The Foreign Service Journal, December 2019

56 DECEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Morris Cohen One fall Friday afternoon, I was called to Ezeiza International Airport by Argentine immigration officials hesitant to admit an elderly, perhaps disoriented, passenger from the New York flight. On arrival I was directed to the coffee shop, where two uniformed officers sat with a small man wearing a fedora. An inspector handed me the U.S. passport of Morris Cohen—age 77, born in Greece—and said that Cohen was speaking “a very strange sort of Spanish.” Introducing myself, I asked Cohen what brought him to Argentina. He had come to visit his brother. The only contact information he had was an address on an envelope. I asked whether the brother knew he was arriving today. He didn’t think so; it had been 25 years since they last met. The brother had immigrated to Argentina about the same time Cohen had immigrated to the United States. I asked him where he would spend the night, and he said with his brother. He then asked where we were, that he wanted to see his brother. I told the inspector that I would look after Mr. Cohen and take him to his brother’s house. Night was falling, and the lights of Buenos Aires came into view across a long stretch of open fields. Cohen pointed and asked whether that was Manhattan. “Buenos Aires,” I replied, “a city almost as big as New York.” He fell silent for more than 30 minutes. Arriving at the address Cohen had, we found a small restaurant and bar. The barkeep said he did not know any Cohens. Neither did the occupant of the apartment over the bar. It was almost 8 p.m. People were beginning to fill the downtown area in search of weekend entertainment and dining. My weekend, on the other hand, was beginning with Morris Cohen, unsure of where he was or where he might find his brother. I brought him to a hotel near my apartment. Giving the desk clerk my card, I asked to be told if Cohen decided to leave the hotel. Then to my handing him a few Argentine pesos, Cohen reacted with disdain at the “funny money.” I escorted him to his room with the bellhop, wished him a good night’s sleep, and then headed for home, dinner and bed. Cohen spent the weekend days in my apartment, seated by the window. Having misplaced his dentures, he subsisted on soup, toast and tea. I called the local Jewish benevolent organizations and asked for help to get the word out to their community about Morris Cohen and to locate possible relatives. It was during these conversations that I learned the likely source of Cohen’s strange variety of Spanish: his family had almost certainly been Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain during the Inquisition. He was speaking 15th-century Spanish. Over the next three weekdays, Cohen sat in my office as I worked on his case and my other duties. The State Department replied to my report on Cohen’s situation—the Social Security Administration office in New York City could arrange to meet him upon arrival if he agreed to be repatriated to the United States. Repatriation meant that the U.S. government would buy the return ticket, and that his passport would be marked as good only for return to the United States, until such time as the government was reimbursed for the ticket. I learned on Tuesday that the Jewish benevolent organizations were unable to find a trace of Cohen’s brother or other family members in Argentina. Cohen said that then he would go home. As I got to work on repatriation, the ticket home presented a bit of a quandary: he had sent $50,000 to himself, c/o the Chase Bank in Buenos Aires. Someone with that kind of money should not be receiving government assistance for airfare. So I decided to send the money back to New York. (It had not “entered” Argentina yet, absent opening an account.) That way Cohen would have no resources in Argentina, and I could purchase the ticket with government funds in (relatively) good conscience. We processed the loan for his ticket on the Thursday afternoon flight. Cohen spent the weekend days in my apartment, seated by the window. Having misplaced his dentures, he subsisted on soup, toast and tea. ISTOCK/ANNDORONINA