About Isaac

Isaac was born in 1930 to two Turkish parents who met and settled in Seattle. His father immigrated to the U.S. because of a passion to travel and visit his brother already living in Seattle. His mother came to the U.S. so her father could be a rabbi in Seattle. His mother tongue is Ladino but he learned English in school and his family had a strong connection to the Sephardic Jewish community in their area. After attending Yeshiva University in New York he came back to Seattle to work for Boeing and to be in the Air Force for a few years. He and his wife raised four children in Seattle and although he did not teach them Ladino, he preserves the language through music. He keeps in contact with his relatives in İstanbul and visited Turkey in 1973. He is close to the Sephardic Jewish community and attends many events they hold.

Interview Transcript Excerpts

MY: What brought them to the United States? You said they met here they got married here. So they both have different stories of immigration. Can you tell us a little bit about how they came here?

IA: OK. My father was one of let's see Naseem, Maurycy, Legra, Yaakov and Allegra and they lived in Eskişehir according to my father for a time. And after one year when my father was one year old the family moved from Eskişehir to Tekirdağ and they were there from about 1902 to 1909. My grandfather, my father's father was a rabbi. He was called İshak or Isaac and his wife was Simha Vida. She was born as a Halfun. And when she married my grandfather she became Simha Vida Azuz. They left Tekirdağ in 1909 and moved to Istanbul and went to a small neighborhood of Istanbul called Kadıköy. And one of the stories my father tells me was that they did not have a regular school to teach mathematics and writing and so on and so forth. They had a small school that was run by the local hoca in Kadıköy. And my grandfather since he was a rabbi he went to see the hoca to tell him please do not teach my son anything about religion. Nothing at all about religion. Just reading and writing or whatever else you can teach him. It turns out that every Thursday they used to study the Koran there. And the hoca asked my father to go to a far corner of the room which he did but of course they didn't give him earplugs to prevent him from hearing what was going on. And every Thursday they're listening to the entire Koran or how much of the Koran that they were studying. And after several months the hoca according to my father asked OK now I like you and he chose a certain boy to read the Koran but he didn't do such a very good job of it. He called one or two others who didn't do such a good job...

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