Devi Mays
FORGING TIES, FORGING PASSPORTS: MIGRATION AND THE MODERN SEPHARDI DIASPORA
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020, ISBN-13: 978-1503613218
Reviewed by Judith Roumani1
This well-regarded and award-winning book stands the definition of success on its head. Generally individuals are admired and rewarded for operating successfully within one culture, one nation, and one language. Especially with regard to national identity, loyalty and steadfastness are lauded, while multilingualism, the chameleon-like ability to function in several cultures, tends to mark someone as a marginal, suspicious character. In the United States, since the Second World War, immigrants have hastened to assimilate to the dominant Anglophone culture, along with cultural tastes and accent, as quickly as possible. In the process, they leave their pasts behind, and fail to convey their original languages to their children. Among Sephardim, Ladino or Judeo-Spanish did not even have the prestige of being the language of another nation-state to give it status, thus few have passed it on.
Devi Mays skillfully examines the history of Sephardic immigration to the Americas, and the post-immigration experience, mainly from the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the first half of the twentieth century, and especially to Mexico. The author has consulted archives in many countries, in particular Turkey, France, the United States, and Mexico, to understand this movement of people. The effectiveness of her book, however, stems from its focus not only on patterns and on historical trends, but on individual lives, the adventures and misadventures, successes and tragedies, of particular Sephardim who left all behind to try their luck in the Americas.
This is another example of a writer’s (here, a historian’s) breathing life back into the yellowed pages of the documentary record, an effort that is parallel to the inspiration that a novelist may receive from similar tattered and taciturn documents. What springs to my mind is Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s French-language novel Dora Bruder which traces and re-animates the life of a certain Dora Bruder on the basis of flimsy historical references in lists of Jews living in Paris and police records from the Occupation as well as deportation records.
What kind of lives does Devi Mays re-animate? Two that occupy many pages toward the end of the book can serve as telling examples, one a great success (achieved with great effort), the other an ostensible failure by most criteria. Their stories are worth recapitulating.
Mauricio Fresco was the son of David Fresco, a well-known Sephardic journalist and publisher in the Ottoman regime and Turkey. David Fresco believed that Ladino should conform to Castilian orthography. Mauricio followed in his father’s footsteps and more, but on the other side of the world, in Mexico. Born in 1900 in Constantinople, Fresco left clandestinely as a young man of seventeen, spent some years wandering, and arrived in Mexico in 1924 at the age of twenty-four from France, like many other Sephardim who had originated in the Ottoman Empire. This was in an age when nationalism was becoming more and more dominant, as empires crumbled and the new states were standardizing their requirements for passports and other documentation such as birth certificates, in addition to imposing racially-based immigration restrictions.
He set himself up as a travelling salesman, drawing on Sephardic contacts and networks for support, for example in obtaining credit. Mauricio applied for naturalization as a Mexican citizen in 1929, citing character references from already established Sephardim; he also obtained a Mexican birth certificate that stated he had been born in the Yucatán. Thus, fully ‘naturalized’, he became a Mexican diplomat and journalist, an ardent defender of Mexican interests around the world. His diplomatic and journalistic career included stints in Shanghai, Lisbon, and in Paris during the German occupation. His Jewish and Sephardic identities were suppressed to outsiders, but at every stage of his career he performed, drew on, and repaid favors to his extensive multinational Sephardic network.
He also used his multilingualism and personal charm at many points to attain his goals, defending and attempting to rescue some Sephardim from the Nazis, who were not aware that the apparently mestizo Mexican consul was also Jewish. Turkish Sephardim who had lived in France for a number of years and had not renewed their Turkish passports were stripped of their Turkish citizenship, rendering them vulnerable to seizure by the Nazis. Fresco could not advocate for them but did exert himself on behalf of Jewish Mexican prisoners of the Nazis in the Drancy internment camp. After his transfer to Marseilles, he managed to organize the travel to Mexico of about eleven thousand Republican survivors of the losing side in the Spanish Civil War who had been languishing in internment camps in southern France since 1939.2 Thus, idealism and humanitarianism combined in this talented person with a willingness to skirt formalities and a well-hidden disdain for nationalisms and passports. It was not until he had retired that he wrote the unpublished book Forge your own Passport. Its title sums up the precarious, knife-edge existence of Sephardim, such as Mauricio Fresco, who were forced to make new lives for themselves in totally new countries and cultures, and sometimes succeeded spectacularly.
A different destiny awaited one Ovadia Nathan who was “not an individual whom history often remembers. But it is precisely his insignificance that makes him noteworthy” (p. 242). Ovadia immigrated to the United States from Turkey via France and Cuba, arriving first in Tampa, Florida in 1909. He was originally considered by U.S. Immigration authorities to be of the Turkish race, but this was later amended to the Hebrew race. He attempted to enter Canada in 1912 to try his hand at farming, but was turned away at the border as Canada only accepted immigrants who arrived directly from their countries of origin. He went West and worked as a laborer on a railroad, then declared his intent to become an American citizen and joined the army, fighting in the First World War. His attempts at becoming a travelling salesman or merchant failed, his brothers-in-law consumed his inheritance back in Istanbul, and he was deserted by his bride after one day of marriage in Mexico in 1929. Nevertheless Ovadia used the same strategies as other Sephardim: drawing on networks of relationships, and as a speaker of six languages maintaining his multilingualism. Henceforth, he maintained that he was a widower, having returned soon after the disastrous Mexican marriage to the United States, and opening a small shop in Texas selling Turkish carpets and Orientalia in 1930. After a long bout with stomach cancer, Ovadia passed away in 1957, in Waco, Texas; he received a military headstone with a Star of David, but as Mays says, “it is unclear who mourned his passing" (p. 242).
Though by most criteria his life had not been a success, he had succeeded in migrating across the ocean and establishing himself in the United States. The fact that Ovadia Nathan employed the same strategies as other Sephardim, using contacts with his traditional network and with Turkey, hypermobility, and multilingualism, but nevertheless met mainly a series of failures, shows clearly that luck and opportunity played an enormous role in many of the lives of Sephardic immigrants. Some element, perhaps an optimistic attitude, perhaps charm, perhaps the ability to be patient, may have been missing from Ovadia Nathan’s personality, this reviewer speculates, but of course we do not know.
Devi Mays skillfully highlights the shared strategies that enable these adventurous and courageous individuals to move from an aging empire that was progressively excluding Jews who had lived in it for centuries, to a new world of risk and opportunity in the Americas; many succeeded in establishing communities in which the traditions of their old home were preserved. In the process, most immigrants had to skirt regulations of the new nation-states, sometimes forging, often falsifying, documents and forging (in the positive sense of ‘creating’) new identities in new lands. It is in the duality of meanings inherent in this word that Devi Mays’ thesis lies, succeeding on the basis of its meticulous research and thoughtful and sympathetic analysis. As a person who has immigrated to two countries in her life, I would add that the latter qualities can be helpful in our dealings with the immigrants around us even today.
1 Judith Roumani is the editor of Sephardic Horizons.
2 This achievement came at a price: Mexico was allowed to accept Spanish Civil War political refugees, but not Jewish refugees. The author adds that we do not know what personal cost this entailed for Fresco (p. 230).