From Istanbul to Jerusalem (Analecta Isisiana: Ottoman and Turkish Studies) 9781617190926, 1617190926

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From Istanbul to Jerusalem

Analecta Isisiana: Ottoman and Turkish Studies

A co-publication with The Isis Press, Istanbul, the series consists of collections of thematic essays focused on specific themes of Ottoman and Turkish studies are brought together in Analecta Isisiana. These scholarly volumes address important issues throughout Turkish history, offering in a single volume the accumulated insights of a single author over a career of research on the subject.

From Istanbul to Jerusalem

The Itinerary of a Young Turkish Jew

Eroi Haker

The Isis Press, Istanbul

pre** 2010

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2010 by The Isis Press, Istanbul Originally published in 2003 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of The Isis Press, Istanbul. 2010

o

ISBN 978-1-61719-092-6

Printed in the United States of America

Erol Haker (formerly Elio Adato) was born in Istanbul in 1930. The families of both his parents hail from Kirklareli. The Adatos of Kirklareli can be traced back five generations to the years of the turn of the 18th century. Erol Haker is a 1950 Exact Sciences graduate of Robert College (Istanbul). He holds a Graduate Diploma in Social Sciences from Stockholm University (1951), a B.Sc. Econ. from the London School of Economics, and a 1954 MBA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1964). He speaks Turkish, English, French, Spanish and Hebrew. Since 1956, Erol Haker has made Israel his home where he has spent most of his adult years. He has a forty-year career behind him as a Transport Economist and Planner and has spent about half of this time working in several developing countries, mostly for the World Bank, other international and regional institutions, and bilateral aid giving agencies. Since his retirement in 1997, he spends much of his time researching his family history and of the Kirklareli community from which his parents hail. He has published part of it in Once upon a time Jews lived in Kirklareli: the story of the Adato family, Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2003. Erol Haker is married to Yael Aronson. They have three daughters and ten grand-children.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD I.

FROM BIRTH THROUGH PRIMARY SCHOOL 19301942 1.

2.

3.

MY PRE-SCHOOL YEARS, 1930-1936 My Birth (15), First Memories, French Songs (16), Living in Kuledibi (19), My times at Grandpa and Grandma Salinas's in Tiinel, (20), Memories of Passover Nights (21), Our Social Milieu as a family (22) NURSERY AND PRIMARY SCHOOL 1936-1942 The passing Away of Grandpa Salinas (25), Primary Schooling at §i§li Terakki Lisesi (26), Grade One I, Acquire my Djidjino Syndrome (27), My Conversion to Islam (29), My new name makes waves at school (30), The fifteenth anniversary of the Turkish Republic (32), The Death of Kemal Atatiirk (33), I start learning about who a Jew is" (34), An unexpected encounter with French (37), Grandma Salinas organizes for me a Jewish cultural underground (38), Some anti-Jewish incidents at §i§li Terakki (40), My last and best year at §i§li Terakki (42) OUR NATIONAL ENVIRONMENT, FAMILY AND SOCIAL LIFE World War Two starts, September 1939 (45), The War gets nearer to us (46), The national climate becomes more antiJewish (47), Our social life following our conversion (50), Mireille my first love (53), My first inroads into Turkish culture (54)

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ROBERT COLLEGE 4.

5.

III. 6.

7.

8.

9.

THE CAPITAL TAX HITS THE HAKERS AND THE SALINAS The Tax (61), The Tax on the Hakers (61), Mordo commits suicide (62) Father's status as a Muslim provides partial relief (63), The break-up of the Salinas-Haker Partnership (66), Father rehabilitates his business (67), The ruin of the Salinas Family, the Death of Grandma Salinas (67) ROBERT COLLEGE THE FIRST FOUR YEARS How I was admitted (69), Robert College enters into my Life (72), The Trauma of my Prep I Year (73), First Form: the School Management Shuffles the Student Deck of Cards (76), Our Teachers, (77) Second Form, dormitory A is populated (82), Socializing with our teachers, the Beginning (82), Our Group comes into Being (84), The Group discovers my Jewish identity (86) Arguments on World War Two and the Holocaust (87), The Press during World War Two (89), Who else does not like Jews (92), I become a bookworm (97), Third Form, relations inside our Group become closer (99), My family problems (100) MY COLLEGE YEARS, 1946-1950 THE FRESHMAN AND SOPHOMORE YEARS My Freshman Year, expelled from Anderson Hall (105), My Sophomore Year, I take up "digs" at Feridun Beys' (107), Refiye (110) OUR JUNIOR AND SENIOR YEARS, 1947/48, 1948/49 Group members follow my Example in moving into digs (113), The Expressions We Invented for for Communicating speaking with Each Other (113), Living together at Feridun Beys' (116), Our teachers (118), Socializing with our teachers during our college years (126) RELATIONS WITH THE FAIR SEX Boy meets Girl RC-CC style (137), My one and only foray into Jewish teenager society (139), Belma (141) THE JEWISH ANGLE IN MY COLLEGE YEARS The national environment and Jews (147), A Jew among Turks, a Turk among Jews (149), The Jewish students of our class (154), The awakening of my Jewish Consciousness at national Level (155), The State of Israel is declared (157), A flag is hoisted (159)

TABLE 10.

IV. 11.

12.

13.

14.

V.

15.

16.

17.

OF C O N T E N T S

CAREER CHOICE Engineering? Psychiatry? Economics? (161), My Robert College years, a summing up (165)

7 161

MY UNIVERSITY YEARS 1950-1954 MY STOCKHOLM INTERLUDE The first few weeks (169), Belma, the end (170), I apply to the London School of Economics (172), Left-wing adventuring (174), I leave Stockholm for London (175), My trip from London to Istanbul (177), The annulment of our conversion to Islam Summer 1951 (179), The story of Melahat who became a real muslim (181) LSE, THE FIRST YEAR, 1951/1952 Studying at the London School of Economics (183), Dr. Reed my psychiatrist (186), I become a Zionist (187), My old group (190), Recovering my lost French, (193), How my business future as Father sees It (194) LSE, SECOND YEAR, 1952/1953 I abandon Marxism for good (197), LSE social life and friends (199), My first trip to Israel, Summer 1953 (201) LSE, MY LAST YEAR 1953/54 Social life and friends (211), More anti-semitic-Encounters (213), I graduate from LSE, learning more French (214), Netta (214)

169

183

197

211

FROM RETURN TO ISTANBUL TO DEPARTURE FOR ISRAEL 1954-1956 BACK IN ISTANBUL AND INTO MILITARY SCHOOL, 1954-1955 I make a false start (225), Working in Father's business (226), Netta in Istanbul (228), Netta in Israel (229), In the Infantry School for Reserve Officers, (230), My civilian life in Ankara (232), The Jewish angle (234) MY ARMY DAYS, 1955-1956 My One-Day Career in the Intelligence Department of the Genel Kurmay (General Staff) (237), My remaining military service (240), Netta arrives in Ankara (244), My failed business attempts (246) MY LAST MONTHS IN ISTANBUL MAY-OCTOBER 4, 1956 I am discharged from the Army (249), My final break with Netta (251), I leave Turkey for Israel (253)

225

237

249

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EPILOGUE Father continues his fight to get me out of Israel (255), Netta does the same (261)

255

CONCLUDING CHAPTER AND ANNEXES WHAT I LEARNED ON WHO A JEW IS AND HIS STATUS OPTIONS The Jewish stereotype (267), The Jew who is the exception (269), The past compared to the Present (271), The status options of an individual Jew living in Turkey (272)

ANNEX 1. THEDONMES ANNEX 2. THE ROLE RELIGION PLAYS IN DEFINING WHO IS A TURK During Ottoman times (283), The case of Gagavuz Turks (284), During the transition period between Empire and Republic (285), In the Turkish Republic through the days of my story (286) SUPPLEMENT A. THE GAGAVUZ TURKS BIBLIOGRAPHY

267

277 283

289 293

ABBREVIATIONS

cc

CHP DP LSE PC RA RC RS E TL UKÌ

us$

Constantinople College Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (People's Republican Party) Demokrat Partisi (Democratic Party) London School of Economics Politically Correct Robert Academy Robert College Robert School of Engineering Turkish Lira Ulajtirma Koordìnasyonu ìdaresi (Transport Coordination Organisation) United States Dollar

FOREWORD

The story that follows is autobiographical though limited in subject matter and in its time frame. It starts from my. birth on November 24, 1930 and ends the day of my arrival to Israel as an immigrant. Three milestones mark the way. The first is the early Autumn of 1938 when my conversion to Islam took place, the second is the annulment of my conversion in the Summer of 1951, and the third and last one is the date of my arrival in Israel as an immigrant on October 4, 1956. I will digress into years past this date on subjects of importance to the main theme of the story, though to a limited extent. The background to the period I am writing about was a rather turbulent one in the history of the Jewish Community of Turkey of the Spanish Exile, a level of turbulence that had no equal under five hundred years of benevolent Ottoman rule. 1 It is the story of a young person who lived all his youth in this period of "turbulence" from birth through adolescence, and young adulthood, from a vantage point that is rather rare if not unique. In Turkey, in these years of my life, anti-Semitism of a visceral kind ruled the day. It would be too facile to claim that had this anti-Semitism not existed, all my personal problems would have been solved. An average person comes into this world with a pack of problems of his own, or acquires them with time, and I was no exception to this rule. However, as I will show in my story my Jewish problem complicated my life not a little. Second to my main theme is a subsidiary one; it is on what times were like, during the period my story took place. What I have to write about in this respect is broader than the limits of my main theme, though still autobiographically observed.

''l'o any person who is interested to read a good account of this period, I recommend Bali 1.

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The names of persons appearing in the story are their real names because the story, being autobiographical, does not call for invention. However to afford the persons I mention some privacy, I omitted their family names. I doubt that there is anyone around who could identify even a majority of the names appearing in the story, and if they do so, I hope that they will forgive me. In very few cases, I did not even mention their family names to provide them full privacy, while not violating the truth about what I have to say about them. With the exception of three persons, all the people who appear in my story who are members of the generation preceding mine are not alive today, and this is also the case with many of my own generation including some of my best friends. By far the largest information source is my own memory. Concerning some events that constitute a background to my story, I have a small bibliography. I have mostly used it in writing up the two annexes the first on the "Donmes", and the second on the role religious identity has played during Ottoman times, and in present day Turkey in defining who is a Turk, and who is not.

