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Antiques

An Immigrant’s Story, Discovered in Discarded Papers

A family’s papers ended up at the Center for Jewish History.Credit...Gloria Machnowski, Center for Jewish History

A stack of notebooks and letters were recently salvaged from a Los Angeles trash heap by a man who stumbled upon them. He was immediately drawn to the intricate electrical drawings among the materials, and said he wondered if the owner “was a famous inventor.”

It turns out that the original owner, Sabi Asseo, 85, a retired engineer who lives in Southern California, did indeed patent some inventions, including motor and helicopter parts, and he wrote dozens of papers for technical journals. A Turkish immigrant, Mr. Asseo worked for Westinghouse and Northrop Grumman, among other companies. Documents from his early career as well as poignant correspondence from his father back home were donated a few weeks ago to the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

Mr. Asseo grew up in Istanbul and is a descendant of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain 600 years ago. The notebooks and drawings date to the 1950s, and contain electrical plans from his first engineering jobs in Turkey. The correspondence — with hundreds of typewritten pages in French — came from his father, Yasef, an importer and exporter in Istanbul, and were written from 1957, when Sabi Asseo emigrated, to 1965, a few months before his father’s death.

In a recent email, Sabi Asseo said that he threw away the papers in December when he moved from Manhattan Beach, Calif., to Chula Vista, just south of San Diego. He had numbered the letters chronologically and sometimes scribbled summaries in the margins. “I like to organize things,” Sabi Asseo wrote.

In the letters, Yasef Asseo worried about whether his son was eating enough, driving safely and finding time to relax while studying at the University of Missouri and the State University of New York at Buffalo. When report cards came in, the father wrote, “With the A’s you are getting you raise up the whole ‘Asseo’ family.” Yasef also reported on family medical and marital crises, Turkey’s economic woes and his own futile efforts to learn English in preparation for resettling in America.

The family was not very religious, but each year Yasef wanted commemorative Jewish prayers said on the anniversary of the death of Sabi’s mother, Luiza, who had died in 1936. “Your poor mother,” his father wrote, “was goodness itself.”

Yasef wanted his son to marry a Jew and “attract that rare bird called happiness.” When Sabi became engaged to a Christian, Myril Bruns, she began writing to her potential father-in-law, and he warmed to her. But after years of tumult, the couple called off the wedding. “I had started to like her from afar,” Yasef wrote to his son.

Sabi’s former fiancée, now Myril Bruns-Hillman, a longtime faculty member at DePaul University, said she remembered their romance as “Sturm und Drang, all the way through.” He described his youth in Istanbul so vividly, she added, “I’ll never forget the stories he told me.”

In 1965, Yasef and his second wife, Nefeli, joined Sabi in Buffalo. He was in failing health, and died there a few months later, at 63.

When Sabi Asseo and his second wife, Lydia, moved last year, the discarded papers ended up alongside a trash hauling bin on Sunset Boulevard near Echo Park. The family archive caught the eye of Thomas Berbas, an operations manager for a solar installation company. “I have a tendency to pick things up off the ground, much to the dismay of my mom and my wife,” Mr. Berbas said in a recent interview.

Mr. Berbas’s attempts to track down the Asseo family failed. His mother, Diane Kroll, then offered the items to the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago, which recommended the American Sephardi Federation.

Mr. Asseo’s daughters from his first marriage, Genevieve and Louisa, and his second wife said they were delighted to know that the material, which they had never seen, was at an institution and available to scholars. “It is a miracle that his life in writing has been rescued,” Genevieve Asseo wrote in an email.

Jason Guberman-Pfeffer, the Sephardi Federation’s executive director, wrote in an email that “the strange, serendipitous travels of these Turkish-Jewish papers” echo the journeys of Sephardim in diaspora. Families and their records, he wrote, are scattered “from Shiraz, Shanghai and Salonika to Seattle and Sheepshead Bay.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: From Trash Pile to Jewish Archive. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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