Chiko Israel: A real story that occurred in Istanbul in 1916

Undated (after 1916), Istanbul

1

It was the morning of March 4, 1916, and the weather was clear and beautiful. It looked like spring had come. There were many people walking on Şişhane Karakolu street, coming from Pera and heading to Galata, each to their day’s work. Among this multitude of people were some porters carrying pieces of furniture. The hamalescame out of Shemshir Sukak street and headed to Pnematakiya, entering Kibli street near Fresko’s apartment, and went to leave their cargo in the apartment of Yitzhak Djevdet Pasha. The doorman was standing at the entrance, shouting in Turkish at each hamal that arrived, “number 8!” and they went up the stairs to the designated place.

Standing at the door of apartment number 8 was Madam Boka Geron, wife of Baruch Geron. She, accompanied by another woman, was receiving the cargo and ordering the hamales where to put each piece. Three hours passed this way until two porters brought two boxes of charcoal and wood and said: “Madam, başka kalmadı, hepsini getirdik,  here are none left, we brought them all.”

Madam Boka Geron started putting everything in place. She was busy with that until midday, when her stomach informed her that she was hungry, and she went to the kitchen to fix herself something to eat.

Suddenly, an inadvertent scream shot forcefully from her throat: “Israeliko isn’t here!”

She ran all around the building, went down to the courtyard and asked the doorman, but no one had seen the child. She went up again to ask the neighbors, but they also had not encountered the child. The poor woman began to despair.

“The child must have stayed in the other house!”

And so, with disheveled hair, in her slippers and dressing gown, she ran to the house she had left to look for her only son. Unfortunately, she found no one there, and like a madwoman, began running around, left and right, asking if anyone had seen her son. No one had. She returned home, devastated and exhausted, not knowing what to do.

When Baruch Geron returned in the afternoon, joyful about his new home, the news about the loss of his son pulled the rug out from under him. He began crying and asking his wife, “Didn’t you go there? Didn’t you ask here? You didn’t inform the police? Didn’t you search in the alleyways?”

“I did everything! Nobody saw him! It’s as if the ground opened up and swallowed him!”

Poor Baruch Geron bowed his head and started thinking. Suddenly, he got up and exclaimed with despair: “Boka! Don’t beat yourself up, I’ll find Israeliko! I’ll go ask the newspapers to write an announcement in many different languages that Israeliko is lost. I’ll offer a prize of twenty-five liras to whoever brings him back.”

Before his wife could say anything, he was out the door, running down the stairs.

2

Life is like two pails on a scale: when one goes up, the other goes down; when one is emptied, the other is filled. At the very same moment that one is laughing, another is crying, and while one loses, another gains. Just when Mr. Baruch Geron ran in search for his beloved son and Madam Boka Geron was crying at home about the disappearance of her child, another woman was filled with joy at having found him.

Curious coincidence! It was exactly at the moment when Baruch Geron left his house that a thirty-five-year-old Christian woman named Marie, originally from Adapazarı, walked by. She was accompanied by a ten-year-old girl and they knocked on every door on the street, asking for charity. Arriving at the door of Mr. Baruch Geron’s old apartment, she encountered little Israeliko, crying his eyes out. She immediately stopped in front of the child and caressed him. Looking around to see that no one noticed them, she stood in front of the door for a few minutes, thinking, and said to herself: “Here is a fortune that the good God gave me to earn more in my trade. People always pity my little girl and give her a little something, but if I send this child to beg with her, I’ll make twice as much.”

With this realization, in the blink of an eye and without giving it much thought, she looked around again and caressed the crying child, calming him. She gave him a fig to gain his affection and took him in her arms and called her daughter.

“Absevta! Come quick, let’s go home.”

“Mom, what are you doing?” asked the girl. “This child isn’t ours, and if anyone sees us taking him, they’ll put us in jail.”

“Shut up, you wretch! Come quickly!”

She went out to Şişhane Karakolu, and turned to Büyük Hendek street, passed Yazıcı Sokak, and entered Topçu Çikmazi street, where she lived. She opened the door, covering the child’s mouth so that he wouldn’t cry and draw the neighbors’ attention. She went up to the fifth floor, where she and the girl lived.

