All's Fair in Love and War

Lafky entered the United States as a teenager on false pretenses, when her cousin presented her to immigration authorities as his legal wife. A decade later, when her real marriage devolved into a messy divorce, her husband used her prior illicit entry against her, reporting Lafky to immigration authorities and triggering a legal battle that lasted for years. Lafky's deportation file revealed that it was not her first ordeal. A survivor of the Greco-Turkish War, she, like many Ottoman-born Greeks, she had already lived many lives on a journey that brought her from the shores of Asia Minor to Athens and the United States. In this episode, we explore the stories, sounds, and sentiments of the Ottoman Greek diaspora in the wake of the Great Catastrophe and the Exchange of Populations through the extraordinary life of a single mother in New York City and her battle with the American deportation state.

This episode is part of our investigative series Deporting Ottoman Americans.   

Episode 589

Produced and Narrated by Chris Gratien

Episode Consultant: Panayotis League
Series Consultant: Emily Pope-Obeda

Script Editor: Sam Dolbee

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Lafky entered the United States as a teenager on false pretenses, when her cousin presented her to immigration authorities as his legal wife. A decade later, when her real marriage devolved into a messy divorce, her husband used her prior illicit entry against her, reporting Lafky to immigration authorities and triggering a legal battle that lasted for years. Lafky's deportation file revealed that it was not her first ordeal. A survivor of the Greco-Turkish War, she, like many Ottoman-born Greeks, she had already lived many lives on a journey that brought her from the shores of Asia Minor to Athens and the United States. In this episode, we explore the stories, sounds, and sentiments of the Ottoman Greek diaspora in the wake of the Great Catastrophe and the Exchange of Populations through the extraordinary life of a single mother in New York City and her battle with the American deportation state.

This episode is part of our investigative series Deporting Ottoman Americans.

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The Journeys of Ottoman Greeks

In 1821, Greeks living under Ottoman rule embarked began a successful war of liberation that established a Greek nation-state. Nonetheless, throughout the next century that followed, Greek Orthodox communities were present throughout the Ottoman provinces, thriving in growing cities like Constantinople, Thessaloniki, and Symrna. Greek musicians were integral to a lively Ottoman musical culture that took on new life in the diaspora. As Panayotis League explains in this episode, migrants and refugees from the Ottoman lands carried innovative musical genres, like rebetiko, to Athens and the port cities of modern Greece, as well as the United States and other sites of Greek diaspora, and those genres in turn vividly captured the life of Greek migrants during the interwar era. However, these musical traditions, which are increasingly celebrated today, were part of an urban underground in which for many Greek citizens, the newcomers were an unwelcome presence, and their traces of Ottoman culture were a reminder of Greece's defeat in the Greco-Turkish War and the demise of the Megali Idea or "Great Idea" of Hellenic reunification. Today, it is easy to explore early recordings of Greek music in collections like the Kounadis Archive Virtual Museum, which celebrate the contributions of Ottoman-born Greek artists.

To learn more, listen to our full interview with Panayotis League.

Ottoman History Podcast · The Journeys of Ottoman Greek Music | Panayotis League

The journey of our protagonist in this episode, Lafky, began more than a decade before her deporation hearing in the aftermath of the First World War. The Greek army, like Great Britain, France, and Italy, occupied portions of Ottoman territory, establishing a foothold on Aegean coast of Asia Minor with plans to make the bustling port of Smyrna and its productive hinterland new pieces of the Greek nation-state. The ensuing war against the Turkish national movement, however, brought devastation and defeat. Civilian populations were abused and expelled by both armies. Large portions of Smyrna were burned to the ground, killing thousands and displacing many more. Lafky was a teenager at that time, living in the small town of Sokia or Söke, but she was not spared the war's violence. In her testimony before American immigration authorities, she stated that she was briefly abducted during those years, and that a child conceived at that time was living with her mother back in Greece.

Snapshot of excerpt from Lafky's immigration hearing. Source: National Archives and Records Administration

With the fall of Smyrna and the mass displacement of the Great Catastrophe, Lafky's family became part of bilateral exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece. Ottoman Greek subjects residing within the new borders of the Republic of Turkey and beyond received Greek nationality, and Ottoman Muslims living in Greek territory were transferred to Turkey. This exchange was heralded as a diplomatic achievement, but it brought another wave of forced exile and dispossession for more than two million people on both sides of the Aegean. The fallout of the Greco-Turkish War became integral to nation building in postwar Greece and Turkey, and exchanged people were discursively and physically central to that project, but as history reveals, the newcomers, often settled in remote, impoverished regions of the countryside, bore many of the same social stigmas that other immigrant groups faced, despite having undergone a compulsary journey to be reunited with their ostensible compatriots.

A map depicting villages burned by the Greek army during the Greco-Turkish War, located in the files of the Ministry of Education at the Ottoman Archives.


