In his son’s account, the danger came as the Ottoman army prepared to leave Baghdad in 1917. His father’s name was on a list of men marked for death. He befriended a Turkish captain and bribed him, escaping before the army withdrew.
His daughter told another story. He had seen her mother playing Queen Esther in a school production and sent a marriage broker the next day. The bride’s father could not afford two daughters’ weddings so close together. The suitor offered to pay, and to bring twelve bolts of silk from Manchester, each a different color.
The man who promised all that silk was the man who later escaped the death list. His children knew both parts of him: the father who had gone to such lengths to marry their mother, and the father whose life had nearly ended before the war was over.
In the family’s 1943 portrait, he sits with his wife, their grown children gathered around them. Among them are the son and daughter who would pass on those stories.
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