As soon as she was inside, she put the child on the cot, gave him another fig, and, deceiving little Israel with this breakfast, turned to her daughter and said: “Listen, you scoundrel! You won’t say anything about this child being here! If the neighbors ask you, tell them it’s my sister’s daughter.” The girl bowed her head and retreated to her room while Marie returned to the child to caress him. An idea was sprouting in her mind. The neighbors are bound to inquire. She must be ready with answers. She realized she must first check to see if it’s a boy or a girl. She opened the child’s shorts and exclaimed with surprise: “Dear God! This child is Jewish! He’s circumcised!”

Her mind raced, and she said in a hushed voice: “A Jewish boy! In my house? It’s a grave crime to keep him here. If I take him back to where I found him, look for his parents, and return him, I’m bound to receive some reward. . . But. . . no, that’s not it. . . It’s true that if I give this child back to his parents, I will have done a sacred duty. But if I keep this child and convert him to Christianity, it will be doubly sacred. And I shouldn’t forget that this child will be my capital. I’ll have him go out every day with my girl to ask for handouts, and they’ll make more than I do with just my girl.”

This thought caused her so much excitement that she was out of breath. She sat on the cot beside the child, embracing him once again.

The ten-year-old girl came into the room, ashamed of what her mother was doing. The mother grabbed her and said in hushed tones: “Absevta, I’m going to tell you something.”

“What is it, Mother? Is it about what you said before?”

“No,” she said more calmly. “From now on, I won’t be going out with you to beg anymore, you’ll be the one going out with this child. When you see someone well-off go by, put the child in front and then ask them.”

“I can do it on my own, Mother. . . If the child’s father or mother sees us and takes the child, you’ll blame me and hit me.”  

These few words were enough to embarrass the damned woman. She got up angrily and paced around the room as a flurry of ideas rushed through her mind.

“My girl has a point!” she exclaimed. “She thinks farther ahead than me. We can’t just take the child out to the streets. We have to find a way to transform his appearance to such an extent that his parents won’t recognize him. Ah! If there was a way to make him slimmer, paler, I’d do anything to get it. But what can I do? Where do I go? If I walk into a pharmacy, they’ll ask me what I want to do. A pharmacist’s questions can make me say something I wouldn’t want to. For God’s sake! What to do? If I take the child back, they might give me a lira, but I can make that in one day of begging. Isn’t it a shame to miss out on that? A lira a day is a good profit. But God sent me this child to save me from misery, and I must receive His gift and use my ingenuity to guard it.”

After a few minutes, she jumped to her feet: “I got it! I figured out a way! In a few days, we can change his appearance. When I go out to beg, I’ll tie him to the wall until I return so that he doesn’t run away, and I’ll feed him once every two days. He will lose weight and look different. It will take a couple of months, but eventually it will work, and I can count on money from this for the rest of my life.”

Pleased with her plan, she ordered her daughter to prepare a meal, and as she took the first bite, she thought: This is the first meal of the first day when God showed me the way to becoming rich!

3

Three days passed. While the mean-spirited Marie was content with her foundling, Baruch Geron and his wife were devastated. All the newspapers published ads about their lost child, but there was no information about him. Their despair grew each day. Baruch could not work or do anything else. Like a madman, he walked the streets of Galata and Pera each day, looking for his precious Israeliko. Boka also could not sit at home. She walked the streets every day, knocking on doors and asking if anyone had seen her lost child. The searches turned up nothing. Husband and wife decided to widen their search and head to nearby villages and orphanages in other neighborhoods. While the wife went to Üsküdar, her husband headed to Rumelihisarı. Another day, she tried Yeniköy, and her husband visited Beykoz. All these expeditions were futile.

It was time to try the fortune-tellers. The fortune-tellers in Balat, Pangaltı, Üsküdar, and other villages were all consulted. Each gave an answer just to pacify the parents. One said that the child will be found after three days, three weeks, or three months. Another suggested that the child is not lost but stolen, and there’s no use looking for him. One claimed that he was with a rich man who was not able to have his own children and had plans to raise him. One said he fell into the sea and drowned. Only one divined that the child would be found, but much later, because they would not be able to recognize him.

