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 "The Great Fire", released this month by HarperCollins,
details how a sickly YMCA worker named Asa Jennings spirited
about 250,000 people from certain death by the Turkish national
army. Led by Mustapha Kemal, the army targeted Greeks, Armenians
and other ethnic groups in what Ureneck calls the final act in a
10-year genocide of Christians.
Jennings, a Methodist minister, arrives in Smyrna racked with
fever, a limp, and a spine disease that already robbed him of
several inches of height. The book recounts how he felt God's
hand placed on his shoulder as he doggedly pursued the merchant
ships he would need for an epic rescue of about 250,000 people.
Turkey, which is mostly Muslim, denies any genocide occurred.
Smyrna, known today as Izmir, was rich, sophisticated and a hub
for trading cotton, figs and tobacco. A young Aristotle Onassis
lived there before becoming one of the world's richest men.
But in September 1922, Smyrna was beset by crisis as thousands
of refugees from the countryside poured into the city after
Kemal's troops routed the Greek army. Despite a harbor full of
warships, including U.S. Navy destroyers, little was being done
to avert the nightmare.
"It was a humanitarian disaster," Ureneck told Reuters in an
interview. That's when Jennings resorted to a bribe, a lie and
an empty threat, as Ureneck writes, to secure merchant vessels
for refugees. The story bears some resemblance to Oskar
Schindler. Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" shows how the
rakish Schindler outsmarted the Nazis with bribes and work
programs to save Jews.
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Ureneck, a 64-year-old journalism professor at Boston University,
delivers an action-packed narrative. But it is the YMCA worker
Jennings, who went to Smyrna to teach sports and Christian values to
young men, that stands out.
Ureneck's previous two books, "Backcast" and "Cabin", are memoirs
that center on a flyfishing trip with his son in Alaska and building
a cabin with his brother in Maine.
But Ureneck, who had read about Jennings and thought there must be
more to his story, became convinced that he was the man to tell it.
"I have another personal story that I want to tell and had already
begun it, but I decided I wanted to tell the Asa Jennings' story
first," Ureneck said.
(Editing by Christian Plumb)
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