PARTI FROM BIRTH THROUGH PRIMARY SCHOOL 1930-1942

I MY PRE SCHOOL YEARS

My Birth The record of my birth is written into the Wedding Certificate my father and mother were issued. This document also confirms that on May 14, 1929 my father, "Menahem A. Efendi born in Kirklareli, and my mother, Rashel Hamm born in Babaeski jointly declared their intention to get married and their declaration was duly recorded in the Certificate". The act of their marriage was recorded on Thursday, July 18, 1929, at the Municipality of Kirklareli. Their marriage was contracted under the new civil law that had been enacted a few years back as part of the Civil Law Reform that Atatiirk initiated. The Marriage Certificate is a fairly elaborate affair, bound in Moroccan leather. The printed writing in it is in Arabic letters and of an ornate kind. At the date of its issue, the change over to Latin letters was two years old, but it seems the authorities had still not had the time to print the document in Latin script. However, the blanks in the document were filled in Latin letters. Some would consider the language of the document as archaic. I consider it as gracious and classical. It is a pity that no one writes or talks like that anymore! For those readers who know Turkish, I quote parts of the document so that they can also enjoy its language.1

Tiirkive Cumhuriyeti, Adliye Vekaleti, Evienine Ciizdani. Adliye Vekalet-i Celilesince tespit edilmig numunesine tevfikan Turk Tayyare Cemiyetince ihzar ve tab edilmij bu ciizdanin fiati iki bu£uk liradir. ÌLAN VESÌKASI. 14-5-1929 tarihinde birbirleriyle evleneceklerini beyan eden hiiviyetleri bu defterde mukayyid Rascl Hanimla Menahim A. Efendinin evlenme keyfiyetleri ilan cdilmis ve hi coin to me, in case he said, my father could not provide me my usual allowance. These boys in the age group between 12-15 needed no research assistance to know exactly what was happening. It was obvious to them that the State was out to despoil minority members of their assets, no matter how modest; or putting it a little less elegantly, to screw the Jews and other nonMuslims. As far as they were concerned this was well deserved and therefore they were enjoying the show. I left school as usual on Saturday at noontime to go home for the weekend. I found my mother wearing black mourning clothes. She told me that Mordo had died. This came to me as a great surprise. I knew that he was ill, but had not heard that he was critically so. It was only four years later that I heard the full story from Mother. It seems that in the night of the Sunday following the family meeting, Mordo took his own life. In the late hours of the night, he had cut the arteries of his left wrist with a razor blade. By the time the act was discovered, he had bled himself nearly to death. Attempts to keep him alive had not succeeded and he died. Mordo left a note explaining that he was about to take his own life because, with the Capital Tax that his family had to pay, he considered that his family could no longer afford to keep him in hospital; he did not want to become a financial burden on them under such circumstances. Mordo was 34 years old when he committed suicide.

Fathers' Status as a Muslim Produces Partial Relief Father and his father-in-law were partners. The Salinas-Adato partnership had never been a happy one. Even during the days of Grandpa Nessim Salinas, a competent merchant, even by father's admission, it was a marriage of convenience. However, Grandpa Salinas had died in 1936. The tension between the two families much increased after his death. Mordo, Nessim's oldest son and successor, lacked his competence in addition to his tuberculosis problem. According to Father, he was really working for two families and getting only 50% of the profits.

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To pay the tax, the business inventory had to be largely liquidated. That was not an easy task at that particular moment. Inventory could be liquidated only if one was prepared to incur some loss. But there was no choice. The process of paying the tax was slow, but within two months, the business had paid about T L 40,000 or two thirds of the tax. At this point, on the occasion of paying a further installment, an opportunity arose in which Father could let the authorities know that he was a Muslim, and complained that the way he was being treated was not the way he should have been treated. His statement caught the official he was talking to with surprise. He almost apologized to Father, telling him that had the authorities known that he was a Muslim, his assessment would have been a different one. From this point onwards he started addressing father as Nairn Bey instead of the usual Mosyo Nairn as a member of one of the non-Muslim minorities. He added that unfortunately, at this point in time, there was nothing he could do to reduce the tax amount. But applying some creativity, the official told Father that he could still make his life easier, and he offered the following relief: the Haker-Salinas partnership would not have to pay the remaining balance of TL 20,000 it owed. The State would then sell off the household goods of both the families at a public auction, as stipulated in the law. Following the auction and receipt of the revenues from the auction, the State would close the Haker-Salinas file on its Capital Tax obligation. The official further told father that he had the authority to absolve him from being sent to Agkale, a God forsaken place near the Caucasian border, a thousand kilometers East of Istanbul, where taxpayers who could not pay the tax to its full were to be sent. At A§kale they were expected to work as forced labor where each one would be paying his debt on account of his tax delinquency at the rate of TL 1.50 a day. In the case of Father this would have meant over 10.000 days, or about thirty years of forced labor! Lastly, the tax official added that if Nairn Bey could find a way to buy back all his household goods that had been auctioned off, the authorities would raise no problems with that. The auction was duly held. I was at school and missed the "fun". Father asked the help of his friend Osman §evki, a Donme, to buy all his household goods. To the bafflement of all those that came to the auction ("Qapulcus" or looters as Jews called them), all the items presented for sale somehow ended in the hands of this awful Osman §evki. As he always seemed to end up as the

THE

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highest bidder, somebody among the bidders started to smell a rat. At this point Aykut, father's younger brother entered the scene. He was a great operator, an expert at telling cock and bull stories, and with an engaging way that made people believe him absolutely. Aykut approached the guy who was about to start kicking up a stink about this "rigged auction". Aykut told him that this Osman Bey was about to get married. His wife to be had seen our house, fell in love with it, and had told his future spouse, cut and dried, that she wanted him to purchase all its contents and that if he did not do this, the marriage was off as far as she was concerned! Since Osman Bey was a very rich person, and loved his bride-to-be to desperation, there was no limit as to how far he would raise his bids, and there was no point in trying to outbid him. Aykut also added that he knew where there were better pickings in other auctions that were to be shortly held, and that he would direct the guy to them. Lastly, Aykut told him that if he wanted one or two pieces really badly, he would use his influence to talk Osman Bey out of bidding for them. The guy agreed. Aykut then went to the person who was running the bid to explain to him the reasons why Osman Bey wanted to buy every item that was for auction. From this point onwards, each time Osman Bey won a bid for a certain piece, the auctioneer started intoning in a well-heard voice, "Osman Bey evleniyor!" (Osman Bey is getting married). So the auction ended in this happy note. With the exception of two unimportant items, Osman Bey bought our entire household for the sum of TL 4500 (about US$ 38,000 of our times). Father, of course, financed the whole transaction and paid the full amount to his great friend Osman who did not ask for even a cent for all the wonderful service he had rendered to him. After all, what are good friends for? If Osman Bey had reneged on the deal, and claimed for himself a part or all of our household goods, who could have stopped him from doing so? The household goods of the Salinas were also auctioned off except for a few basic pieces which they were allowed to keep. They did not look for an arrangement by which they could buy back their property like we had. The revenues received from the two auctions were duly paid in to the tax authorities and this closed down the Salinas-Haker file. After the file was closed down, about one third of the pre Capital Tax net worth of the business was left, and this only thanks to the lately discovered status of Father as a Muslim by the tax authorities. But with the amount that was left in the business there was a fair chance to get it started again.

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The Break-up of the Salinas Haker Partnership Unfortunately, this was not to be, as further complications appeared on the path of the Salinas family. Mordo's young brother Alber had joined the business in 1940, and this made matters worse between father and his in-laws. Alber did not get on with father, and within a couple of months past his joining the business, decided to break out on his own. He joined the business of his brother-in-law Gabriel, who had a small workshop producing ink. They became only de facto partners, with each one keeping his identity as a separate firm. This arrangement was arrived at only on Gabriel's insistence. Gabriel's reason for acting this was that he was a Spanish citizen, and carried a Spanish passport. He said he did not want to get into a partnership with a Turkish citizen of the country because, in his estimate, if he did that, he would be taking a risk of loosing the protective umbrella stretched over him by Spanish authorities. Gabriel had not heard that "Capitulations" were dead a long time ago. But how wise of him it was, to have declined forming a formal partnership with Alber, will become evident! I don't know how much Alber's small business was actually taxed, but I know by how much it was taxed over and above his net worth, namely TL 12.000! Here were two partners, each with his little business, who were 50-50 partners and shared profits. Both were Jews born in Turkey and lived the same kind of life. The only difference between them was that the father of one (Grandpa Salinas), a loyal Ottoman subject, declined to acquire a foreign passport even at a time when the country was full of European powers that were pushing their passports on Jews, and on all other non-Muslim minorities, and anyone else who would take one. Gabriel's father was the more prudent of the two and preferred to take a Spanish passport; it turned out that he had done the right thing. Gabriel benefited from his status as a foreigner and was taxed at a rate less than half of Alber's. Turkish authorities did not want to have problems with European countries by overtaxing their nationals, even their Jewish ones. Alber did not want to go to A§kale, a seemingly open ended proposition, without even knowing at what date he would be back in Istanbul, if ever. He laid claims on the remaining net worth of the Salinas-Haker business to defray to the full the tax amount he owed. The Salinas took from the business the TL 12,000 to pay off the remaining Capital Tax balance Alber owed. Father then asked the partnership to be dissolved, and so it was. I think that one should not be too hard on anyone for refusing to go to A§kale, no matter what the cost. Only a few people had the courage not to refuse.

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Father Rehabilitates his Business Father now struck out on his own without even a store, the old one having been liquidated as the partnership itself had been. He was now operating on a shoestring, buying cloth literally "in the street" and selling it "in the street". His assets now mostly consisted of his knowledge of the business, his proverbial honesty in his business dealings and his reputation. Because of his reputation, the market extended him credit well beyond what he was entitled to, based on his now much reduced net worth. 1943 was our most difficult year. The food we ate became a little more basic; there was less going out, and above all no summerhouse. However, by 1944 Father was back on track. He had established a new partnership with two Turks, both from Thrace like he was, and he joined their store as a full partner. He had recovered to the point that when Robert College raised its annual fees for boarding students from T L 800 to TL 1400 (about US$ 12,000 of our times) he paid it, seemingly without difficulty. By 1945 he was already better off financially than in his pre Capital Tax days.

The Ruin of the Salinas Family and the Death of Grandma Salinas The Salinas Family was among the few who never recovered from the tax, financially or otherwise. After the suicide of Mordo, Grandma Buka was left with her two other young sons, Alber, 23 years old and Peppo, 21. Within a month after Mordo's suicide Peppo was found to be suffering from tuberculosis that he had picked up from Mordo. Neither one of the two remaining brothers were very capable businessmen. After having paid Alber's tax the family had almost no money left; only an iron reserve of a few thousand Turkish Liras in gold coins outside the joint business, that Grandma Salinas jealously guarded, to be drawn upon during hard times only, and never in a business venture. Suffering from tuberculosis, Peppo did not work, but instead, had to be looked after. To his credit, he was cured of the disease in the space of five years, despite the financially and otherwise very adverse conditions he lived under.

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Father tried to teach Peppo accounting, but Peppo did not like it. Father then tried to set up Alber, as a "scalper", (a kind of go-between for importers of textiles and wholesalers who were their clients) but that did not go very far either. Father paid the monthly rent of the Salinas apartment, and sometimes a little more. Mother secretly spirited them provisions without letting Father know. The Salinas family had difficulties in making ends meet. The iron reserve in gold was being slowly but surely whittled down. Gone were the days of Buka Salinas, her great home, her largess during the twenties in accommodating great numbers of Adato relatives from Kirklareli. She was now a broken person. In 1943, past the capital tax trauma, my life with Grandma Buka continued, but she was hardly herself any more. With Peppo my relationship intensified, and he became my intellectual mentor outside of RC. However, Father greatly disapproved of the relationship, and Mother feared it, because of his tuberculosis. She worried that I could have become infected by his illness, just as Mordo had infected him. I continued to see Peppo, but with my own fears of the experience. The level of comfort was not like in the old days. In an August morning of 1945, Peppo found Grandma Salinas dead in the couch in their living room. She had made herself her morning coffee but did not finish drinking it, and its contents spilled on to the now barren floor, all the lovely carpets that once covered it sold long ago in a state auction to pay the Capital Tax. She died of a brain hemorrhage caused by high blood pressure, an illness she had been carrying with her as long as I can remember. She died at the age of 58, my beloved grandmother, a few days before the first atomic bomb exploded over the skies of Hiroshima. With her death, I lost the centerpiece of my emotional life in the family. I had no substitute for her.