All these divinations did not deter the parents, who continued their search without a clue to the whereabouts of their son. After months of tireless search, the parents retreated to their home. Closed off from the world, they vowed not to mourn the child yet, believing that God would one day bring their precious Israeliko back to them.

4

Wicked Marie kept the boy locked up in her apartment. She was following her plan: each morning, after giving the child a good beating, she tied him to the wall and went down to the street to ask for charity. She would only feed him when she returned.

In the first days, the child cried bitterly when he was left tied to the wall, screaming for his mother. This drew the attention of the neighbors. One of them came to her apartment once, asking for explanations about the child, since it was known that Marie had only one daughter. Marie put on an emotional act, saying that it was one of her sister’s six children whom she was caring for to help her sister and her unemployed husband. One of the neighboring women was not convinced: “Your sister is Christian, and so are you. How come this child is speaking Spanish?”

“It’s not Spanish, Señora, it’s Italian. My sister is married to an Italian.”

This answer satisfied the neighbors’ curiosity, and the woman continued as before. When the child’s appearance had sufficiently changed and he seemed to have forgotten his parents, a new idea came to Marie’s mind: she could teach him some gymnastics tricks, passersby would find the pair of children—her daughter and her “son”—irresistible, and would give them more generous donations. She taught the child to do somersaults, and spent a month making him practice performing upon the command, “Hopla, Manuel!”

One Sunday morning, when she believed that her project had come to fruition, Marie took the boy to Petit-Champs garden, along with her daughter. Among the many people walking and resting in the park, Marie ordered “Manuel” to begin his performance. The child began doing somersaults, and the girl circled around the people with a plate to collect donations. The plan was a success: after three performances, she’d collected a sizable sum.

From then on, she began sending the two children out every morning and forced them to beg in the streets until five in the afternoon and then move to Petit-Champs Garden to perform. For six whole months, they continued this routine. No one recognized little Israel. But God did not forget and castigated the vile woman. One day, as she was counting the children’s earnings, she felt a sharp pain in her head. Fever took hold of her body. A doctor was called. He diagnosed her with typhoid and ordered her to go to the hospital at once. The authorities were also notified of the diagnosis.

Marie feared that, in her absence, the child would run away, and so she locked him in the small room. Meanwhile, the municipal doctor arrived, examined the patient, and, after confirming the typhoid diagnosis, took her to the nearest hospital.

5

It is known that when someone is diagnosed with typhoid, people from the municipality come to disinfect the house. When they came to disinfect the house, one of the workers heard sighs coming from the closed room. How curious! He opened the door and, to his surprise, saw a child lying on a mattress, seemingly ill with typhoid as well. The child was taken to the hospital.

Curiously, the fever sustained the child and prevented him from dying of hunger during the four days he was left without food.

After spending two weeks in the hospital, on May 28, 1917, the woman and the boy left and returned to the house.

Vile woman! The sickness did nothing to soften her heart! Once she returned home, her first concern was to send the child out to work again. Manuel was skinny and did not have enough energy to walk, but she ordered him to return to his work with his “stepsister.” It took great effort for him to extend his hand to beg for charity. The girl, more merciful than her mother, saw his condition and said to him, “Manuel, we won’t walk much today. We’ll only go as far as Yemenici Street. At the beginning of the street, there is a staircase, where we can sit to ask for handouts.”

Despite his young age, the boy smiled at the benevolence of his “stepsister” and said, “Thank you,” in Greek.  

We will note in passing that, after fifteen months with Marie, little Israel almost entirely forgot how to speak Spanish and now spoke in Greek.

The children went to Yemenici street and sat there for the rest of the day. With each passerby, little Manuel extended his arm and asked for a handout, trembling.

6

There is an old saying: There is no rope without an end. Every misery must end at some point. That is why when a disaster strikes us, we must be humble and wait patiently for a resolution. Sooner or later, the resolution will come when it is least expected. The story of Israel Geron also shows this to be true.

On the afternoon of June 5, as the children were beginning in the street, Señora Z.A.,  one of our coreligionists and an acquaintance of Mr. Baruch Geron, passed by them. The older sister pushed the child to approach the lady, who opened her purse for some money. Then she saw the child’s face. As she gave him the coin, she realized that the child looked familiar and began to examine him more closely. The woman’s glances scared the girl, and her face changed, and she moved to take the child and lead him away. This aroused the woman’s suspicions even more.

