I recall enjoying my preschool days running around with lots of cousins and exclusively Jewish-acquired friends. Marie acted as a very loving nanny. For entertainment, she used to read me the Old Testament in French from a Bible we had at home. Marie is 94 now and lives in Holon. I call her every Sunday morning at 7:30 AM Israeli time, and we have a nice conversation in French. Except for Buka, everyone in the household spoke French to me. Since Buka did not speak French, we spoke Ladino to each other (we called it Spanish). My parents also spoke Spanish to each other. I learned my preschool Turkish in the street.
We lived in a third floor apartment between Harbiye and Hamam. My father had a neat brokerage office with an associate, in the business district, where they sold and bought securities and gold and exchanged foreign currency. The firm was called Asseo-Benaroya, and I used to love to go there and type nonsense. At noontime my dad would take a streetcar home for lunch. He and I, weather permitting, would take long walks on Sunday mornings after the "desayuno" consisting of homemade baked goods. Otherwise, it was my mother who organized my daily life. The three summer months were spent at a residential hotel in Buyukada, the largest of the Prince Islands in the Marmara Sea, within commuting distance from the city. I started first grade in 1934 in a good private school, Sisli Terraki Lisesi, operated by "donmes" and located in Nisantas.
Those were the good old days with very happy remembrances. However, suddenly three big blows brought the good times to a halt. In 1935, my brother died of lockjaw just before his bar mitzvah was to take place. He had fallen off a bike and had not cleansed his wound. As a result he contracted a tetanus infection that the doctors did not diagnose in time. This was very devastating to all of us and caused us to grieve for a very long time. Secondly, as a result of the Great Depression, a Paris bank where my dad had a considerable sum of money went bankrupt. Finally, the government decided to nationalize the securities industry causing my father to close his office. Ultimately, my father, with a new associate, started a leather business in The Grand Bazaar.
We moved to an apartment , in the Nisantas neighborhood. The view of the southern entrance of the Bosphorus, from the living room window, was
absolutely spectacular. A wonderful occurrence was that a boy of my age lived just upstairs, and a strong friendship developed between us, lasting to this day. My good friend Charles Kohen is now retired and lives in Nice. We
are in constant communication and visit each other whenever we have a chance.
After five years of the obligatory Turkish school, I went to an English school for two years in that same neighborhood until I was old enough to commute to Robert College. There I attended its high school for three years, later moving on to its Engineering School. For the first three years my cousin Victor Benaroya and I rented a room located a few minutes from the campus, and went home only on weekends. Robert College's reputation was founded on its premier Engineering School. In fact, that was its only division that offered an accredited bachelor's degree. In 1948 I received a BS in Electrical Engineering and looked forward to going to the U.S. for graduate work. I had to go to Ankara to facilitate the issuance of a permit that would allow my father to send dollars for my monthly upkeep in the States. This permit was to make it possible to convert Turkish liras into dollars at a much more favorable fixed rate than the black market going rates that faced a constantly dropping value. That summer I took the commuter boat every morning from B?y?kada to the city to work at a radio shop, repairing radios.
Finally, on Nov.15, I boarded a Greek cargo ship bound for New York. Two days later, we celebrated my birthday onboard while the ship was loading cargo from Izmit. We reached New York 37 days later after having made further stops in Catania, Messina, Naples, Genoa, and Halifax, almost loosing the ship in a storm and getting quarantined in New York for contraband search. It was a beautiful, exciting, and memorable trip nonetheless.
As a pre-adolescent, I was given private French lessons, together with my cousin Victor. Before my bar mitzvah I was taught to read Hebrew. I grew into adolescence during a very perilous period. In 1942 the Germans were in Bulgaria and Greece. A blackout was ordered for all of Istanbul, and the government, presided by Prime Minister Sukru Saracoglu, imposed a so-called Varlik Vergisi (wealth tax), mostly affecting minorities. The tax consisted of arbitrarily assessed monies on each business owner in accordance with an inflated net worth figure. In effect it was designed to punish the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews and break their hold in the business world. Some managed to pay. Others unable to pay were exiled to Eastern Anatolia and were made to live in substandard conditions, clipping away at rocks and digging ditches. This policy was soon rescinded when word got out and pressure from abroad mounted. My father was able to scrape together the assessed amount, but we really had to tighten our belts. My brother-in-law was called to arms, yet minorities were never issued rifles. News of the horrible atrocities that were being committed by the Hitler regime started to circulate in the Jewish community. Luckily, our greatest fear that Germany would invade Turkey never materialized.