5 ROBERT COLLEGE, THE FIRST FOUR YEARS

How I Was Admitted I was almost twelve years old in June 1942 when I graduated with top grades from the five-year primary school of §i|li Terakki Lisesi. During those years it went without saying that anyone, whether a Turk, Armenian, Greek or Jew, who could afford it would continue his studies in a foreign school, French, Italian, German, Austrian, English, or American; there were plenty of them in town. Going to Robert College, RC, was my idea. Later, I found out that RC was one of the best schools available in Istanbul, and some would even maintain it was the best. But I had not heard that when I decided I wanted to study there. I had heard other things about the school that I found attractive. The four things that attracted me were (i) the school was far away out of town, at Bebek, located on the hills, about midway along the Bosphorus along its length. It took about an hour and a half to get there from home. The journey involved traveling in two sets of trams with a walk in between and a further walk from Bebek, the last tram stop, over a rather steep path. It felt as if the school was located far away in Africa! (ii) Reinforcing this feeling was the fact that the school had its own dense private forest, in which hunting parties were organized, and in which any student could participate, (iii) Students were given riding lessons if they wanted them, (iv) Beginning in mid-May one was allowed to go down and swim in the Bosphorus! It all sounded so exotic and outlandish. Everything I had heard about the school turned out to be correct except the hunting parties and the riding lessons. That was just cock and bull. When I told my parents of my wish to study at RC, they were distracted. In any case, during the whole summer of 1942 they did not take any initiative concerning where I should be studying, other options with their pros and cons, etc. I just waited for something to happen. Father did exactly nothing. Late in August, about one month before the opening of schools, Mother traveled one day from Btiytikada to Robert College, about a three-hour trip. She was told that the entrance exams had already taken place and there was no possibility of my being considered for the coming year.

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The 1942/43 school year was to open in mid-September. A week before opening father talked to me on the subject of my future schooling, for the first time since my completing primary school, and said that under the circumstances there was nothing that could be done for me except to continue in my old school, §isli Terakki. Father took me there for a meeting with the school director, and said that he wanted me to continue my studies at the school and asked the school director if there was still room for me. The director's face lit up with pleasure and he answered, "For Erol we always have room"! In mid-September I started my studies in Sixth Grade at §i§li Terakki, broken hearted. I slowly adjusted to my predicament, a process helped by the fact that I knew all my schoolmates. They were those of my previous grade, less all those, including some of the best ones, who had gone to foreign schools, among them Ozer, Ender, and, surprisingly, Ali, one of the duller pupils of my class, who had transferred to RC. A memory I have from this period was meeting Ali in the street. He had on his head a visored RC casquette and was wearing a matching school tie. He greeted me effusively, showing off his cap and tie and telling me what a great school RC was and that he was about to start his riding lessons (a lie). I felt like crying. Towards the end of October, with almost one month gone at §i§li Terakki, father came home one evening at his normal hour, but this time, with a big smile on his face. He went straight to the dinner table, and we followed. At the table he told us that he had been to RC in the morning to ask the school whether it could recommend a teacher for me who would give me private lessons in English. Mr. Mantikas, a Greek school administrator with whom he talked, told my father, while beaming with a huge smile, "But Mr. Haker we can do better than that. It just happens that one of the pupils whom we were expecting this year did not turn up and there is now a vacancy in the Prep grade. If you are agreeable, we will examine your son in two exams, and if we find him sufficiently qualified we will admit him to the school for this year." The following week I went to the school and was examined in arithmetic and Turkish grammar. I was told to come back in a few days, accompanied by an adult and I would be told the results. I came with Mother and we were told that I had passed the exams successfully and now the way was open to my registration. I was most pleased and did not try to hide how happy I was; but strangely, my mother did not look so happy about my

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success. She did not congratulate or hug me, or seemed pleased. The day was a Thursday. When informed of the results, my father also assumed a rather glum face. He did not put in a good word concerning my success either. He merely told me that he was convoking a family reunion on Friday to discuss the matter of my registration. The meeting took place in the afternoon. The participants were family members on my mother's side. It appeared that my father seemed to be having second thoughts about my going to RC. Perhaps he had not thought that I would pass the exams, or some other difficulty would intervene to prevent my entering the school. My success must have caught both my parents by surprise since they seemed to be totally unprepared to deal with it. Given the fact that I was going to become a boarding student away from home, except during weekends and holidays, this change was also a consideration. Be that as it may, Father could not go back on his word as the whole thing had resulted from his own initiative. Thus he focused mostly on secondary and technical matters: "The school is so far away; you can't travel there alone; at weekends who is going to bring you home and who will take you there?" Peppo promptly volunteered to do the job. Father raised some other technical objections. At one point my mother whispered into my ear that if I gave up the idea she would make me a gift of twenty-five liras, a staggering amount those days for a twelve-year-old boy. I did not consider her offer even for a second. The meeting did not end in a conclusive note. Father declared that tomorrow he would take me to Barzilay, his younger brother, who was closest to him in age, whose opinions he particularly valued, and whom he loved a lot. The next day we went to Barzilay's store. It was a Saturday and although business activity continued on Saturdays it did so in a muchdiminished form. Barzilay was alone in his shop with no clients. Father threw the "problem" at him, telling him about my having successfully passed the entrance exams to RC, asking him what he thought about my going there. When he heard this, Barzilay absolutely beamed, and said, "Why of course he should go, this is a capital idea". My father said nothing more. Perhaps he may have thought that if Barzilay supported the idea with such enthusiasm then perhaps, after all, my going to RC could not be such a bad idea. I have no doubt in my mind that without Barzilay's support, I would never have entered RC.

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On the Monday after this, father and I went to §i§li Terakki. Father informed the school director of his decision about my leaving the school. The director looked sorry about my leaving, although in a way he recognized its inevitability. Surprisingly, I too suddenly felt my emotional attachment to this old school of mine where I had spent six of my formative years. A lump formed in my throat. My heart and my head found themselves in conflict. But I followed my head and not my heart, and did not change my mind about leaving the school in favor of RC.

Robert College Enters into My Life As it will become evident from my story, entering RC and studying there for eight years changed my life completely, breaking me away from my family and from the particular Jewish environment I was born into. A few words are required about RC as background for those who don't know. 1 believe to this very day that RC was a unique school even on a world scale. I doubt if there are many other schools that can claim its level of uniqueness. I have no pretensions in thinking that the chapters that follow on RC represent a comprehensive and balanced view of the school. This is my story of Robert College as viewed from the vantage of my main theme, my class, and the group I belonged to in it, and by no means the story of Robert College. I can't be sure exactly how large the school area was, but I would be surprised if it then was less than a few hundred acres, or at least 100 hectares. During the years I studied there, it mostly consisted of eight buildings arranged in an elliptical form, about one hundred and fifty meters across its major diagonal, and fifty meters across its minor diagonal. For the expatriate staff there were houses constructed in New England style with all the foliage that goes with them. The wooded area that so attracted me was also there, in a size not smaller than the campus area. Each one of the buildings had its own architectural uniqueness, and most of them were pleasing to the eye. Ivy grew on many of them, giving the campus an Ivy League look. American missionaries had established the school in 1863, to educate young Ottomans of all religious persuasions and spread the gospel among them. In its first year after opening, the story goes that Roberts College had a staff of nine teachers, and five students. The teachers were the first to wake up at six thirty in the morning, and after prayers, would make coffee for their students and then wake them up!

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After the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and the decision that Turkey was going to become a secular state, with religion being completely taken out of schools, proselytizing was stopped. The school church was renamed Albert Long Hall; its second floor was converted to an assembly hall for the weekly school assembly and for concerts; its ground floor became the location of chemistry and physics laboratories. Roberts College consisted of three interconnected schools, which were run by the same management. The first one of the three schools was the Roberts School of Engineering (RCE) that gave out B Sc Engineering degrees recognized by all the major universities of the world. The second was also called Roberts College (RC) like the combined school entity was. This second school enabled specialization in the subjects of Arts, Commerce, Exact Sciences and Biology. RC gave out BA's and BSc's, but major universities anywhere did not recognize them, though they were still considered to be somewhat higher than a normal high school or lycee diploma. The third school was called Roberts Academy (RA) that provided secondary education in Turkish (Orta Okul), equivalent to the last three years of an eight year primary school system in Anglo-Saxon countries. During my time, the three schools together had about 800 students, consisting of about 600 boarding and 200 day-students.

The Trauma of My Prep I Year On a Monday, at the end of October 1942,1 registered at RA and started studying the following day. RA consisted of a Prep grade mostly devoted to the study of English, and three additional grades, the First Second and Third forms. The facilities for the Prep Grade and First Form were located at Theodoras Hall. Theodoras Hall was pretty isolated from the main campus of the Roberts College complex, and had its' own gate. During term time, students who had a home in Istanbul would have to be issued written permission called " a town permission" and they then could leave the school for the weekend at about twelve o'clock on Saturdays. I would be home at about two o'clock in the afternoon. On the return, I would leave home on Sunday afternoon around five to be in time for dinner at the school. In other words, weekly leave did not amount to much more than twenty-four hours.

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The Prep Grade I had entered in the 1942/43 school year consisted of four classes. Each class was run by an English teacher who taught us English during most of the class hours of the week. Three of them were prim and delicate American ladies of New England background. The fourth was a Turkish Jew, who happened to be my class teacher, his name, Vitali Tarragano. Despite these delicate and prim ladies who taught us English, coming from the well-cushioned ivory tower of §i§li Terakki, the student environment I found at Robert College was quite a shock. At §i§li Terakki primary school, about 20% of the pupils were Jewish and probably an equal number Dónmes. An overwhelming proportion of students were Istanbul born. By contrast, of the fifty-nine students of my Prep year there were two Greeks and two Armenians. Other than myself, with my imaginary ethnic background, there was not a single Jew among the fifty-nine. The first Jew that was to join us in the First Form was called Rifat; he was from Izmir. All the other Prep students were Turks. A good half of them hailed from the outlying provinces, some among them sons of semi feudal landlords with vast estates that measured their wealth in the number of villages they "owned". The numbers I heard were in the two-digit range. One boy told me that whenever he left his home alone without the company of a parent, an armed guard would accompany him. To use a Hobbean aphorism, life was "brutish" at Theodorus Hall. There were daily fistfights. Older bullies would roam around looking for material among us, new comers, to beat up, so that they would not get "uppity". Ozcan, who was a very strong boy and who had already failed his Prep class once, made it his duty to beat up new students for weeks from the day they entered school. At §i§li Terakki, I had not witnessed a single fistfight for my whole six-year length of stay including my nursery year. There was a lot of lewd talk, mostly of a homosexual kind. At §i§li Terakki I had not heard a word on sex. Among the street urchins of Ye§ilkoy I had frequented during summer vacations, I had learned that there were two kinds of sex of equal validity, the first between a male and a female, and the second between two males. It was all a matter of choice (No one knew of the Lesbian possibility!). However, the whole subject was an abstract one. At Theodorus Hall the talk about sex was confined to homosexual relations alone, and it was not just talk either. Persons who could not defend

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themselves against older boys were sexually molested. There was action too. In our grade there was a student of a transvestite disposition whose name I will spare. His services were freely available. Some made use of his services openly, and freely admitted that they did. Now and then we would hear of the seduction of a young student, an innocent victim who did not know better and was taken advantage of by an elder bully. There may have been cases of sex by mutual consent, although I never heard about them, as discretion prevailed, at least to this limited degree. There was one iron rule in this boys' jungle and that was "never squeal to teachers even in cases of being aggressed upon in various ways". I can't think of a single case of squealing. So I do not know to what extent teachers knew of the goings on in our deep jungle. I think they must have known, at least a little, but did little to really fight it. At §i§li Terakki, corporate punishment was exceptional and of a light kind even when it occurred. The Housemaster of Theodorus Hall, a Mr. Whitman, made use of corporal punishment not infrequently. Some of it was spontaneous, to put a student in his place on the spot who looked as if he had gone completely wild at a particular moment. But mostly it was by invitation and planned. Wednesday afternoons were "corporal punishment time" at the office of Mr. Whitman. He would invite to his office students who reputedly were getting too undisciplined for their own good. At his office he would "work on them" and hand them a real thrashing. To maintain quality, he invited only one student per cession for such treatment. Actually, and surprisingly so, the students who were thrashed took their thrashing rather well. They did not complain and described to their peers their experience at Mr. Whitman's office in all its detail. At some point, being treated this way by him became a status symbol, not necessarily sought for, but nevertheless not suffered from either in psychological terms. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one's viewpoint, at the end of the year, Mr. Whitman was drafted into the US Marine Corps. I didn't envy the Japanese that were to face him. A second person that frequently thrashed students badly was Tacettin Bey, a history teacher who boarded at the school. David Garwood, who replaced Mr. Whitman, was a mild mannered person, who would not raise his voice even when scolding a student that fully deserved it.

