Turkey was also not immune from the global spread of anti-Semitism. In 1934, there was a pogrom against Jews in the region of Thrace. It resulted in the removal of nearly the entire Jewish population to Istanbul. Thousands of people were uprooted from a region their ancestors had inhabited for centuries.

The same American diplomats who were processing deportation cases like Leo's monitored such developments with alarm. And yet, deportation cases continued to go forward. The lives of thousands of immigrants like Leo who were caught up in the emerging American deportation state are chronicles of a hulking bureaucracy, both cruelly persistent and laughably ineffective. On the individual level, immigration enforcement might have amounted to simply doing one's job, but on the collective level, it carried very different consequences. This fact has been on full display for the past months at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. at a new exhibit entitled Americans and the Holocaust.

While the exhibit did not go quite as far as to explicitly say that America was complicit in these crimes, it demonstrated that there was considerable anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, and anti-immigrant sentiment at all levels of American society. It also showed how American laws and concern about security contributed to countless tragedies. There was the infamous example of a steamer carrying almost a thousand Jewish asylum seekers being turned away in 1939. But perhaps even more disturbing was the convoluted immigration visa process that prevented perhaps hundreds of thousands of Jews from coming to the U.S. The wait for an immigration

visa under the quota system was many years by the start of the war. Many people died in concentration camps waiting in line for American visas. Sephardic Jews in Turkey, like Leon's family, were relatively safe. Turkey was neutral during the war. But the Sephardic communities of formerly Ottoman parts of Greece, like Salonika, were all but annihilated after Germany occupied Greece in 1941. I was never able to find out how Leo Negri was detected by immigration authorities to begin with. Maybe it was because he was on welfare, or maybe it was that fleeting encounter with the law when he was laughed out of court as a witness in the domestic abuse case with which this episode began. Whatever the case, Leo was

able to escape deportation, but what happened after was bittersweet, to say the least. We realized we know very little about our families, and in my case, especially knowing very little about my father. And then suddenly, this Pandora's box opens up, and there you were. It was incredible. I found Sam Negri, Leo Negri's son, on Facebook. A retired journalist based in Arizona, Sam was born during the 1940s. If his father had been deported, Sam probably would have never existed. I mean, they never discussed that with us.

I knew the fact that he came in with a false name, but I don't know what happened with the deportation. That's like a blank. Louis Negri is Sam's older brother. I met up with Louis last fall at a cafe in Manassas, where he hangs out and paints watercolors. Though their father was from Turkey, Louis and Sam haven't been there and have few remaining links. So a lot of my relatives who were in Turkey are now in Israel. They like Turkey, but if they had a chance, they migrated elsewhere, you know. It wasn't an easy life for them if you were in a community where you're a minority and then you try to work.

Could you imagine how that was, you know, try to get a job? It's like Muslims try to get a job in France and they won't hire them because they don't like them. Their Sephardic background, however, has intersected with the places life took them in surprising ways. I worked in South America 16 years. We did a dumb thing, and it happens in a lot of foreign families. The father spoke to us in Spanish and we answered in English. So when it came time for me to go to South America, I had to go to night school to learn to read and write and speak Spanish. I've spent a lot of time in Mexico.

Two of my daughters are married to Mexican guys. Life took Sam and Louie many places, but they were both born and raised in the close-knit Sephardic community of Brooklyn where their father had ended up. Recently he went to Cuba because he knows he's going to speak to people that understand what he's saying. And then when he came to the United States, on the streets he looked for people and they hung out at coffee houses. Great uncle of ours, Moise, used to go to coffee houses and tell them to get out there, this is America, you gotta go to work. He wrote, he published a newspaper called La America, in their language, in Latino.

For many years, the Negri family lived in Brownsville, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. The world that I grew up in was almost like growing up in some ghetto in Europe someplace. There were hundreds of synagogues. I used to say you could throw a dead cat from any corner and he'd hit a shovel. In Brownsville, the Turquino identity of the Negri family shaped many aspects of daily life. You see, one of the scholars I've interviewed mentioned that there was a distinct Turquino identity of Sephardic Jews who came from the Ottoman Empire. Now that is a really pregnant statement. I think it's absolutely true because while I was still an infant, my parents moved to Brownsville. Brownsville

and East New York are adjacent communities in Brooklyn and they're very poor neighborhoods. Most of that Jewish community, especially on my block, were Ashkenkenazi but when I got old enough to go to Hebrew school I was sent to the United Sephardic Talmud Torah in East New York where all of these families were from some place in Turkey I mean their parents spoke most of them spoke Ladino or Turkish, or usually both, like my father spoke both. That was a very distinct community, and you could see it to a certain extent in the grocery stores. One of my errands was to go to, quote, go to the Greek and buy Turkish coffee. Families like the Negri's scraped for a modest living even after the Depression was over. People were doing almost anything to make a living.

