The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History (original) (raw)
The literature on the Armenian Genocide has been growing steadily in recent years. We now have access to many good books and articles that shed light on the historical background of this tragedy and add to survivor and eyewitness descriptions that have been available since the deportations and killings started in 1915. None of these studies, however, pay much attention to the Armenians who chose to stay in Turkey after the genocide and through the establishment of the Turkish republic. This is not surprising, because this small and dwindling community of at most 60,000 people does not easily fit into the competing narratives of the Armenian Genocide. For those promoting the official Turkish version, the continued presence of Armenians in Turkey is a reminder not only of an earlier, much more diverse and tolerant era but also, more poignantly, of everything that happened during the closing years of the Ottoman Empire, including the deportation and murder of almost the entire Armenian population of Anatolia. For both survivors and historians of the genocide, on the other hand, it is not easy to understand why any Armenian would have chosen to stay in Turkey after 1923, knowing that this would place them under the protection of the very people who had engineered the deportation and mass murder of their communities. With her new book Lerna Ekmekçioğlu takes an important step in filling this gap. She describes how the Bolsahay (the Armenian community of Istanbul) navigated the treacherous currents of the Allied occupation and the early years of the republic to (re)make a place for themselves in a changing country and a changing world. In addition to newspapers, magazines, personal memoirs, and contemporary publications, the book relies extensively on articles that appeared in the journal Hay gin (Armenian woman), which was published in Istanbul from 1919 to 1933 by the Armenian Women's Association. Throughout her analysis Ekmekçioğlu pays special attention to the writings of a handful of feminist intellectuals—in particular