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Following this description I am sure I will be accused of generalizing rather recklessly concerning the student milieu. In my defense, I would like to say that not all students, or even a majority among them would fit the above description. It was just a matter of who set the tone, and for that a majority is not needed. The setters of tones in the student milieu had their own role model. And here is a description of the "ideal" role model that applied during my first year at Theodorus Hall. He was born outside Istanbul, he eventually became a heavy smoker, he was a poor student academically, having to repeat his classes; outside them he spent most of his time playing football, and during later years played poker; he often engaged in fist fights, and beat up new students younger and weaker than himself, he was foul mouthed, and molested students homosexually. Of course there was not a single person who fulfilled all these conditions. To be a "satisfactory" role model it was probably sufficient that he fulfilled the majority. My predicament facing this group was particularly difficult, as by accident my Jewish origin became quickly known to it. Within two weeks of my entering school, Ali, who had witnessed my transfer from Grade One to Grade Two at §i§li Terakki, had spilled the beans. He was a minor member of the tone setters. They allocated me special attention for treatment. Fortunately, at this point, the revelation about my Jewish background was limited to this group alone. It became common knowledge in the school only over the next two years. The delay in being found out by all was much in my favor, as I will explain further. It should come as a surprise to no one that I missed §i§li Terakki, but not to the point of wanting to go back. Again I was allowing my head to dominate my heart. Funnily enough, I even missed home, despite all the quarreling between Father and Mother, my lack of friends at home, and all. At times, I counted the hours to Saturday noon when I would be on my way back home.

First Form: The School Management Shuffles the Student Deck of Cards With a few exceptions, we were all promoted to First Form. There were to be three classes, First Form A, B, and C. In allocating each student to a particular class, the student deck of cards was shuffled to achieve some degree

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of homogeneity in each class. I have to give credit to the school management that it did this in subtle fashion, exercising good judgment and savvy so that it would not be easy to accuse them of outright discrimination. Generally, the better students, who also happened to be born in Istanbul, who were not physical, who did not create disciplinary problems were allocated to First Form A. The emphasis is in the word "general", since in First Form B, there were also good students. Most of the remaining class B students were those that had repeated their classes. In other words, the performance average of Class A was distinctly better than Class B, though without enabling a claim to be made that all Class A students were better than all Class B students. Class C consisted of students with an average record or less. The particular student composition of the three classes remained unchanged for the next five years through Sophomore College. New students were inducted to classes more or less following the same criterion; but once allocated to a class no one was moved.

Our Teachers This being an American school, one would normally have expected that a high proportion of the teachers would be Americans. This may well have been the case for RSE, but not so cither for RA or RC. About a quarter of the staff was Turkish; this could be expected because about a quarter of our class hours were allocated to subjects taught in Turkish. In addition, there was a smattering of Istanbul born Armenian and Greek teachers who taught at RA andRC. The majority of the staff was expatriates and sprinkled among them were quite a few Englishmen, and in addition, a Frenchman, a Swiss, a Swede, a Dane, and probably others I cannot remember. Their presence strengthened the perception of the school as an ivory tower, not only with a suitable location for the purpose but also with an international staff. Thus, the school attracted more than a normal share of expatriate teachers with idiosyncrasies that stood out, oddballs and eccentrics. In the context of RA, I will only mention two of my teachers. The choice of the teachers I write about is strictly mine and therefore wholly subjective.

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Baha Toven taught us Turkish. He was a small built person with gold pincetted glasses. I never saw him not wearing them. "Toven" is a peculiar family name that does not sound very Turkish. He assumed it sometime in the mid-Thirties when as part of his westernization campaign Atattirk obligated every citizen of the Republic to adopt a family name. Before this, Turks did not have them. Baha Toven explained to us how he chose his particular name. He was a great lover of the music of Beethoven. He wanted to be close to him and thought if he adopted the name Toven, he could sign his name as B. Toven, and that was as near as he could associate himself with the great composer, so he told us. He had a peculiar way of punishing or rewarding his students. If he found one to be delinquent, he would call him to his desk, produce a small stick and strike his left hand once. If he found one with whom he was pleased, he would do exactly the same, but this time hit his right hand once. In both cases, the strikes were not too hard. If he was especially pleased with a student, he would still invite him to his desk, but this time he opened another one of his desk drawers, produced a piece of candy and gave it to him. On one occasion, when he came to give us an examination in the form of an essay question, he left us free to choose the subject about which to write. At the time I was following the war closely. 1 Only a couple of weeks back, the British Navy had sunk the Scharnhorst. So I decided to have a go at reporting the action. The next day Baha Bey came to the class and told it what a great essay I had written, made me get up, stand next to his desk read it to the class. In particular, he liked my closing sentence. "... And the Scharnhorst descended to the mysterious depths of the North Sea." I then got my piece of candy! There was one thing about Baha Bey that was truly unique. He had no compunctions about openly criticizing Atattirk and his regime. I have not met a Turkish teacher, or for that matter any educated Turk who was prepared to do this. Baha Bey was not a dyed in the wool reactionary who was anti-Western. But still he opposed to the law specifying the kind of headgear people could wear. Baha Bey would say "What kind of head gear I want to cover my head with is strictly my business, and what right does anyone have to dictate to me which one I can put on my head and which one I can't?"

I had my maps, my crayons to draw on them to follow the front line, and the direction new attacks were taking place. I still remember the numbers and names of the Allied armies and Russian armies and their commanding officers.

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He had strong objections to the invention of new words wholesale, in order to purge the language of its Arabic words. He maintained that this was happening anyway throughout Ottoman history in a natural way, and therefore, why push it to an unnatural extent? He would ask in rhetorical fashion, "Suppose the English had decided to purge the language from French words that had gotten into it into it after the Normans invaded England in 1053. What would the English language sound like then?" He also used to make fun of the philological pretensions of Atatiirk. In the mid-Thirties Atatiirk came up with a theory on language (in Turkish, Gune§ Dil Teorisi), that claimed that all languages in the world are derived from Turkish. As could be expected, all the acolytes around Atatiirk, of which there were quite a few, applauded the new theory with great enthusiasm. On the strength of this reaction, an international congress of philologists, comprising some of the biggest names of the times was convened in Istanbul sometime in the Thirties, to hear out the theory. Baha Bey then went about describing the theory to us blow by blow, with one absurdity after the other. The philologists who participated in the congress met the theory in embarrassed silence and left the country telling their hosts that they would submit their comments on the theory at a later date. Within a few years, the theory was forgotten even in Turkey. Baha Bey's last and most important no-no, was to attempts at rewriting some aspects of the history of the Turkish War of Independence. He maintained that the Sultan Vahdettin had gotten a raw deal as traitor that he had not deserved. The idea of organizing resistance in Anatolia was Vahdettin's idea, and it was he who had sent Atatiirk there to organize it. This is confirmed in the history books of our times too, although without diminishing the fury with which Vahdettin was denounced as a traitor. All this was pure heresy against what passed as the ruling "Kemalist" ideology, and I still wonder to the present day how he got away with it. Cherchiyan, our algebra and penmanship teacher, an Armenian, a truly gentle soul, with a face smiling most of the time, was a great teacher, who loved to give us high grades. Every Friday, he gave us a weekly test. He would bring them back the Monday following, and before he handed them back to us, he would announce with a big smile on his face something like "Twelve (depending on the number) of you got ten and 11 of these, ten excellent!" For a class of about 25-30 students, this was not such a bad

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record. This kind of proportion never changed much. I don't remember anybody getting less than seven from him, or very rarely, six (a pass). The Grade "Ten Excellent" was his invention. He felt that for some of his beloved students, and we all had such status, the "ten" mark was not good enough. He was so pleased about being able to give us such high grades, and looked so unhappy when performance was less than he expected it to be. Despite all this, I had a hard time in his class at the beginning of the year, when he started explaining to us the concept of an equation and how to solve it. I was getting bottom of the barrel grades. My reputation as a mathematician was about to fall to pieces. One day at the end of a class he detained me and asked me to stay on a little longer. When all were gone he made me sit down next to him at his desk, wrote a simple algebraic equation with one unknown and said "I know you are an intelligent fellow, and I will explain to you in my special way what an equation is and how to solve it." He then pointed out with his finger at the "=" sign in the equation and said: "This is the Eminonii-Karakoy bridge (across the Golden Horn). Imagine that there are two kinds of people at each one of the two locations; those designated with an 'x' at the end, and those who are not designated this way. To solve the equation all the 'x' ones need to be assembled on the Eminonii side and those without an 'x', on the Karakoy side. But each of the sides also has a shirt color. All those on the Eminonti side have to wear blue shirts and those on the Karakoy side have to wear white shirts. For example, if you find on the Karakoy side a number (person) ending with an 'x' and wearing a white shirt, this means that he is on the wrong side; but to cross over to Eminonii he has to change his shirt from white to blue to be accepted, because on the Eminonti side only blue shirts are worn. This means that if he is with a plus sign he has to get a minus sign before he crosses to Eminonii, and of course, if he is with a minus sign he has to acquire a plus sign." The coin had dropped; I could almost hear it. I was so moved by his explanation that I ended up saying nothing, went out just like that, and almost ran away. From that day onwards all my problems about equation solving had disappeared. As far as his p e n m a n s h i p lessons were concerned, w i t h o u t exaggeration, I could say that I had the most horrible handwriting in the whole class. Trying to improve it was a hopeless proposition. The reason for this was that I am very strongly left-handed. My good father had categorically

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forbidden me to write with my left hand, and firmly believed that with systematic effort, this "infirmity" of mine could be remedied. I was forbidden to use my left hand for writing purposes. With all her good heart and kindness, Kerime Hamm, my Grade One teacher at §i§li Terakki, thought exactly as my father did. All that was left for me to do was to obey them and that is what I did, and no matter what the consequences. 1 By the end of the year with Cherchiyan there was not the slightest improvement in the condition of my handwriting. At the beginning of the year, he had announced that at the end of his course, he would distribute penmanship diplomas to students who deserved them. Towards the end of the year, he announced that all of us had attained the required standard, and if one was interested to get a diploma, he had to bring to the class three Turkish Liras (about US$ 15 of our times) to have one issued to him under his name. The money was for mailing expenses! All students with the exception of myself and one other pupil brought the money. In a couple of weeks he brought to the class the diplomas that had "just arrived" from America, so he said. Being in the middle of the war, post took about two months to arrive, provided that a German submarine did not sink the ship. I think he had stacks of his diplomas stored somewhere, each with a blank space to insert a name in. The diploma was on expensive creamy paper and its contents were printed in elaborate and stilted letters of the kind he had taught us to write. The reason that I had not asked for a penmanship diploma was that I felt so badly about my handwriting that I was sure that no one in his right mind would issue me one. A few days past the issuing of the diplomas he came to me and asked me why it was that I did not want to receive a diploma just like the others had done. I gave my reason. He admitted that I had a case in point, that he was impressed by my honesty, and said that because of this he was prepared to give me a few extra lessons, after which he was sure I would deserve the diploma. I felt embarrassed; I said to him neither yes nor no. But in the end I still did not apply for the diploma. Deep in my heart I knew I did not deserve it. My being left-handed is a rather long story on its own right and I am writing about it only briefly. I had the opportunity to come across some samples of my writing with the right hand in the days I was a teenager. Without claiming to be a graphologist, I would say that the author of those pages must have had personality difficulties and serious psychiatric problems. I started to make attempts to go back to writing with my left hand, for the first time, when I was 24 years old. It took me ten years at the age of 34 to succeed. Since then my handwriting has much improved. In the mean time I had gone through my whole education while using my wrong hand. In my exams, I was always the first to finish and hand in my paper. I was quite proud of the fact and always kidded myself about being so great that I did not need the extra time. In truth, I hated my handwriting, could just not bear to read what I had written again, to check mistakes, or improve upon what I had written. I have no doubt that the grades I got suffered to a considerable extent as a result.