I mean, my father rarely held a job for any length of time. One of the things that he did was he had a shoeshine box. Also, during that time, I think he was working at Steeplechase, or right near it, in Coney Island. What he would do is he'd stand outside with a scale and for, I don't know what, you know, a nickel or something, he'd guess your weight and then he'd stand on the scale and see how close you were. But my parents, my aunts and uncles, and most of the people we knew were on welfare. They were all poor. Even the ones who were working were not making very much money.

They were living in roach-infested tenements like the one I grew up in. The kids never knew they were poor because they took on any job to survive. The street cleaner, they worked in the Department of Sanitation. The other ones in the Garment Center. It was like a chain amongst them. They'd be in touch with their own people. Support from the Jewish community is ultimately what saved Leo from deportation. His case lingered into the 1940s in the midst of the Second World War,

and the National Council of Jewish Women repeatedly lobbied on his behalf. The NCJW was a first-wave feminist organization that focused on a range of issues from voting rights and civil liberties to relief for Jewish families and reuniting Jewish families after World War II. Deporting Leo meant deporting someone's husband and father. Migration and deportation had broken up

many families during that period, and women were often left in particularly vulnerable positions when husbands left or disappeared. Immigration and naturalization services ultimately judged Leo's deportation to be what was referred to as a hardship case. The situation of him and his family was bad enough, and ultimately, deporting Leo was going to cause a bigger problem than letting him stay. It is a proud privilege to be a citizen of the great republic. To realize that we are the descendants of 40 million people who left other countries, other familiar scenes, to come here to the United States to build a new life,

to make a new opportunity for themselves and their children. I think it is not a burden, but a privilege to have the chance in 1963 to share that great concept which they felt so deeply among all of our people, to make this really, as it was for them, a new world, a new world for us and indeed for all those who look to us. That is what this organization has stood for for 50 years. That's what this country has stood for for 200 years, and that's what this country will continue to stand for.

Thank you. John F. Kennedy gave that speech in 1963 as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL was another Jewish organization in the U.S. that got its start protecting the civil liberties of Jews and then began, more broadly, to confront the issues of discrimination and civil rights that dominated the headlines of the 1960s. As the first non-Protestant elected president, Kennedy represented a more inclusive America. The book he wrote, at the request of the ADL, popularized the idea of America as a nation of immigrants.

JFK was assassinated before the book's final publication, but by the end of his Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential term, a return to more liberal immigration policies was complete. People like Leo Negri wouldn't be deprived of an equal shot at the American dream because of their nationality, race, or religion, though they'd still need a visa. At the same time, the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination against all Americans on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. States' rights be damned. Sam Negri was a young reporter in Connecticut at the time. So I go up and talk to the managing editor at this newspaper in Bridgeport, Connecticut,

to apply for a job. Naturally, he wanted to know what kind of experience I had. I had just gotten out of the Navy. I said, well, I've published these poems, you know. To his credit, the guy did not fall on the floor laughing, but he just, he hired me to write obituaries. Sam wasn't content to write obituaries in the midst of an exciting new political current that began to sweep the nation. And he said, no, no, no, we don't care about stuff like that, blah, blah, blah. But I talked him into it. And I went. It was trial by fire for me.

So let me get this straight. The first story you ever covered about somebody who was actually alive was Martin Luther King Jr.? Is that what you were saying? That wasn't the first. It was close to the first, yeah, actually. You know, I never thought of it that way, but that's absolutely true. The problems of Sam's generation were a little different than that of his father's. In the post-war economy, there was more work,

and Sam had plenty on his plate. I was working at the New Haven Register and doing a couple of other things, which is to say that I was walking in my sleep half the time. I was also taking classes at Southern Connecticut State College. And I had three kids who were all very small. After another long day at the paper, Sam was sound asleep around 2.30 a.m., Saturday night or Sunday morning, depending on how you look at it,