A map from a study of malaria in post-war Greece, depicting high malaria rates in many of the villages created through the exchange of popluatoins. Soruce: Pasteur Institute Archives

The Laws of Men

Cropped photograph of Lafky from Greek travel document issued for her deportation, 1938. Source: National Archives and Records Administration

Lafky traveled to the United States with her cousin Emmanuel, a naturalized American who left the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the First World War. Having returned to their hometown to care for his family after his father was killed in the war, Emmanuel also temporarily became a refugee residing in Greece. There, he secured a paper representing Lafky as his wife, which allowed them both to travel to the United States despite increasingly restrictive immigration policies. The post-1924 immigration regime rested on remote processing of visas to reduce unwelcome traffic at American ports, but offshoring security in some cases made it easier for prospective migrants to subvert the visa system. 

Photograph of Lafky's cousin Emmanuel from his naturalization records. Source: Ancestry.com

Lafky's illicit entry to the US as a teenager was also the natural byproduct of a patriarchal legal system in which female dependency was assumed. Unmarried women could not travel freely to the US without risking deportation on grounds of being a "public charge," and by that same token, when Emmanuel arrived in New York representing Lafky as his wife, there is little surprise that the authorities asked no further questions. Lafky's disenfranchised position as a woman made it easier to smuggle her into the US, but her ability to initially fly under the radar of the immigration regime set Lafky's life on a precarious course, which could be most easily corrected by finding an actual husband in the United States.

Emigration contributed to a mounting marriage crisis for Greeks on both sides of the Atlantic. Men went abroad, living and working as bachelors in big American cities, as immigrant groups fed native American anxieties about the demise of traditional families and labor trafficking. Their prospective wives stayed behind in Greece, which is why in 1926, Lafky's future husband became part of an ill-fated plan for his parents to bring him a wife from the old country. When their engagement fell apart and the woman was rudely thrown onto the streets of New York by Evangelos, a successful furrier in Manhattan, she took him to court and won a settlement in a "heart balm" suit, which was covered by New York newspapers, not necessarily for its importance, but because it was a salacious and disparaging story involving immigrants and foreigners. While Evangelos emerges from the historical record as the apparent villain in the life of a multiple young Greek woman, he was also the victim of the xenophobic undercurrent swelling in America's most diverse city.

The Maid of the Mist was one of many pieces of detail of the testimony of Lafky's husband, which led to her unusual deportation case. Source: Postcard depicting the Maid of the Mist, c1920, via eBay

Soon after the heart balm suit, Evangelos married Lafky, still a teenager at the time, which for a brief moment solved both of their problems, as the couple set about establishing a normative Greek-American household. They honeymooned at Niagara Falls and crossed the Canadian border to behold the American side, resulting in Lafky's second illicit entry into the United States. When their marriage fell apart some years later, Evangelos tried to use this border crossing, along with other personal details from Lafky's life, to instigate her deportation. At stake in the deportation was not just Lafky's right to remain in the United States but also the alimony and child support payments she was awarded in their divorce, which during the Great Depression mattered all the more to the once prosperous fur trader. Lafky's ex-husband and the immigration inspector on her case actually became accomplices, as Evangelos continue to stalk her in the months and years following the initial deportation hearing.

Albert (left) and his brother at their jewelry store, 1935. Source: Newspapers.com

In the course of her deportation, Lafky found support from another Greek immigrant man, Albert, who owned a jewelry store in Manhattan. Albert's store was the address where Lafky received alimony payments from Evangelos, so when she turned up missing, Evangelos was able to help immigration authorities locate her by having his attorney stipulate that she sign for the payments in person, after Greek diplomats finally issued a travel document for Lafky and her daughter after more than a year of requests by American officials. The coordinated ambush worked, and Lafky and her American-born daughter were detained and photographed in preparation for travel to Greece. But the fight was not yet over.

Cropped photograph of Lafky's daughter from their Greek travel document, 1938. Source: National Archives and Records Administration

Past and Present

Lafky's deportation file ended in 1938, but her story, as well as the story of her children, was just beginning. Through various digitized government documents and newspapers increasingly available to genealogical researchers, it is possible to reconstruct their trajectories into the 21st century. The public release of the 1950 census in 2022 provided the remaining pieces to solve the puzzle of what became of Lafky and her daughter, who appear by different first and last names across different types of records. Women with far less tumultuous lives present a similar challenge to researchers. Mundane cultural practices like a woman assuming the last name of her husband along with the tendency for immigrants to adopt new or anglicized names have real consequences for the visibility of their historical experiences in both family histories and scholarly studies. To reconstruct the stories of Lafky and her daughter, we also had to reconstruct the history of all the men in their lives, which revealed a striking ending to what was already an incredible story of survival and a microhistory of Greek diaspora arising from Lafky's deportation file. We present what we know in the conclusion of episode, which reveals that the pasts we study in historical documents are never as distant as they seem. Even when exploring events that transpired as far back as the Great Depression, people implicated in these histories as well as their children and grandchildren are still alive, sometimes possessing other pieces of the puzzle that is every migrant life we encounter in archival fragments.

