Strong as Steel, Fragile as a Rose: A Turkish Jewish Witness to the Twentieth Century

Until recently, Jewish experience in modern Turkey attracted much less scholarly interest than the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire. One of the many reasons for this is the reticence of the Turkish Jewish community to be in the public gaze. Only in the past decade or so have a history and an image of the community begun to emerge in the public sphere,¹ albeit cautiously, and they remain distinct from intracommunal discourse.

The emergence of Turkish Jewish voices and their representation in the public sphere parallel the quest for democratization and the growing interest in history, memory, and identity in Turkish society as a whole. This interest is linked to recent debates concerning the legacy of the Kemalist revolution and its implications for the meaning of Turkishness in the twenty-first century.² The status and experience of minorities play an important role in this debate.

The debates in the public sphere in Turkey, along with emerging interest globally in questions of identity and subjectivity, have produced a growing body of social science research on Turkey. One of the emerging growth areas is social history of the twentieth century, including oral history. Oral history can make an important contribution to debates on historical events that are highly contentious, or about which the historical record remains largely silent.³ The subjective and presentist nature and narrative structure of oral history make it a useful means of studying how the past is understood, interpreted, and experienced by subjects in the present.⁴ Oral historians have mined life history narratives to come to terms with the ambivalence, ambiguity, contradiction, and lack of cohesion that characterizes subjective experience and its articulation in everyday life.⁵ Oral history is an invaluable tool in the study of national, communal, and subjective identity.

I begin this article with an overview of Jewish experience in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. I will then discuss the oral history narrative and military journal of Yaşar Paker, born Haim Albukrek in 1896 in the Jewish neighborhood of the city of Ankara, a community that no longer exists. Paker was an important witness to life in the Jewish community of Ankara in the years leading up to its establishment as the capital of the new Turkish Republic. He was also witness to two important but little-known events in Ottoman/Turkish history: the experience of non-Muslim "soldiers" conscripted into labor battalions during the Turkish "War of Independence" (1919– 22),⁶ and this conscription again during World War II.

I was fortunate in that Paker shared with me the journal he kept during his experience as a soldier in 1921, and that he allowed me to interview him in 1997.⁷ This has made it possible to compare a historical document with an oral history narrative recounted in the present. At the advanced age of 101, Paker said: "If I have lived until today, it is because I suffered so much. Suffering makes a person strong. Man is strong as steel, fragile as a rose."

In my analysis of his oral history narrative, I suggest that Ankara functions as a trope for the traditional past that "enlightened" Jews came to reject. Paker's depiction of his military experiences in both his journal and his oral account demonstrates the contradictory position of Turkish Jews between Christians and Muslims as well as their ambiguous and ambivalent relationship to Turkishness. Paker's dual narratives exemplify the long-standing identification of Turkish Jews with modernity and reflect their unease with discourses of difference, at least in the public sphere. This contrasts with the rise of postmodernist discourses of identity and difference among other minorities in Turkey, such as the Kurds and the Alevis (a community of heterodox Muslims). Whether emerging representations of Turkish Jews will result in an analogous public discourse of difference remains to be seen.

Jewish Experience in the Ottoman Empire

A distinguishing feature of the experience of Jews in Turkey is that, unlike in the West, they live in a Muslim (rather than...