January 8, 1967, when an unlikely tragedy rocked his family. And suddenly the telephone rings in the middle of the night, and it was my sister-in-law saying that my father had been shot and I should come down to Brooklyn. All I can remember about that night was that I just handed the phone back to my wife and she hung up the phone and I fell back asleep I fell back asleep I don't know how much time went by and the phone rang again it was my sister where she said where are you and then we went through the whole thing again I realized what was going on that I got dressed went down but it But it's, God, how could I

have fallen back to sleep? I don't know. Except that, I mean, it was absolutely true that I was exhausted most of the time. Still, it's one of those things. But then I went down to New York and my oldest brother, Mo, and I had to go to Kings County Hospital to identify the body. And it was a very chilling experience. Leo Negri, who at this point had lived in New York for almost 40 years, was shot and killed by a complete stranger in Brooklyn, near the intersection of Van Sicklen and New Lots Avenues,

on the border of Brownsville and East New York. My parents and their relatives used to get together a lot, especially on the weekends, and the women would play bingo and the men would play cards, and so that's what they were doing that night. His friends that he was visiting told him, why don't you sleep over there? And he said, no, they want to sleep in their own bed. And it was a big mistake to leave their apartment at night and walk down the street because that's how bad it got. You couldn't walk down the street at night.

You're looking for trouble. Flora and Leo had been on the way to catch a bus when they encountered a group of six young men who had also been out late that night. One of them went for Flora's purse. Leo tried to fend them off. A bus pulled up. They tried to board. And this guy put a bullet right through his heart, from his back to his heart. The bus driver sped off to the nearest phone for help as Leo began hemorrhaging from his mouth. By the time help arrived, Leo had died right there on the floor of the bus. There are heartbreaking photos of the event that appeared in the press. A reporter who came to the scene captured a moment in which Flora collapsed into the arms of police, overwhelmed by her husband's sudden and senseless death. She was in a state of

shock for years. I had her come down to South America and be our guest at our house and she was very tormented, but that messed her up so badly, it's crazy. You don't forget that. To see your husband shot and die right on top of you? Christ, that's terrible. There were almost 1,000 murders and tens of thousands of violent crimes in New York throughout 1967, but most did not involve the level of response that Leo Negri's slaying did. Around 50 detectives immediately swarmed the area. I was just so, so amazed. Here it is the middle of the night, two o'clock in the morning,

these detectives go out and they find these guys. How do you do that? The murder of Leo Negri became national news. I don't think I felt anything. It's like I just shut down. The only time I reacted was at some point while we were sitting shiver. Some guy called from, I don't know where, New York Post, and he started out by mentioning that I was a reporter, and he thought that that was going to make everything okay,

and I was going to give him exactly the quote that he needed. No, I just said, Jesus Christ, man, go away. I don't want to play this stupid fucking game now. Violence is constant. In 1943, there were more than 200 race riots in Detroit. And it was mainly, it was white people fighting against African-Americans who were sometimes attempting to integrate neighborhoods, sometimes just attempting to build public housing

projects. Leo Negri died at the center of America's long urban identity crisis in a neighborhood that had become the site of an ugly backlash by white Brooklynites against the changing face of American cities. In the 1960s, I mean, cities were transforming. You have white flight that is also financed by the government as well. You have deindustrialization. You have the loss of high-paying manufacturing union jobs. So there's a transformation in the political economy. And you have people dealing with the fact that cities are becoming overwhelmingly African-American, but they're still a white power structure. The city council or, say, the school board still being overwhelmingly white or Italian American. Brownsville was archetypical.

You know, the measurement of success in Brownsville and East New York was to get the hell out of it and move to Levittown or someplace on Long Island where people had single family houses and a patch of grass. Historian Wendell Pritchett has written an authoritative study on this transformation entitled Brownsville, Brooklyn, Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. During the period in which families like the Negrees settled in Brownsville, Pritchett characterized it as an immigrant mecca.

Then, after World War II, a wave of migration from the South brought over 200,000 African Americans to New York City, and the black population of Brownsville doubled. People from Puerto Rico also began to move in. At first, things seemed fine. Brownsville had a strong progressive tradition. But Brownsville was developing the same tensions as were developing around the country. The schools were underfunded and crowded. The public housing projects transformed from a community asset to a source of anxiety,

as the new, poorer, non-white tenants were targeted for surveillance, of juvenile delinquency in particular. When we grew up, it was a very safe neighborhood. Like somebody will say, it's like a village within a city. But all of a sudden, when I got out of the army, he took a look at it, whoa, you know, it changed for the worse. One time I visited a friend of mine who was living in Sheepshead Bay.

