and started their reign of terror against the Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, and Jews who had been at the center of commerce and culture in the region for nearly five hundred years.
My father came to America in 1914, when he was fifteen years old. By then young men were being conscripted into the Turkish army, and my grandfather had already allowed his two eldest sons to leave Turkey (though they did not fulfill his wishes and go back to the Greek mainland: one went to America, the other to Russia) in order to avoid conscription. The genocide launched by the Young Turks was brutal. In the middle of the night, my grandfather got word that he and his family would be slaughtered if they did not flee immediately, so the next morning, he, my grandmother, my father, and my father’s sister, my aunt Marina, grabbed the few jewels and coins they could hide on their bodies and made their way to the sea, where boats from Mytilene were to arrive to take Greeks to safety. For some reason the rescue boats were delayed, and by the time my father was put on board, he was deathly ill with a life-threatening virus. While crossing the Adriatic Sea, he was given last rites. It was always considered a miracle that he survived the journey from Turkey to America.
My grandfather, whose home back in Adramit, Turkey, was now the home of the newly installed mayor, never recovered from having to abandon the business he had so carefully built. After building a successful life in Turkey, he arrived in this country with no money, no status, and no work. In 1918, he and his eldest son, Arthur, died, victims of the great influenza epidemic that swept the globe following the First World War.
When they got to Lowell, my father and his brothers were forced to take any kind of work they could find, so my father took a job in a munitions factory. That lasted only six months, however, as my father watched men lose limbs, eyes, and their lives whenever there was an explosion in the factory—which happened often. My father had always had a deep love for education and had already mastered three languages and wrote essays on politics, social issues, and the classic arts. He felt that he would only succeed in America if he were educated. Thanks to the generosity of his brother George, he was able to finish high school in Lowell. From there he went on to Boston University, and he continued to study there off and on for the next decade as he pursued a law degree. To make ends meet, he ran a printing business, first with a partner, who, I learned later, had embezzled profits from the business and run off with them. I recall my father beginning his business again, solo, when I was a young child, after we had moved into the house once owned by my grandparents. Over the years, whenever he could pull the tuition money together, he would go back to school. It was only years after his death that I discovered he had actually continued to pursue his law degree, and eventually, in 1937, at the age of thirty-seven, he was chosen by his fellow law school classmates to be the class day orator for their commencement ceremony. This was a high honor—but my father never mentioned it. It was only after he had died that I finally understood how determined he had been when he first came here—how tenacious he remained in the face of obstacles, and how hard it was for him to get that degree.
My father, or Costa, as he was known at home and around the neighborhood, was a true believer in the democratic process. There were liberties and opportunities available to him here that he never would have had access to in Turkey or if his family had gone back to Greece. These liberties included access to free education and free libraries; the ability to speak out in public; and the ability to organize and create unions that would protect workers and laborers. He loved everything about the democratic political system, especially the right to voice one’s dissent publicly—something that
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