Snapshot from New York City census records of 1950. Source: Ancestry.com

In Lafky's case, her story is not yet past because it underscores the stakes of legal debates that have not been settled since the creation of the modern immigration and deportation regime of the United States more than a century ago. For example, the seemingly uncontroversial Violence Against Women Act, which provides protections against abuses exactly like those attempted by Lafky's veangeful husband, has repeatedly been challenged on the basis that by extending protections to migrants, it offers a visa loophole for undocumented people. In recent years, even birthright citizenship, which should have protected Lafky's daughter from deportation, has been thrust into national debate. We often conceptualize those debates in terms of liberal and conservative, open and restrictive, inclusive and xenophobic, and progressive and patriarchal binaries. However, such characterizations may obscure the deeper truth of the American immigrant experience — that the law is an unsteady foundation on which ordinary migrants build their lives, which even in the "nation of immigrants," can shift beneath their feet according to whims of government officials and the electorate.

Demonstrations in favor of Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, 2013. Source: CNN

The stakes of migration history for the present make it all the more rewarding and painstaking. Between the release of the previous installment of Deporting Ottoman Americans and this episode, seven full years passed. But we were hard at work conducting more research and many interviews with scholars of migration past and present to sharpen the tools and methods that form the basis of this series. Alongside this episode, we offer three conversations as bonus listening worthy of consideration:

In 2019, we organized a roundtable at the Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association recorded before a live audience, featuring historians Reem Bailony and Andrew Arsan in coversation with sociologists Neda Maghbouleh and Rawan Arar about the perils and possibilities of narrating migration.

Ottoman History Podcast · Narrating Migration: A Cross-Disciplinary Roundtable

In 2022, historian and scholar Randa Tawil visited the students of "HIME 1501 - Migration, Displacement, and Diaspora in the Middle East" at University of Virginia to talk about the methods underlying her riveting account of a Syrian migrant woman's life, previously published as an episode of Ottoman History Podcast under the title of "Zeinab's Odyssesy."

Ottoman History Podcast · Recovering Migrant Histories | Randa Tawil

Anthropologist Sophia Balakian also returned to the podcast on a visit to HIME 1501 in a conversation about her research for the book Unsettled Families, which probes the politics of the family embedded in modern day governance of refugees and asylum-seekers. As Balakian told the class, seemingly straightforward notions of gender and kinship become incredibly fraught categories when lawmakers and officials deploy them to make decisions about the lives of people whose trajectories almost by definition defy normative conceptions.

Ottoman History Podcast · Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship | Sophia Balakian

These are just some of the past episode of Ottoman History Podcast that will inform the next installments of Deporting Ottoman Americans that we will develop in the weeks and years to come. Stay tuned!

Credits

	Chris Gratien, Producer and Host Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century. His current project, provisionally titled The Book and the Sword: Civil War and Reconstruction in Late Ottoman Syria, offers a global microhistory of the Tanzimat period, centered on the unsovled murder of an American missionary in the Ottoman Empire.
	Panayotis League, Episode Consultant Panayotis League is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University. His first monograph, Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora, published by University of Michigan Press, explores the legacy of Ottoman-era cosmopolitanism among musicians and dancers on the island of Lesvos and their migrant cousins in the United States.
	Emily Pope-Obeda, Series Consultant Emily Pope-Obeda is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Lehigh University. Her first book, Building the Deportation Regime: Expulsion and American Global Power in the Interwar Era, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press.
	Sam Dolbee, Script Editor Samuel Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power is out now with Cambridge University Press.

Episode No. 589 (DOAP No. 4)
Release Date: 20 June 2026
Archival research, script, and narration by Chris Gratien
Series Consultant: Emily Pope-Obeda
Episode Consultant: Panayotis League
Script Editor: Samuel Dolbee
Digitized phonographic music recordings (by order of first appearance): Tetos Demetriades - Aman Elenio; Jan August - Misirlou; Rita Abatzi - Gazeli Neva Sabah; Noukoutos Rigas - Ta mavra matia sou; Maria Papagika - Smyrnaiko Minore; Maria Papagika - Mpournovalio; Dimitris Perdikopoulos - Sou 'pa mana pantrepse me; The Cavaliers - A Faded Summer Love; Εργάτης Τιμημένος - Κώστας Ρούκουνας; Μπουζούκι μου διπλόχορδο - Παγιουμτζής & Βαμβακάρης; Roger Wolfe Kahn - A Little Birdie Told Me So; Roza Eskenazy - Yati foumaro kokaini
Additional music and sound production by Chris Gratien

Sources and Further Reading

Fairchild, Henry Pratt. The melting-pot mistake. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1926.

Gratien, C., & Pope-Obeda, E. K. (2020). The Second Exchange: Ottoman Greeks and the American Deportation State during the 1930s. Journal of Migration History, 6(1), 104-128. https://doi.org/10.1163/23519924-00601007

Laliotou, Ioanna. Transatlantic subjects: acts of migration and cultures of transnationalism between Greece and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

League, Panayotis. Echoes of the great catastrophe: re-sounding Anatolian Greekness in diaspora. Musics in motion series. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2021.

Llewellyn-Smith M. The historiography of the Greek-Turkish War in Asia Minor: Britain, Greece, and others, 1915 - 1923. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. 2023;47(2):271-289. doi:10.1017/byz.2023.16.

Petit, Jeanne D. The men and women we want: gender, race, and the progressive era literacy test debate. Gender and race in American history. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010.