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Second Form, Dormitory A is Populated In 1944/1945, when we entered Second Form, the school management performed an additional, but this time smaller "discriminatory act" without changing the allocation of the students to classes. The great majority of students transferred to Anderson Hall, where the classes themselves were located, as well as the Second and Third Form dormitories. A small group of Second Form students were kept in Theodorus Hall. They were allocated to Dormitory A, which housed about 20 students. Nevertheless, these students had Anderson Hall privileges. For example, they could leave the building without having to get written permission; they did not have to do study hall in the evenings. In other words, these privileged students were getting the best of both worlds. On one hand, they would avoid the rough and tumble existence at Anderson Hall with the physical types, but had no less privilege than them. If the school management was trying in this way to hatch an elitist spirit among those who were chosen to remain in Theodorus Hall, it was not talking about it. However, judging by the results, this is what eventually happened. And who were the students who were given this enviable position? They were mostly from First Form A, but lo and behold, all the better performers of Class B were also accorded room in this dormitory. I was one of the lucky ones who got into First Form A and also spent a third year in Dormitory A of Theodorus Hall.

Socializing With our Teachers, the Beginning Many of the members of this privileged group began to receive personal attention and treatment from teachers of American, and in later years of European origin. Already in mid-1944, the RA management decided to establish an English Speaking Club. Mrs. Mc Neal, one of our Prep grade teachers, ran the club. She was married to Professor Charles Mc Neal who taught Shakespeare at RC, in the Arts and Literature section. He was a chubby little fellow with blue eyes and a well-groomed red beard, the only teacher in the school who had a beard. He had a large collection of classical music records, of course all 78 rpm ones. He played them to students he invited to his home, and when the spirit moved him, for example at times when listening to a Schubert impromptu or a "lied", tears would roll down his cheeks.

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Initially, the English-speaking Club was a hush-hush affair, and the increase in membership numbers was slow. In our meetings of the club, we first engaged in small talk. Then an invited guest made a presentation, or at times one of us spoke. In particular, I remember a talk given by Hillary Summer-Boyd, who had just joined RC, on his experiences as an undergraduate studying English literature at Oxford. He told us how at Oxford it was not obligatory to attend lectures, with the most important thing being getting on with the assigned reading. The main teacher in a student's life was a personal tutor who would assign him subjects to write essays on. At the appointed time, the student would visit the "rooms" of his tutor and with both sitting on comfortable armchairs they would discuss the essay over tea. I exclaimed to myself, "wow!" I liked especially the part of not having to attend classes if he did not want to. After the talk, we had tea and biscuits, and at times, chocolate cake, and we shifted to the formal business of the day that was mostly the admission of new members, one or two at every session. Mrs. M c Neal was the chairperson. She gingerly offered her candidates for our "consideration", and very modestly said that it was up to us to accept them to our club or not. I don't remember our ever refusing her candidates or coming up with any of our own, and we had no problem with our chairperson, nor she with us. But we still had to go through the correct procedure with one of us saying "I hereby propose that so and so be admitted to our club". Another member would have to say, "I second the motion". All hands went up, and Mrs. Mc Lean would duly declare, "The motion is carried". All this was new stuff for me. Lastly, announcements were made if there were any to make, and we adjourned. The whole event lasted about two hours. To me, coming into a New Englander's home was like visiting Planet Mars. It felt so different, as cultured and comfortable without looking showy. Our second foray into the New England World was to David Garwood's digs at Theodoras Hall. At the time he was a bachelor and shared the accommodation with Onnik Tuygil, the son of the RC Librarian and his best friend. The excuse we had to appear at their door was one I had created, though without intention. In an afternoon, after class, I had bought myself a piece of chocolate in the courtyard, and just about having finished eating it, I bumped into Nur and Kemal. They asked me what it was that I had eaten, and I answered "a piece of chocolate", but for some inexplicable reason I added, "but now I have five kurug less". Kemal answered me, "no you don't, the five kuru§ are now sitting in your belly in the shape of a piece of chocolate"!

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Maybe Kemal was trying to provoke me into an argument, or it was his special personal way of looking at things, I don't know, but the argument raged for a good half hour. Nur joined Kemal's side but I was still arguing that my net worth had diminished by five kuru§ through my act no matter what was in my belly. In the end Nur proposed that we all go to David Garwood's and ask his opinion about who is right. So we did that, and knocked at the door. It was five o'clock and they were having tea and cake. It seems the expression in our faces was such that they must have thought that we were bringing them the news that we had discovered a large crack in one of the retaining walls of Theodorus Hal, and that we were expecting momentarily, the collapse of the building. When we told them what the matter was, they burst out laughing and immediately invited us to join them for tea. It took about five minutes to finish the subject of our contention with one of them delicately asking us "don't you have anything better to argue about?" The conversation then shifted to all sorts of subjects, mundane but pleasant, and by the time we left, dinnertime at seven had gotten rather near. The visits continued for a while but irregularly. Eventually they petered out.

Our Group Comes into Being, 1944/1945 It was a slow process. The composition of the group was rather amorphous, and fluctuated in its intensity in both its group context, and in the relationships that developed between its individual members. It peaked during the last few years of the Robert College phase of our lives. It continued its existence in England during the 50's where five out of six of us ended up getting our first degrees. It then petered out amidst matrimony problems, with two of the wives exchanging their spouses with each one remarrying with another member of our group. I dropped out of the group completely in 1956 by immigrating to Israel, although I did maintain a lingering and limited relationship with some of its members. Today I regret that I did not do better than that. There were six of us Nur, Kemal, Ibo, Ilham, Tosun and myself. A few more floated in and out for a limited amount of time. Three of the six, Kemal, Tosun, and Ilham have died during the last four years. What I relate here about the group is strictly limited to my own experience of it. I would hope that one of the two surviving members other than myself will tell a fuller story of the group. Time is getting short, however, I am not optimistic that it will ever be done.

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The beginnings consisted of individual and unconnected relationships, Nur and Kemal, Nur and myself, ilham and ibo. During First Form, it mainly consisted of after dinner walks in twosomes in the Theodorus Hall courtyard. The story of when and how the ilham and Ibo relationship was formed is quite charming. Their families lived on opposite sides of Moda Bay. Ilham's family lived in a house that was a beach property. Both were sailors, one with his dinghy and the other with his yole. Both played tennis and ibo in particular was good at it. According to what I got from ilham, one summer day in 1944, ibo sailed right in to ilham's property to a small anchoring facility replete with an equally small pier made of concrete. According to ilham, that was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him in his life until that day. It seems such visits continued throughout the summer, ibo's family was a member of the prestigious Moda Club that also had a waterfront and some marina facilities. That was where they would meet when ilham was doing the visiting. ilham's bed was only a couple of beds away from mine at Dormitory A, opposite me. During the early part of the year, ibo was away from school for about three weeks. I guess he must have been sick. Each night when bed time came, a little before lights went out, ilham used to moan in a distinctly audible and painful voice "Oh Ibo, Ibo where art thou ibo?" and then he would tell me once again the story of the first sailing visit from one sailor to the other. This continued day after day until Ibo came back, and then, when this happened, the gates of heaven finally opened for ilham! What were the common interests that members of the group had that brought them together? The things were not the same for all of us. With Kemal, art in its various forms was the subject he was most interested in. For Tosun, the main purpose of life was to find the fun in every situation and do one's best to participate in its enjoyment. For the others, the main purpose in life was to exercise the mind in all conceivable subjects of intellect. This was Nur, ilham, Ibo, and myself, ilham, and Nur always counted among the few top students of the class. Geography, history, and politics were the subject I was most interested in. I specialized in intellectual agonizing to the point of being disagreeable to the group members at times. Luckily, I was forgiven, ibo had general, and one may say balanced interests. Nur was a powerful personality even in his very young days, and at times led the pack. He was the first who started to have dealings with the fair sex, with ibo a good second. He became my role model for the whole period.

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With perhaps one exception, we all had an interest in literature. The majority among us read rather avidly. All of us had a reasonable amount, or more, of a sense of humor. Also, we were all misfits of some sort among our peers, and intellectual snobs as well. This made us insufferable in the eyes of most of our peers, especially during later years. Matters came to a head in our senior year. At the beginning of the year, Nur had been elected Class President. Towards its middle, in an extra-ordinary meeting of the class Nur got a no-confidence vote and was forced to resign from his presidentship. I don't remember the precise charges directed against him, but I do remember that they were all made up to the point of being absurd. However, the classical rule holds in such situations, namely once people don't like you and want to get rid of you, they always invent some sort of charge against you, and it does not matter how much truth it contains. However, worse was still to come, and not for Nur alone, but for all the members of group. At the end of our senior we were collectively accused of being Communists and having established an underground Communist cell at the school. This was a very dangerous accusation as anyone with such a disposition, if found out, would go straight to jail without much ado. Of course if there ever was an absurd charge against us this was the one. Actually the only person who could be accused of this was myself, but then I kept my left leanings to myself and never discussed them with any person other than Hillary, and Haldun who had already graduated two years back.

The Group Discovers my Jewish Identity Towards the end of 1944, the group discovered my Jewish origin. One afternoon just before dinner when I entered the dormitory, I found the group assembled and sitting around on two beds next to each other. I walked towards them. One of them looked at me with a big smile and said, "We heard that you are Jewish", and the rest laughed. The laughter was half friendly, half malicious as if I had been discovered in a delinquency I had committed. As can be expected, I denied their accusation, though probably not with much conviction. When I did that they laughed at me even more. However, they concluded by affirming that they were going to "overlook it".

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Of the six of us three were Muslim Turks, and two more were Muslims, though with Jewish roots. But they too denied it like I did but no one really challenged them over this, because the conversion of their families had taken place long back in the past. It is possible that, at the time, they had no knowledge of their having Jewish roots. Out of respect for their privacy I will not give out more detail. As a practical and working hypothesis it is best to say that other than myself all were Muslim Turks. In the group, other than myself, of course, Tosun was the only one that totally lacked an anti-Semitic outlook. All the others were anti-Semitic to varying degrees.

Arguments on World War Two and the Holocaust The war was to wind up in less than a year, with the conclusion expected not in doubt. About two third of the dormitory were pro-German and about a third were pro-British. We still identified England as the main party on the Allied side, never mind about the USA and the Soviet Union! In December 1944 the German army had attacked in force in the Ardennes. It was to be its last hurrah. But as the attack progressed it blew new hope into the pro-German students in the dormitory. After all, perhaps the Germans would get away with it and achieve a standoff. The pro-German students had some powerful representatives, while their pro-British counterparts were less assertive. There were lots of arguments, but all ended in an inconclusive note. By mid-January 1945 the offensive had spent itself, and the end could be seen, even by the dummiest among us. Most of us knew about the extermination of Jews. So the argument was not about whether it was taking place or not, but rather about whether or not Jews should be exterminated. There were two outstanding supporters of extermination, one of them being a member of our group. Briefly put, their argument was as follows: "Jews are very intelligent people, but at the same time very dishonest. Because of their high intelligence it is difficult to catch them in their dishonesties and punish them for breaking the laws of the country they happen to live in. In any case, even if one succeeded in catching all the lawbreakers among them, there were just not enough jails in any given country with enough space to put them into. So the most practicable solution is to exterminate them, lock stock and barrel!"

