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 Aleppo, 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 musical “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” my grandfather was sweeping the floors at Universal Studios.

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 dollars,” 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, underlined: “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 patiently. 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 vinyl 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 grandfather 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 throughout the countryside near Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Over the next two centuries, my ancestors became members of the merchant class, extending, 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, Eduard, 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.

Courtesy Pauls Toutonghi

My grandfather was born into the vibrant, complex 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 district of the city. My grandfather would never forget 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 residents were killed. Over the next few years, regional 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 independence 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 especially imperiled, since they were perceived—perhaps unfairly—as rejecting the values of the newly 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 grandfather 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.

He was a young man. In his new city, he wrote poems about his exile, poems to his new country 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.

An admirer of Alphonse de Lamartine and other early-nineteenth-century French lyricists, my grandfather employed a metered, careful, rhyming verse.