“Who is this boy?”

“My sister. Can’t you see it’s a girl?” she responded, trembling. Noting the girl’s response, the woman pushed her further.

“The clothes don’t mean anything. Many boys are dressed in girls’ clothing.”

“I assure you, madam, this is my little sister.”

“Look, if you tell me the truth, I’ll give you twenty grushim as a reward.”

“But Señora, what are you saying? I don’t understand. This is my sister, we’re out every day to ask for charity for our sick mother.”

These words, while said with courage, were accompanied by trembling, and the color of her face changed. The lady was concerned and examined the child more closely.

“This child looks very much like Israeliko Geron. He has exactly the same eyes and a scar by the ear, just like the one he had. I’m going to check if it is a boy or a girl.”

She bent down next to him, pulled down his pants, and, to her astonishment, saw that it was a Jewish child, a circumcised child!

“You worthless, lying girl! You were lying to me! This isn’t a girl, it’s a boy, a Jewish boy! What are you doing with a Jewish boy?”

“Señora, please don’t make a commotion, calm down, and I’ll explain. I beg you, please don’t make noise.”

Seeing the girl’s despair, the woman sighed and said calmly, “What do you want to say to me? How can you explain this? It must be my friend’s child, Boka Geron’s son, who disappeared over a year ago. Isn’t it?”

“It might be, Señora, just please don’t scream. I’ll explain.”

The girl told Madam Z.A. the whole story that we’ve heard, and in the end said, “You can take the child with you. Just let me go.”

“My girl, this child isn’t mine, but the son of my friend. If you tell me the whole truth, there’s a reward in it for you. Come with me to his parents’ house, and I’m certain they’ll give you a nice reward.”

7

Having lost all hope of finding her child, Madam Boka Geron wanted to go out and visit her relatives as much as possible to put her sadness out of her mind for a short time. When Madam Z.A. brought the two children to her house, Boka was not there. You can imagine the woman’s despair. She decided to stay outside the apartment and wait. People who passed by the woman and the two children waiting in the street asked what they were doing, and she explained the story. Curious to see the reunion of the child and his mother, many women joined them, and within half an hour, the street was filled with women waiting impatiently for the mother’s return.

At six in the evening, Madam Boka Geron was seen walking down the street. Many of her friends ran to welcome her, yelling, “Madam Boka, gözün aydın! Congratulations!”

“What is it? What’s happened? Why are all these people in front of my house?”

In that moment, Madam Z.A., holding the hands of the two children, approached Madam Boka and said: “My dear, stay calm. Thank God, Israeliko has been found!”

“Israeliko? Found? My boy? Where is he?”

She then saw the two children on each side of her friend. “Is that him? Is that Israeliko? It doesn’t look like him, that’s not my child! You’re tricking me! Israeliko was plump and beautiful, this child is skin and bones, dark-skinned.”

“Calm down, Boka,” responded Madam Z.A., “This is Israeliko. Let’s go home and I’ll tell you everything.”

You can imagine the great tumult in the house. Madam Boka went up the stairs, and behind her was the woman with the two children, followed by a crowd of curious women. Inside, the mother could not believe it. She examined the boy and could find no trace of his former appearance, a year before. The child did not speak Spanish and only responded to her and others  in Greek. It was the girl accompanying little Israeliko who told the story again and led her to believe that this really was her son and no other: “Señora, this woman who brought me here promised that you would give me a reward. If you promise to reward me, I’ll prove this is the boy you lost.”

“How?” demanded the emotional mother.

“Do you remember the clothes he was wearing when he disappeared?”

“Yes, do you have them?”

“My mother kept them. I’ll bring them if you send someone with me.”

The girl went with two neighbors to Marie’s apartment. Without being seen by her mother, the girl quickly took the clothes and went back. The moment Madam Geron saw the outfit, she exclaimed: “That’s it! It’s his!” and she jumped to embrace the child, shedding heavy, warm tears of joy. Baruch was informed and soon came running home. The police were also notified and arrested the woman who had kidnapped the child. What is most curious about this little piece of history is that the Greek woman named the child Emanuel, marking God’s presence, and the blessed God indeed stayed with the child until he returned to his parents’ house.

The end.