I was already living in Connecticut. And I said, well, let's go back to the old neighborhood. I'd like to see what it looks like now. He said, I'm not going back there. He said, you're crazy. He said, you could kill me. The changing perceptions were related to race. In 1960, East New York was 80% white. And by 1966, 80% of its residents were African American and Puerto Rican. Perceptions of American Jews had also changed. Whereas they were counted

under the racial category of Hebrew during the interwar period, by the 1960s, Jewishness was a religious identity as opposed to a racial identity. Like the Italians who lived in the neighborhood, they were now counted as white. That's also something that you have to kind of wrestle with with this immigration thing is this story of the process by which people become white. Southern and Eastern Europeans, when some first arrive in the 1880s and 1890s, they're not considered white. All of these things are being reconfigured sort of in that moment. The 99% Invisible podcast has done a piece on this period entitled Turf Wars of East New York.

That piece didn't mention Leo Negri's killing, but Leo had been shot right in the middle of those turf wars. And that's why the press was so interested in it. Things that jumped out at me from those stories was how many of them in the lead, in the first paragraph, would point out that a white man had been shot in the back by a black youth. The racial component was almost always there. I think there was a lot of fear, a lot of bigotry that played into the whole thing. Those same newspaper articles also emphasized that there had been a police detail constantly patrolling Bed-Stuy for about six months amid a series of highly publicized incidents. That police detail had recently been called off.

In other words, these articles were seeking to make a point not only about what color America's cities should be, but also about how the police should be part of that. The Negries didn't even live in Brownsville or East New York anymore. Flora and Leo had been visiting from Coney Island. Sam lived in Connecticut. Louie lived in California. And suddenly they were thrust into the middle of the politics that had engulfed their former neighborhood.

The mayor called us up and said, don't make a big deal about it. We don't want to cause riots. I said, how the hell could you say that? I really got pissed off and went ballistic on the mayor. How the hell could you call and say, did you realize what this guy did? There was one phone call even more unsettling than that. The phone rings that one night. These are guys from the mafia. I said, we knew your father, and we could fix it for you. And I told the phone, and I told my mother, you know, they're calling.

And they could take it. No, no, she's very superstitious. And for one minute, I said, no, big mistake. They could have got this guy and shot him, the one did it and I said no I'm sorry thank you very much these events transpired a half century ago Sam and Louie don't remember every detail and disagree on many points of the family lore this was one point of confusion but after doing some research I to say, is it possible that Mayor John Lindsay reached out to them about keeping quiet? It sure sounds like him.

And was it possible that someone reached out about helping the family get revenge? I'm afraid this was also not that far-fetched. In the years leading up to Leo Negri's murder, Brownsville and East New York became the site of conflict. Activist groups in Brownsville included the NAACP, the American Jewish Council, the Urban League, the Catholic Interracial Council, and a group called CORE, the Congress on Racial Equality. CORE got its start in Chicago, but it was spreading throughout the US, fighting for

desegregation of schools and participating in the Freedom Rides of the 1960s. Meanwhile, an organization known as SPUNGE emerged on the scene. That's an acronym, and some renditions of it contain the N-word, which should tell you about all you really need to know. A group of young white men opposed to integration of New York's neighborhoods, SPUNGE made its name by egging demonstrators from CORE into a brawl at the 1965 World's Fair. And a year later, Sponge would use the same tactics to ignite one of the worst riots New York saw during that period. And it all went down in Brownsville and East New York. In July 1966, Sponge was doing what it often did, spewing angry slurs from behind a police barricade much to the chagrin of the majority of East New York's Black inhabitants. As things escalated, the Sponge members pushed through the barricade.

Somewhere in the chaos, gunshots were fired and an 11-year-old Black boy named Eric Dean was hit. The neighborhood used lost it. Mayhem ensued. One newspaper article contained a picture of a kosher butcher shop with a Star of David above the counter and broken glass from a garbage can hurled through the window. 1500 police swarmed the area and identified an alleged shooter, a 17-year-old who was supposedly positioned as a sniper on the roof and aiming for the police. A critical article in the Village Voice also reported that when Mayor Lindsay got the news, he said, quote, God, what a relief a white kid didn't do it. We'd have riots all over the city. As cynical as that sounds, Lindsay was good at

keeping the peace and continued to do well with voters in predominantly African American neighborhoods. But problems soon emerged in the individual trial of Eric Dean's alleged killer, who vehemently denied guilt. Numerous witnesses said the alleged killer was actually sitting on the stoop with his mother at the time. Meanwhile the prosecution's witnesses were young boys, and their testimonies kept changing. Both the prosecution and the defense complained of witness tampering. The trial resulted in an acquittal, and Eric Dean faded away as just another senseless, unsolved shooting. When Leo Negri was shot six months later, it looked like the same old story for