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The side I took on the issue goes without saying. The arguments I produced against extermination were the usual ones and I don't need to go into them either. I had little support from my fellow "A" dormitory peers. Even those few among them who were against extermination did not support me all that strongly. The arguing went on for days, but as it often happens the arguments ended in an inconclusive note with no one of the two sides succeeding in convincing the other one of the Tightness of the position he was defending. I have two general points to make on the subject. Firstly, the arguments both in favor of the extermination of Jews, and against, were made in the spirit of a public debate. None of the arguing sides raised their voices, and personal acrimony did not develop between the arguing parties. Invectives were not hurled at each other. There were no attempts at hitting the adversary below the belt. Concerning the last point, I was the most exposed party as any one of my adversaries could have said, "Of course you are defending the Jews because you are one of them!" But none did. The atmosphere through the whole process was a civil one. It was as if the issue was a wholly abstract one with no moral issue at stake, on which the life or death of countless people depended, and among them adolescent boys like us. A second point of interest is that in the context of my professional life of over more than three decades, I met many Europeans, English, German, French and Dutch who were prepared to swear on a stack of bibles that during the whole length of the war they, their families and their friends had not heard a word about Jews being systematically exterminated, on a massive scale. And yet, here you had a bunch of Turkish youngsters in their early teens, located at a distance of more than a thousand kilometers from the nearest battle front who not only knew about the exterminations but were discussing between themselves the pros and cons of exterminating Jews, in a courteous and dispassionate manner. Now all those Europeans who denied knowledge of the Holocaust, were they lying about not having heard anything? For a large majority among them, I would have to say yes. Today, and long before now, I harbor no ill feelings, nor bear any grudges against my peers, who at the time, so forcefully argued what a good thing it was to exterminate the Jews. After all, they were not older than fourteen, and who can hold anything against a youngster at such an age? He had probably heard the opinion from an adult, lacked the capacity to think of it in depth, to analyze its full implications, and just passed the idea on to his

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peers without much thinking. For a fact, I know that by the early fifties one of my two antagonists who was a member of our group was urging me to immigrate to Israel as, in his words, "They are a hard working people over there, doing great things, and you should go there and take part in their doings." This notwithstanding, the arguments we had about the extermination of Jews was one of the most traumatic experiences I have gone through in my life, and it took me ten or more years to get rid of the trauma in emotional terms. During those years I could not stop myself from bringing the subject up in the contcxt of describing to close friends of later days some of my traumatic experiences of my life, namely, that one of my best friends was in favor of exterminating all my kind, lock stock and barrel!

The Press During World War Two During World War Two, a majority of the press was pro-German. 1 Many caricatures were published depicting Jews as the lowest form of human existence. These caused me great grief. Newspapers and weeklies were full of

^There were three major dailies that were pro allied. The Vatan (Ahmet Emin), the Tan (Zekeriya Sertel) and the Tanin (Hiiseyin Cahit Yalijin) Two among them were Donmes, the second not only a Donme but a crypto communist to boot, (Sertel) and only a single one whose Turkish origin was undisputed There were five pro German dailies, the Cumhuriyet (Yunus Nadi), Ak§am (Necmettin Sadak), Son Dakika, Son Saat, and the Tasvir-i-Efkar. In addition there were a few smaller newspapers that were pro German. The Cumhuriyet in particular, who supported the ruling party the CHP established by Ataturk, was strongly pro-German. About a year from the day the German Army attacked the Soviet Union, during the Summer Offensive of 1942, when it was thought that by the end of the summer the German Army would appear along the eastern border of Turkey in Caucasia, Yunus Nadi published a leading article which in plain words wrote, "what are we waiting for, let us join the Axis now, before we miss the boat." This was too much even for the ruling party, who was trying to maintain a modicum of neutrality between the warring sides. The Government summarily closed the newspaper for nine months. When the Government permitted the newspaper to resume publication, it did this it did on condition that Yunus Nadi would no longer act as the chief editor of the newspaper. His son, Nadir Nadi, who was a little more cautious than his father about being pro German took over from him. Sometime during late 1942, or early 1943, the Ministry of Propaganda of Nazi Germany invited a delegation of pro German Turkish newspapermen to Germany "to show them around". The delegation had nine members. The delegation visited Germany; at the very end of its stay and as a bonus, it was received at the office of a personality no less than Joseph Goebels, and every delegation member received a handshake from him. Upon their return they wrote articles praising what they had seen. Not to be outdone, the Allies did the same, inviting their friend in the Turkish press to England and giving them a similar treat. However, there was some difficulty in finding a big enough delegation. The chief editors of the three pro Allied newspapers mentioned participated, but only a few more could be found to participate in the visit. At RC there was a reading room called the Browsing Room where all the dailies published in Istanbul were available. Beginning with First Form I became a frequent visitor, normally spending there the break after lunch. It was like an addiction.

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them. 1 The caricatures of Cemal Nadir in the Cumhuriyet were particularly vicious. His stereotype of a Jew was a profiteer with huge bags full of money thrown over his shoulders that reached the height of his knees on both sides of his body, front and back. Occasionally, when a Turk appeared in a cartoon, he was twice as tall as the Jew. The facial and body features of Cemal Nadir's Jew were taken from the cartoons about Jews that appeared in the Volkische Beobachter, the Nazi daily. I don't remember a single carton showing a Greek or an Armenian as a disagreeable stereotype, nor an article against them. At that time the Government thought that they could print all the money they wanted but still prevent prices from rising. All they had to do, so the thinking went, was to impose price control on most of the products traded in markets, define profit margins and put every one in jail who did not observe the price control laws. This belief stemmed from a total ignorance of the economic laws of supply and demand. Of course price control is sometimes necessary in a state of war. But to make it effective, a lot more steps are needed, like for example extensive rationing (in Turkey only bread was rationed) and other steps taken to skim off excess purchasing power created by large amounts of money sloshing about in the economy. One way to do this is to increase current taxation on imports and on items considered luxury goods. At the time, income tax did not exist in Turkey. A compulsory savings program could have been established. The only step taken to skim off excess purchasing power was the one shot Capital Tax (The Varhk Vergisi) I wrote about in a previous chapter, that in the end turned out to be mostly a means to despoil non-Muslim minorities of their assets; otherwise it was wholly ineffective. It did not take longer than six months after its imposition before inflation resumed in full force. The agricultural sector was exempted from the Varlik Vergisi even though the land owning class was one of the major holders of wealth in the country. The Jewish stereotype was chosen as the scapegoat for all the ills of the economy caused by an incompetent economic policy pursued by the Government throughout the war. All traders practiced "profiteering" as understood by the Government. While there is no doubt that Jews had their share of "profiteers", there were Greek, Armenian, and even Turkish "profiteers". Also the implicit assumption that every Jew was a profiteer was incorrect. The majority of Jews of the times were bone-poor because of the limited economic opportunities that they faced as a result of being discriminated against. Such Jews were the first to leave Turkey, "en masse" for Israel five years later when the state was declared. *Bali 1, Aktar 1.

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One of Cemal Nadir's cartoons, I have not forgotten till today and never will, though it was not about the Jew as the profiteer but concerned the stereotype of the "Dirty Jew". It was about the Struma. This was a rickety old ship that barely had room for a hundred persons but was carrying 350 destitute refugees trying to escape from Rumania and extermination. A lot has been written on the subject and I don't need to add m o r e . 1 The cartoon showed the southern entrance of the Bosphorus where many ships were anchored, as was then usually the case. There was this small Turkish service boat that was trying to sail to the Struma to perform some port duty. It was having a hard time finding her among the large number of ships stationed there. In the cartoon, a port pilot (Kilavuz in Turkish) turned to the captain saying, "If you want to find the Struma, above all keep your nose in a state of alert, and once 2 you detect a heavy stink in the air sail towards it and you will find her". In the end, neither the Turkish, nor the British Authorities were prepared to grant the people in the Struma refugee status. As a result, she had to sail back to Rumania. But a little past territorial waters out of the Bosphorus, the Struma was torpedoed; with almost total loss of life with only a single survivor. A write-up appeared in the Son Dakika, or Son Saat about the sinking, claiming that the ship had been torpedoed by a German submarine, and that to make sure that all the inmates of the ship had been killed, the submarine surfaced, and the crew let loose some Great Danes who methodically went from one survivor to another and slit their throats with their teeth. The story was presented in the write-up like an entertaining event, some sort of athletic competition. There was not a single note of compassion in the article, no regrets, no questions asked. In the end, with the exception of the actual sinking and the fact that there were no survivors, the story turned out to be total cock and bull. According to the archives of the Soviet Union now available, the attacker of the little ship turned out to be a Soviet submarine that torpedoed her by mistake, thinking that the boat was carrying military supplies from Turkey to Rumania, presumably for the German army. Anyway, who would think of keeping Great Danes in a submarine that is so short of space? I would say, not even Nazis would!

] BaIi 1, pp. 346-351. ^Bali 1, pp. 343-343. Additional cartoons appeared in the same vein, in Akbaba, a particularly viciously anti-Semitic weekly periodical. 3 Bali 1, pp. 356-357.

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During the whole war there was not a word in the dailies of Istanbul as to what the Germans were doing to the Jews in Germany and the countries they occupied. Like all the newspapers of the world at the time, Turkish papers had kept mum about the extermination of Jews. When the AngloAmerican Commission, established to estimate how many Jews the Germans had killed during the war, published their results in April, 1946, the cat was finally out of the bag. On an early September day of 1946, I opened the "Cumhuriyet". In the third page of the newspaper, in one of the middle columns the following item appeared for the first time in small script: "According to the estimates of the Anglo-American Commission", so the news item stated, 9.4 million Jews lived in countries occupied during the war by Germans and in Germany itself. The Jewish population in them at present totals 3.0 million. It therefore appears that six million Jews were killed during the war." I have quoted the full length of the item. Brief as it was, this was a really sloppy piece of reporting with even its simple arithmetic not adding up right. In point of fact, the figure appearing in the report published by the Anglo-American Commission, which the newspaper did not quote, on the number of Jews that perished in the holocaust was 5.6 million. 1 In page two of the same issue, a crime passionel that had ended in the murder of a woman the day before was allocated three times the space given to the one allocated to the quoted news item on the Holocaust. To the best of my knowledge, no more news items appeared on the subject in the Turkish press, at least through October 1956 when I immigrated to Israel.

Who Else does Not Like Jews? I had other anti-Jewish experiences during First and Second Form Years. They consisted of those directed at me personally, those not directed at me by persons who at the time they uttered them then, did not know I was Jewish, and others I witnessed not belonging to either one of the two categories.

^Reitlinger, pp. 546.

