Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey by Lerna Ekmekçioğlu (review)

The Armenian genocide, which occurred more than a hundred years ago, remains an important topic of scholarly research with a number of serious works regarding its historical background and political outcomes in recent years. With Recovering Armenia Lerna Ekmekçioğlu sheds light on a long-overlooked issue: Armenians who remained in Turkey after the massacres. The unique and major contribution of this work is its specific focus on Armenian women's "forced" roles in the process of Armenian nation building under the Turkish government despite its role in perpetrating the massacres. In "A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption," Ekmekçioğlu (2013) encouraged a consideration of women's traumatic experiences of the 1915 genocide by exploring the wartime transfer of women and children from one ethnic group (Armenians) to another (Turks and more generally Muslims) and its partial annulment after the war. Recovering Armenia extends the time frame from 1915 until 1933 and moves the focus from the survival of Armenians to the survival of Armenianness, or Armenian identity, in post-genocide Turkey with a feminist perspective. The fundamental questions she answers are: How was it possible for these women to maintain their feminist ideals in a country that attempted to persecute the entire Armenian nation? How could feminists reconcile their demand for gender equality with solidarity with all "women" in Turkey? How could feminists reconcile their demand for gender equality with their wish to perpetuate Armenian specificity? How could one be an Armenian and a feminist after genocide and minoritization in Turkey?

When it comes to genocidal events and their consequences, focus usually falls on the political and public events that follow the massacres. In the case of women, nevertheless, we tend to focus on women's victimhood during the genocide more than on how they survive in the aftermath. Ekmekçioğlu shows that Armenian women in Turkey confronted another phase of suffering in the post-genocide era when they were forced to forget or conceal their traumas to ensure the survival of their community. In this chaotic atmosphere, nationalist men placed the responsibility for maintaining Armenianness on Armenian women, who were usually active in the domestic sphere. Their motherhood was exalted, with women's identity limited to being mothers and the carriers of Armenian culture. Armenian men were simultaneously working for communal acceptance by the Turkish government, necessary because the Turkish regime recognized only "harmless" and assimilated ethnic and religious minorities as citizens of the new state. Women were forced to choose between being women and being members of their ethnic community, and this situation delayed their request for equality. To better understand the role of Armenian women in the early Turkish republic, Ekmekçioğlu looks at the changing discourses of both the Armenian patriarchate and the Armenian women's journal Hay-Gin (Armenian Woman).

Ekmekçioğlu blends the mainstream historiography of the genocide and its political outcomes with insights from the Armenian press. Even though she uses Armenian memoirs, institutional reports, correspondence among intellectuals, Turkish state archives, and Turkish newspapers, Hay-Gin (1919–33) is the center of the study, bringing to light the women's situation in the process of the revival of the Armenian nation. This journal also determines the time frame of Ekmekçioğu's study, as the editor of Hay-Gin, Hayganuş Mark, is the real inspiration of the book. An outspoken figure, she encouraged Armenian women to become more publicly active in Armenian community life and Armenian identity. Unfortunately, her mission conflicted with the expectations of patriarchal norms and the mainstream understanding of womanhood. Even though the discourse of the journal changed over the years because of suppression and the assimilative politics of the Kemalist government, Mark and her colleagues became the collective voice of the Bolsahays (Armenians of Istanbul) and their concerns about Kemalist politics.¹ Ekmekçioğlu ends her book with the abolishment of Hay...