By Pauls Toutonghi
Photography: Bernd Lohse
LEAVING ALEPPO
My grandfather had a poet’s eye for beauty. Cut off from any means of
publication, surrounded by a new culture, what hope did he have?
Still, my grandfather was a recent immigrant,
full of ambition. He was a poet, and he’d written a
few lyric stanzas in English, which he dreamed of
turning into a song. It was, he would always claim—
even decades later—a poem worth “a million dol-
lars,” and “unlike anything anyone had ever heard.”
On the day of his meeting with Thomas, he went
to the post office and spent twenty-eight cents
to send the poem to himself through registered
mail—a poor man’s copyright. On the envelope, he
wrote his address, twice, and then added, under-
lined: “Poeme in English,” and “its title had never
been used.”
Excited and confident, he went to Thomas’s
house, where he was led into the study. He brought
his son, my father, along, and they waited there pa-
tiently. My grandfather had come up with a melody,
and he hoped that Thomas might play the tune on
the piano—a simple chord progression—while he
sang the lyrics. It would be my grandfather’s début
as a Hollywood lyricist. His verses, he was certain,
would make him famous. They would come back
to him, amplified, made more lovely by radio or vi-
nyl records or film.
They waited for an hour. Then two, then three.
Finally, a housekeeper came in. Mr. Thomas
wouldn’t be able to make it, she said, apologizing.
But he would be sure to reschedule. My grandfa-
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ther nodded, certain that this rescheduling would
never happen. He and my father left through the
side door and went home. He was working that
night; he had to change out of his suit and into his
coveralls.
My family’s recorded history dates back to 1720,
when two brothers, Victor and George Tütünji,
were born. Tütün is the Turkish word for tobacco,
which Tütünjis grew on farms scattered through-
out the countryside near Turkey’s Mediterranean
coast. Over the next two centuries, my ancestors
became members of the merchant class, extend-
ing, through commerce, their worldly connections,
to Europe and European institutions, especially.
You can see this on our family tree, from 1904.
Written entirely in Arabic, it features names that
sound one way (Bashir, Abdullah, Fouad, Salim,
Hafifa) and names that sound another (Basil, Edu-
ard, Michel, Susan, Sophia). Over the years, many
generations of Tütünjis lived in the region, near the
sea. They spoke any combination of a half-dozen
languages. Some were Christians and some were
Muslim.
My grandfather was born into the vibrant, com-
plex culture of fin de siècle Aleppo. Because his
father and uncles, selling tobacco across the
region, depended on inter-urban commerce to
make a living, they frequently travelled on the
Baghdad Railway, commuting between the main
cities of the Vilayet of Aleppo, a province of the
Ottoman Empire. It was a cosmopolitan existence.
The family’s home was in the soap-making dis-
trict of the city. My grandfather would never for-
get the scent of Aleppo’s soap season—the time
each November when the soap-making houses
would feed their boilers with wood and cook the
straw-colored admixture. The air would smell like
charcoal and laurel oil; the pungent, muddy odor
clung to clothes, to bedsheets, to the fibers of the
carpets.
This all changed in the closing days of the First
World War. One of the war’s last battles happened
within the city walls—a bloody, hand-to-hand
fight between the Egyptian Expeditionary Force
and the fleeing Thunderbolt Army Group of the
Ottoman Empire. Much of the fighting happened
in the darkness, on the night of October 25,
1918—a night when hundreds of Aleppo’s resi-
dents were killed. Over the next few years, region-
al politics only grew darker. The Ottoman Empire
collapsed; civil war broke out; General Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk, the leader of the Turkish National
Movement, fought a prolonged war for independ-
ence against Armenian and French forces in the
countryside of the Vilayet. Turkish troops burned,
shot, and drowned Armenian Christians by the
thousands. Melkites and Maronites were espe-
cially imperiled, since they were perceived—per-
haps unfairly—as rejecting the values of the new-
ly founded Turkish state.
During wartime, most trade-related businesses
failed. My family struggled to survive. And so they
were divided. Some chose to stay; my grandfa-
ther was one of the many who fled. He travelled by
boat to Cairo. He imagined that his time in Egypt
would be brief, and that he would soon return
home, where he wanted only to teach languages
and write French poetry and grow geraniums, all
the things that, to him, seemed to add up to a full
and worthwhile life.
Aleppo in 1939
Photography By Bernd Lohse
He was a young man. In his new city, he wrote
poems about his exile, poems to his new coun-
try and his new city, poems to St. Thérèse, to the
Virgin Mary. Ultimately, he wrote poems to my
grandmother, Lorice, whom he met in Heliopolis,
a suburb outside Cairo where he’d settled. Then
he wrote poems for each of his seven children, as
they were born, in quick succession, in the course
of eleven years. He worked as a teacher and
French translator, offering French lessons out of
his apartment not far from the Heliopolis Palace
Hotel. He wrote articles for Cairene newspapers;
he acted, semi-professionally, in plays. But poetry
remained his single great passion, the art to which
he would return again and again.
LEAVING ALEPPO
Of all the family stories about my grandfather
Philip Toutonghi’s time in North Hollywood, one
pains me the most. In 1951, after months and
months of polite but dogged pursuit, he managed
to get a meeting with the actor Danny Thomas.
Thomas was born Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz in
1912, to Maronite Catholic parents from Bsharri,
Lebanon. My grandfather was born Philippe Elias
Tütünji in 1898, to Melkite Catholic parents in Alep-
po, Syria. At the time, the two men attended mass
at the same Catholic church, in Los Angeles. But
while Thomas was starring opposite Doris Day in
the Michael Curtiz-directed Warner Brothers mu-
sical “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” my grandfather
was sweeping the floors at Universal Studios.
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