| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
"You are a Greek Jew? I thought all Greeks were Orthodox?" As a Jewish-American growing up in New York City, whose paternal grandparents were Jews who had emigrated from Greece in the 1920s, I was frequently asked this question by well-meaning-if confused-friends and acquaintances. Indeed, while "Greek Jew" has always been a central aspect of my multiply-hyphenated American identity, in fact my grandfather Morris Isaac, né Izaki, was from Salonika and, it turns out, he himself grew up as a Turkish Jew under the Ottoman Empire, only to discover after World War I that he was in fact (now) not a Turkish but a Greek Jew (which was not, in the parlance of his time, synonymous with being an authentic "Greek"). Greek (Orthodox) or Jewish? Greek or Turkish? Pogroms, wars, "ethnic cleansings," and sometimes even genocides have been undertaken to resolve such questions, and indeed my ancestors experienced all of these things in the opening decades of the twentieth century. For my family, such traumas are part of the story of how my grandparents came to leave Greece and migrate to the US and become Americans and US citizens (alas, many of their relatives were not able to leave, and most ultimately perished at the hands of the Nazis).
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