East New York. But was it? What I'm saying is, was justice done? We don't know. We don't know. How do you capture the persistence, the resiliency of white supremacy and racism and economic exploitation, and at the same time, respect the singularity of a certain political moment. These are not people who are thinking in depth about, who am I? You know, what does it mean to be Sephardic? Those categories don't seem to be mattering to them. those categories don't seem to be mattering to them. In histories of race and racism, bigots and bigotry,

immigrants and immigration, or nations and nationalism, it's easy to lose sight of the individual. But individual lives are critical to understanding what these terms actually mean. People like Leo Negri disrupt the categories by which people are commonly identified, and their stories resist the violence such categories can do. In investigating what it meant for Leo Negri to be a Turquino setting out into the world, the last thing I want to do is reify the specific identity as the most essential, irreducible aspect of his person.

Being a Spanish Jew from Turkey didn't totally shape where Negri could go, work, and ultimately live. Like most of us, he was content to be many things if it meant he could live his life. Learn French to get an education at the Allianz School in Istanbul? Why not? Work as a peddler to get out of Turkey? I can do that. Be a Cuban man named Ramon Franqui? If that's what it takes to get to America, sure.

No work for painters? Well, I can shine your shoes, or guess your weight, drain your swamp, or pick up your trash. But become a charity case? If it will feed my family and let me stay in the country, what else can I say? It's sad that racists could decry an immigrant's murder as the death of a white man at the hands of a black man, when Leo had spent years under the shadow of deportation because his community was not really considered white. When he had made his newspaper debut in an article that seemed to mock his unique Spanish,

Jewish and Turkish background. But that was just a final chapter in the story of what it meant to be a Turquino in the world. And maybe that's part of why his family never fully got closure. Leo's wife Flora certainly was never the same. She never remarried and attributed her heart condition and high blood pressure to the stress of the tragedy. And her kids just had to go on living their lives. The enormity of what happened in the horror, it didn't hit me for many, many years. I mean, it's funny how those artifacts linger someplace in your memory, in your subconscious.

About five years ago, I was in the hospital having surgery, and when I was recovering, I was on Dilaudid, which is a wonderful drug if you're recovering from surgery. But I started hallucinating in the middle of one night. And a whole bunch of stuff about my father and my brothers came back. It was almost like they were all still alive, almost like different people. When I was describing it for my wife one night, I said, you remember those, some of those paintings that Picasso made during his blue period? That's what they looked like.

They were all there, but they were all bluish. And then after they gave me some advice, they eventually all walked away. But you know, it was just artifacts from that whole weird experience. You know, I would have loved to know what kind of sentence this guy got. Over the years, Sam and I discussed it and discussed it. I told him the guy probably got off with an easy sentence. I said, you don't know the truth. I said, well, if that's true, I don't know the truth. Tell me, would anybody know about it?

The man who shot Leo Negri was Van Murray, age 18. He, too, had been out late partying that Saturday night. I was loaded, he told police. My friends had been walking me around for hours trying to sober me up. I don't know what came over me. He ended up pleading guilty to murder in the second degree, reduced from the first degree. That carried a 20-year sentence. I haven't been able to figure out what happened after that. Not yet. Deporting Ottoman Americans is an Ottoman History Podcast production. Our chief consultant on this series is Emily Pope Obida. My main collaborator on this episode is Devin Gnar. Our script editor is Sam Dolby. Contributions on this

episode by Davy Mays, Claudrina Harold, Victoria Saker-Wiesty, Sam Negri, and Louis Negri. Many thanks to Chris Silver, Shireen Hamza, Reem Bailoni, and Sarah Afonso. The Sephardic music in this episode has been published on Joel Bressler's website. See ottomanhistorypodcast.com for links to all of the music and audio elements used in this episode. Finally, a big thanks to you, our dope patrons, Faye Donsinis, Tardik Siddiqui, Carol Dean, Avery, Alexander Polsky, and Christopher Scott. I'm Chris Grayton. Join me in our next installment as we delve into not only the experience of Ottoman born Greeks in the United States after the exchange of populations, but also what deportation meant for women in an episode entitled All's Fair in Love and War.