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Oktay, who was from Kars, was in a class one lower than mine. One afternoon in my Second Form year, as I was having a casual conversation with him, utterly out of context, he said, "Ben Yahudilerden nefret ederim!" (I hate Jews). Since that day our paths have crossed on many occasions, as students at RC, at the London School of Economics, and later as staff members of the World Bank. By that time he had long ago found out that I was Jewish and was tactful enough not to make again such remarks in my presence. In my dealings with him at close quarters, just in case, I always wore my "Teflon" suit to protect myself in case he makes another attempt to hurt me like he did on the occasion. In Third Form Özdemir, a class mate was mad at me for one reason or another, and he almost switched to physical violence, stopped and satisfied himself by exclaiming, "Ulan Yahudi"; freely translated to English means "You awful Kike". Ilham was a fully-fledged member of our little group with whom I had quarreled on one occasion and we were not even on speaking terms with each other. In a conversation he was carrying with some one I overheard him refer to me as a " S a l a m o n " , one of the denigrating names a Jew is called in Turkish. I had accidentally got within earshot of their conversation. Of course at that moment ilham could not have seen me and he had no idea about my close presence. During my second form year, I was harassed physically and repeatedly, by three students, one year my senior, §akir, Turgut and Tanan. They were a set and often hanged out together. In the afternoons, after class as soon they saw me somewhere in the campus; if no one was around they attacked me together hurling at me the usual expletives, "Ulan Yahudi" or "Pis Yahudi". I thought the better of trying to defend myself as what chance did I have against the three boys older than myself coming at me together? This was a good tactic, as usually I was only pushed around, and not meeting any resistance they eventually lost interest in harassing me. After a while their attacks stopped altogether, and by that time, when I walked alone in the campus I always kept a watchful eye and as soon as I saw them f r o m a distance I quickly changed course if necessary, to avoid them before they could sec me.

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I thought that I had solved my problem of being subjected to physical violence when a new antagonist sprang up, his name Harun. He was in my grade though not in my class. He was a really violent guy, trained in boxing, and spoiled for fights, always inventing excuses for starting one. At his home he reputedly kept a large collection of handguns. As far as I know he was the only student at school who had such an interest. He set upon me in more violent fashion than the trio did, while starting off with the usual expletives. My best tactic again I thought, was not to defend myself and somehow this passed away too. A couple of years later in our sophomore year there was a boxing event at the school, the only one I heard of in my eight years at Robert College. Harun was matched against a student called Rosenfeld, who was the son of a Jewish refugee from Germany. I did not see the match, but I read an account of it that was published in a school newsletter. It seems that the match was well attended with Harun being considered to be the seeded favorite, and with every one coming to watch how Harun was going to massacre Rosenfeld. In fact it turned to be the other way around. Rosenfeld won the contest on points. At one point in the contest, Rosenfeld literally knocked Harun off his feet, coming close to winning the match by knockout. The day I read all this was one of my happiest days at RC. Our group had developed a tradition of inviting one another for lunch in each other's home. The first time this happened was on the initiative of Ibo. He invited Nur, Kemal and myself to his home and we had lunch, following which we listened to his jazz records. Running out of what to do next, someone proposed that we pay a visit to Tosun who lived nearby at a distance of ten minutes by tram. So we appeared at his home at about four o'clock in the afternoon, unannounced. Those days no one bothered to phone first. Tosun was home at all right, not only himself but also his two sisters, Inci a year older, and Yildiz two years, younger. Both of them looked nice but Inci looked stunningly beautiful. She was one year older than us, at fifteen, and in full bloom. I somehow found myself sitting next to her, almost within touching distance. The experience was overwhelming, to the point that I must have remained tongue-tied for the best part of an hour before I could utter a word to her. She replied, and the exchange developed into a convivial but still restrained conversation lasting about half an hour, at the end of which, when we were about to go, she looked me in the eyes and said, "Erol, I think we are going to become friends, but please let me tell you about my three dislikes and take them into account when we are together again. I don't like gym shoes, I don't like carrots, and I don't like Jews!" I felt as if I had just been punched in the nose, and almost staggered.

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Of course she could not have known my Jewish origin, as she was too polite and sensitive a person to make such a remark, even to a Jew, whose kind she appeared to dislike so much. Nevertheless, even if she later found out, she did not breath a word about it. We did develop a good relationship as she had said we would do. Perhaps her innate dislike for Jews did disappear eventually. I do not know. What I do know is that many years later, in 1974, when visiting Tosun and Giilen (Nur's former wife), at their Anadoluhisari home, Tosun told me that after a first disastrous marriage which lasted less than a week, tnci married a Greek Jew, Mario Modiano of Athens, and they lived there happily thereafter until her death from a terminal disease a few years ago. Another story about gym shoes, oddly enough, relates to Orhan, my father's youngest brother and my uncle. During the period I am writing about he was a medical student. At the time, all university students had to spend a month in military camp in the summer as part of their training as officers. In the summer of 1943 we had not rented a summerhouse, and had remained in the city. The university students who were participating in the camp were quartered at the military school for reserve officers that was about a hundred meters from our home. In 1943, non-Muslims could still not become commissioned officers in the Turkish army, and therefore, a non-Muslim university student would not participate in such a camp. There was, however, one exception and this was the non-Muslim medical student group. As the army did not have an excess of MD's, it could not afford not to use all the graduates of the medical school even if these were non-Muslims; and once they were allowed to serve as physicians, there was no choice but to grant them the rank of officer. Otherwise what soldier would be prepared to be treated by them? The unit marched out every morning to Hiirriyet Tepesi (Freedom Hill!), got their training and marched back late in the afternoon. My brother and I would come down to watch them; and the fact that Orhan was also among the marching soldiers was an additional attraction. As we watched it all, one thing attracted our attention. Orhan was always to be found in the last two rows, and with the unit mustering about 200, all in all, there were about sixty rows. We probably would not have noticed this had it not been for the fact that in contrast with all the other members of the unit who were wearing proper military shoes, the six members of the two last rows were wearing white gym shoes!

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I puzzled over this and came to the conclusion that the army must have run out of military shoes, and that Orhan turned out to be among the six unlucky ones who had to make do with white gym shoes instead. How was it that our glorious army was incapable of providing to six more of its cadets proper military shoes? I couldn't think of a satisfactory answer and I forgot the experience until it came back to me like a flash almost sixty years later. The occasion was the book I had read of Rifat Bali writing about a similar experience and giving the cause for it. 1 1 suddenly realized that I now knew the answer to the question that had been in my mind sixty years back. Just to make sure about my guess, on the first occasion we met I asked Orhan, my uncle, who is now a retired general director of a psychiatric hospital, as I wanted to hear it straight from his mouth. So I put the question to him; "How come, Orhan?' He said: "Oh yes, there were six of us, Armenians, Greeks and Jews; they gave us white gym shoes to wear so that we could be identified as non Muslims." In the summer of 1945 in Buyiikada near the "iskele" (pier), I was witness to a street fight between a single Jewish boy about my age, set upon by three Turkish kids. They were beating him up. He did not run away but tried to defend him as well as he could. Two other Jewish boys, probably his friends, who remained passive, were watching them from close bye. But on the opposite sides there were six Turkish boys who were also watching. The two Jewish kids who were watching exchanged a question between themselves "SaltamosT (In Ladino, shall we j u m p in?) But looking at the other six opposite they thought the better of it. I was watching the unequal fight with some fascination. It was an afternoon, and the area was not deserted, but no one even turned his heads towards the group. After watching a few good minutes I left, but the fight was still going on. Rifat was the only Jew in our Grade, a nice kid, small in stature, blond with curly hair, green eyes, and very mixed up. As soon as he arrived he became the subject of much abuse and rough treatment by the bullies of the grade, because he was Jewish. The crowning of the injuries he suffered was inflicted on him in early 1945. A common characteristic attributed to Jews during those times, as part of the Jewish stereotype, was their being cowards, and hence they were often called "Korkak Yahudi" (Coward Jew). Now two of the bullies of our class who wanted to find out how "korkak" Rifat really was, decided to test the hypothesis on him. The Theodorus Hall building had a covered internal courtyard, and the stairs that went to the second and third floors were built around it, resulting in the formation of a large empty air space in the middle of the building.

1

Balil,pp. 548.

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These two brutes told Rifat that they intended to dangle him from the stairs over the courtyard with his head down. One grabbed him by the head and the second by his feet, and walked towards the staircase leading to the third floor of the building. The boy who related the story to me, told me that once finding himself on the way to being dangled down in this fashion, poor Rifat fainted almost immediately. Having proved to themselves that Jews are after all cowards, they dropped him on the landing, and disappeared. The boy who told me the story said that after the bullies had disappeared he rushed to Rifat to help revive him, following which Rifat told him the full story while crying. Eventually, most students in the grade got around to tolerate him, and some even got to like him, but what an introduction to his new school and his friends to be! Even worse, what would have happened if the two had dangled him down, lost control while holding him head downward, and Rifat had fallen down two floors? It would have been a case of plain murder, the death of a Jew.

I Become a Bookworm Beginning with First Form, I turned into a bookworm. I guess this was the best method of escape for me from the disagreeable experiences I was having at school as a Jew. I started to borrow books from the College Library. The library was of impressive dimensions by any standard, but especially for those of the day. It had a huge collection of books, in Turkish and English, on history, literature, travel books, and others. I acted like a vacuum cleaner, reading without discrimination. Fortunately, this was a library that was choosy about the books it kept. In addition, I read books I purchased with my weekly allowance that I spent mostly on buying them, Turkish translations of Dumas, Jules Verne, the Pardallians, Arsène Lupin detective stories, Nat Pinkerton, you name it. I also read novels by Turkish authors of semi-classic status like Yusuf Ziya and Re§at Nuri. One particular book I was most fascinated with was called "The Two Year Vacation". A Frenchman wrote it and I read its Turkish translation. It was a book about a group of youngsters who had hired a boat during their summer vacation, and lost their way in the sea. In the process of trying to get back, they lost their way even further and found themselves in the South Pacific. By the time a ship found them to escort them back to where they

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came from, two years had gone bye. What a summer vacation! What a capital idea of a vacation that lasted two years! Most of the book was about their adventures in the South Seas, sailing into Micronesian islands, learning about their inhabitants, their customs and much else. The book bore the form of a ship log with daily entries, some short, only a line or two, some a few pages, depending on the experience of the day. For me the most dramatic entry into the ship log was the mention of a particularly bitter cold day in the month of July. This was the first time that I had stumbled on the fact that in the southern hemisphere our summer is their winter and vise versa. As far as I was concerned, the world became upside down in the southern hemisphere. The thought deeply moved me. I briefly entertained the idea that if I went to one of those islands to live, where winter is summer and summer is winter, maybe I would not be a Jew any more. It did not take me long before I dropped the idea. Through Second Form years, all my reading was in Turkish. By Third Form, I started shifting to English books, and from then on almost exclusively so. Reading a book in Turkish, either an original or a translation became a rare experience. In this respect I was following what other members of our group were doing. Some read Turkish books even less than I did, and tlham least of all of us. Mr. Tuygil, an Armenian, was our chief Librarian. He was very nice to me. In addition to spending my usual time at the browsing room after lunch, reading the daily newspapers, I visited the library almost every day to return the book I had just finished and to borrow a new one. This became for me almost a form of religious worship, although a secret one. One day after class, a teacher approached me and laughingly asked, "Erol, in addition to doing your homework, how much do you read for your entertainment?" I felt as if I were caught red handed, about to enter a bank for the purpose of robbing it. I made some noises for an answer and hoped that he would leave me alone. He then told me that Mr. Tuygil had written to the Hall Master, that from the number of books he was borrowing, this Erol Haker seemed to be doing nothing but reading for entertainment. Mr. Tuygil wanted to draw the attention of his teachers to this fact, in case Erol was not doing well in class. The head master had shown the letter to my teacher who wrote back to Mr. Tuygil telling him that Erol was doing fine in class, and that he needn't worry about his continuing to borrow books, as long as he returned them on time.