I remember the Struma, a Panamanian registered Greek ship, filled with 769 Romanian Jews trying to flee to Palestine. It broke down in the Bosphorus, in plain sight, and sat there for two and a half months. I remember that its passengers were not being allowed to disembark for lack of legal papers to
enter Palestine. Only the British could have issued them but they would not. The local Jewish community tried its best to feed them. One day, after a set deadline, the Turkish authorities towed the ship, which had no running engine, back to the Black Sea. The ship blew up soon afterwards. There is some evidence that a Russian submarine may have torpedoed it, but I am skeptical. At the time, not knowing the gory details of the death camps, I thought that this was the worst cruelty that society could have inflicted on its own members.
Life went on in 1944 Istanbul. My group of friends and I would regularly go to the movies on Saturday afternoons. Afterwards we traditionally stopped at a sweet shop for a cake treat, eating it at the counter. We had formed a group of all Jewish friends and organized home parties with girls on Sunday afternoons, alternating hosts. Food was offered, but no alcoholic drinks. The parties would last until about 9 PM. Rugs were rolled up to facilitate dancing, the principal entertainment, while holding a girl close was the main attraction. To put it in proper perspective, there was some conversation as well. We did well even without chaperones because the girls' families were well known to us.
We also did some charitable work. We joined the Or-Ahayim and on Sunday mornings collected monies from Jewish households. In 1946 some of us joined an underground Zionist organization (Turkish law did not allow it) with Aliyah as its goal. I was taught conversational Hebrew. A few in that group went to Palestine before graduation and one of my best friends died in a skirmish there. By the time I graduated, Israel's War of Independence was over. My goal was redirected towards the U.S.A.
We sailed past the Statue of Liberty early in the morning of Dec. 22. Excitement was at a peak, anticipation was overbearing and I felt my heart beating faster. Finally, after 37 days and nights, we were going to arrive, but not as fast as we thought we were. Some agents boarded the ship and started an inspection. There must have been serious problems with the ship. We finally learned that the ship had been quarantined and that they were looking for contraband on board. Luckily, in the afternoon, they let the 17 of us disembark. We never learned how the inquiry was finally resolved. I was now happily in the States with a student's visa.
It was love at first sight. I loved everything about the States but especially the free press and the New York Times. I took residence in Cleveland and Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve) and joined the International Students Group ISG). I found everyone pleasant, accommodating, helpful, and courteous. These were not qualities that I had been accustomed to seeing routinely outside the family and social circles.
Through ISG we were often extended dinner invitations and had an opportunity to meet families and exchange ideas. School went well and I did not find it too difficult. I took mostly Electrical Engineering courses that led to a master's degree in EE. I enjoyed planning and doing the experimental work for my thesis the most. I also worked at odd jobs to subsidize my expenses.
My first summer was spent mostly at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, where through an American Friends Service Committee scholarship, I studied different approaches to peace for seven weeks with other international students. This was a fascinating experience.
After I obtained my degree at Case, I came to Chicago and started working. I boarded with a good friend of mine, Nissim Eskenazi from Turkey. (He is the fellow that I go biking with when the weather is good.). We went to Temple dances occasionally in order to meet girls. In Oct. 1951, I met a very pretty Jewish girl (not at a dance), Helen Ronen, who was a senior at Roosevelt University and fell in love with her almost immediately. I started courting her and finally got married eight months later. In 1953 I was able to obtain a permanent residence status that made me also eligible for the Draft. The Korean War was still raging at the time. I was "called up", and had to serve. After my basic training, thanks to my scientific and professional status, I was not sent overseas. I served at Ft. Bragg, NC, testing mostly the effectiveness of new night vision equipment for the Army. Helen came to the Base and started working as a civilian secretary for the Army. We lived outside the post, in Fayetteville. While in the Army, I had a lot of time to think about my future career. I had read about Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and was very intrigued. I arranged for a series of job interviews there.
I landed a very interesting job at ANL's 60 in. cyclotron and began employment Feb. 2, 1956, one month after my discharge from the Army. At first, I designed, built and tested electromagnets (dipoles and quadrupoles) in order to facilitate the use of the cyclotron beam for experiments. I took physics courses in order to broaden my horizon. I studied superconductivity and did some good experiments on DC and RF superconductors. The RF superconducting work culminated in building ATLAS, the world’s first superconducting heavy ion linear accelerator for physics research. Later I joined the Advanced Photon Source (APS) project during its infancy. The accelerator together with the experimental facilities was a very large project, which cost almost one billion dollars. It has been operating effectively since 1996. It produces the world's most brilliant x-rays for research. Such x-rays reveal atomic and molecular structure in the greatest detail. You probably can read all these details and more on the Argonne Site. Working at Argonne has been one of the great gifts in my life. I retired completely at the end of last year but still have an interest and keep up with the work that is being done at ANL.
As co administrator of this Web Site with my genealogy colleague and recently found cousin Raphael Ventura, I want to thank all of you contributors and potential contributors to our Site for helping make this enterprise a great success. However, we will not rest on our laurels until we link all known arrows to the summit. This will require your continued support and your investigative talents in pursuit of your ancestry.