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Third Form, Relations Inside the Group Get Closer The year was 1945/1946. We were transferred to Anderson Hall. We did not need to do our beds any more. We had a servant who took care of that. However, we still had to get up at seven and be in the dining room at seven thirty for breakfast. Relations inside the group got closer. We reached the point where instead of going home every weekend we started going only every other weekend, Nur, Kemal and myself always, Tosun and tbo now and then. The excuse we had was that with most students being away, we could spend all the time we wanted at Social Hall to listen to jazz records, whereas during week days they were not conveniently and readily available. We also played various games. Retrospectively, I believe that the main attraction in spending weekends at the school was that we were with each other all the time. There were absolutely no distractions, no classes, no teachers, no large groups of students milling around. All I had to do was to phone and tell my parents that I would not be coming for a particular weekend and they would never ask me why I did not want to come home. What a change from my Prep days when I counted the hours left to get home. Now I did not want to go home even when I had a chance to do so! My relations with Nur became particularly close outside school as well. His home was nearer than ours to Beyoglu where movie houses, restaurants cafes, bookstores and God knows what else were located. On Saturdays, I used to go to his home, a ten-minute trip by tram, pick him up, and then we would go together, to see a film starting at four thirty. Afterwards, we would eat a slice of cake in one of the pastry shops and then visit bookshops, browse and sometimes buy books, by now mostly English ones. On Sunday afternoon at about four o'clock, I would travel with him to the school in his family car, a 1946 Dodge Sedan driven by a private chauffeur, its plate number 1 still remember, "495"! The sense of luxury I experienced on these occasions was too unbelievable for words. In today's terms, it was as if I was flying in a private plane. The door-to-door drive to school took about 30 minutes, instead of an hour and a half, which was the usual time it took me, and in what comfort!

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Given the kind of home life I had, it is not to be surprised that I had become totally dependent on the group for friends, social life and values; outside it, all I had was a hopelessly short circuited emotional world that stretched to infinity. My only problem with the group, as I wrongly perceived it at the time, was the Jewish monkey that was sitting on my back, — If it would only go away! Retrospectively, I should have leveled with my group about my Jewish origin, instead of pretending that it did not exist. I was afraid of doing this because being aware that none of them liked Jews. If I had admitted being one, I feared that I would loose them all. My outlook at the time was such that if God had descended from the heavens and told me, "Erol I am prepared to have you reborn as a Turkish baby, if you agree to a life shorter by five years than the one I intend to give you as a Jewish born baby", I would have accepted His proposal in a jiffy. It took me many years to appreciate that this fear I had about loosing my friends was entirely unjustified. In the words of Nur to Netta, a future girl friend, "We never understood why Erol was so uptight about being Jewish. We knew that all along, and did not mind it one bit".

My Family Problems I was being pulled towards the group because of the intimacy and the comradeship we shared, but that was only one side of the coin. The deteriorating conditions of my family life, was its other side, giving me the push towards my group. The continuing quarrelling between my parents on every conceivable subject bore heavily on my emotions and was giving a push equal to the pull towards the group. The preferences of my parents, father's for my brother, and mother's for me, caused their quarrels to spill over into my relations with my brother. In our small household, harmony in any of its forms was entirely unknown between its individual members. In the past it had been the Salinas family, which had provided the affection and support one normally expects from a family life. Following the Capital Tax and the death of Grandma Salinas, the Salinas family had collapsed as a cohesive entity. Father's family, the Adatos or later day Hakers, was the only one left for me who could provide me with a family life. Most of the members of Father's disliked my mother from day one, had worked very hard to prevent the marriage of my parents with Mother never forgetting their efforts. With a single exception, members of the Haker family treated my brother and I almost like foster children of that "horrible woman", i.e. our mother. Matters got only worse when Father developed a private and secret relationship with his family that left both Mother and us children entirely out, and of course, reinforcing in the process our status as foster children.

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For me family was just a lot of problems. With the deepening of my relations with our group, and the relations with some of my teachers, the role model Father played in my life had largely eroded during this period. There was now practically nothing under the sun we could agree on: politics, the way he ran his business, music worthwhile listening to, the shoes I wore, what I wanted to become, or on how he proposed to cure the stammering bouts I suffered from at times. I don't remember a conversation with him past five minutes before we started to argue in pretty strong terms. While being well conscious of my Jewish problem, as an exclusive and continuous factor, I was not aware at the time that I had a problem that was not less severe, namely my family problem, Thus even if I had come to an agreement with God over my Jewish problem, by being reborn as a baby in a Turkish family, if God had made me born into a Turkish family with characteristics similar to mine, I still would have been left with a major problem of equal size to the one I had as a Jew. I had feelings of insecurity in my new Turkish life, even though I had acquired the status of a Jew who had been "accepted". My insecurity expressed itself in my disposition to feel offended on hearing anti-Semitic remarks even when these were not directed against me personally.

PART III MY COLLEGE YEARS 1946-1950

6 THE FRESHMAN A N D SOPOHOMORE YEARS

My Freshman Year, Expelled from Anderson Hall Most of the freshman students were transferred to Hamlin Hall dormitories, where they were to spend all the rest of their college years. A minority of freshman students remained in an Anderson Hall dormitory, taking their classes in Washburn Hall with all the other college students. The students who remained in Anderson Hall were more or less the same ones as those who, two years back, had boarded at Dormitory A of Theodorus Hall; they included all the six members of our group. Thus our "protected species" status was preserved. However, our stay there turned out to be a rather short one when our little group was expelled to Hamlin Hall. At the start of the school year, Anderson Hall got a new Hall Master by the name of Stolfuss. He was a peculiar looking little man with thin graying hair. His most outstanding characteristic was his left dimple that never disappeared even when he was not smiling. We nicknamed him Mona Lisa. Stolfuss was bent on introducing all sorts of changes to improve how we were taught, and also increase our well being outside class hours, as he understood it to be. One day Stolfuss decided that we did not have sufficient recreation facilities, and to improve our lot, he brought a ping-pong table into our dormitory. There was not too much unutilized space in the dormitory anyway, even without the unwanted ping-pong table; but now, the dormitory had become truly crammed up. Playing ping-pong raised a real racket. In addition, with the concrete floor wc had, playing the game raised quite a bit of dust. Nur, Kemal, and I went to Stolfuss on behalf of dormitory residents, and told him that we wanted the table out of the dormitory. He would not hear of it. We had a second meeting where we repeated our request with similar results. At some point during the meeting I blurted out: "But Mr. Stolfuss "this is not democratic!" He got red in the face and left us in a huff.

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On the next Monday, the three of us were summoned to Dean Scott's office, a father figure whom we all loved. This not withstanding, it quickly became evident that his intention was to give us a good dressing down. He opened up with the question "Who do you think you are!" And then he followed by "What makes you think that we need your advice on how to run the school?" He followed on along this line for a few more minutes and then handed us his verdict. "Because of your undisciplined behavior you are to be transferred from Anderson Hall to Hamlin Hall. Upon your return to your dormitory take all your belongings and move to Hamlin Hall". Well, this was the end of our "Protected Species" status. Our group was now split into two, with tlham, Ibo, and Tosun remaining in Anderson Hall. This was really unbearable. In less than two weeks, Tosun managed to get himself expelled as well. With ilham and Ibo it took longer, something like two months, but they too made it to Hamlin Hall and the group was now united again in the same dormitory. Soon after, we heard that the ping-pong table was removed. At the end of the year Mr. Stolfuss disappeared from RC never to be seen again. In Hamlin Hall, we got to know members of classes senior to us through Nur's cousin Erdogan. Seniors did not board at dormitories but had their own rooms. The rooms were located on the top floor of Hamlin Hall as were freshman dormitories. Popping over to Erdogan's room was just across a short corridor. We became welcomed guests at Erdogan's room. He offered the use of his room even when he was not there, and we took a good deal of advantage of this privilege. Spending time in his room was quite a relief from the drab and rather depressing dormitory we slept in. Erdogan's principal hobby was painting. He always had half finished canvasses lying about, and at times, finished ones as well; the smell of his oil tubes and of his pallet was always in the air, and with his canvasses, created an arty atmosphere. He permanently kept a bottle of Vermouth in his room of which we also availed ourselves now and then. He smoked a pipe, and that is where I first picked up the habit, which I maintained for many years. Erdogan introduced us to friends in his class who also painted and dabbled in poetry as well. At times I wondered how much studying Erdogan was really doing at school. I never caught him "red handed" in the act of studying. Retrospectively, I wonder how he ever passed his classes. Perhaps miracles do sometimes occur after all!

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My Sophomore Year I Take Up "Digs" at Feridun Bey's As the beginning of my sophomore year approached, I decided that I no longer wanted to be a boarding student, and I definitely did not wish to become a day student either and commute to school from home. The solution was to look for a room to live near school. My conscious reason for the decision was to "save money for Daddy". RC was set up to make this possible. It had a cafeteria called a "tuck-shop" where day students could purchase lunch at a very reasonable cost. During the evenings, it was kept open for junior and senior students who lodged in rooms on the top floor of Hamlin Hall. I showed my Father that with such an arrangement I could save about 15% of the annual fee a boarding student paid. Father agreed on the spot. The advantage of the new situation was that I was now on my own, neither under parental supervision, nor under school discipline, and I was only seventeen years old. I really could have gone bad ways. Increasing the risk, Father had to raise my weekly allowance from ten to fifty liras so that I could pay for my meals. This was a staggering amount of money for someone my age. With all this money I might have run wild! 1 could have risked it in poker, developed a drinking habit or even worse things not to be mentioned, all of which would have impaired the progress of my studies and jeopardized my future. But all this did not happen, at least not 95% of the time. I rented a room in the home of Feridun Nigar, my Turkish Literature teacher. The house was in a gorgeous location, two lower levels than RC the main ground that was called "The Terrace". It overlooked the Bosphorus, and was located at a ten minutes walking distance from school. Feridun Bey's house was next to another one, a little higher up belonging to Tevfik Fikret, a well-known Turkish poet who had also taught Turkish literature at RC until his death in 1915 at a relatively young age. After his death, his house became the A§iyan Museum. The house had a lovely Turkish garden and so did Feridun Bey's house and the others further down along their street. Feridun Bey was a chubby little person with hardly any neck, half bald, with "pince-nez" gold rimmed spectacles and a cylindrical shaped body that led him to be named "barrel" (in Turkish jigi). He wore two pairs of glasses, and once he had put on the glasses for short sightedness could not see much beyond a meter away. Of course we all knew this and as a result he became an easy target in class for practical jokes. From the way he taught it he obviously had a deep love for Turkish Literature, which he instilled in me and many other students of our class, especially, for the classical literature of the Ottoman period.

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Lodging at his home I discovered a dimension of his personality that, though consistent with how he acted in class, was still a new aspect for me. This was his being a true Ottoman in his mannerisms, especially the way he addressed people and talked to them. Feridun Bey was a real Sarayli ("Of the Palace", a reference to the palace where the Sultan lived). 1 His manners were so anachronistic; it was as if he had been born in an earlier century, but I just loved him for it. Feridun Bey had a brother who also taught Turkish literature. Physically, he was thin and frail and contrasted rather starkly with Feridun Bey. In all other respects they were a pair. They addressed each other as "Efendim" and used the second person in the plural when they talked with each other. The way Feridun Bey greeted people in the morning, and particularly at home was especially noteworthy. In modern Turkish one says for good morning, and to be a little bit polite one can say Giinaydin Gtinaydin Efendim. Well, for Feridun Bey this was not enough. When greeting persons of his age, he would say "Sabah §erifler Hayirlar Olsun Efendim (Let the morning bring holiness and good deeds, my sire). What this length of greeting would do to production schedules in an industrialized society could be a cause for anxiety. But that it would considerably improve the quality of life, I don't have any doubts. It was a great pleasure to hear him greet me like this. Occasionally in the mornings on my way to school, when he pottered about in his garden, I would throw at him the full length of the greeting with a deferential smile, and he would answer in kind with the slight but expected difference that he would drop the " E f e n d i m " at the end and substitute it with "Erol". My first acquaintance with such Turkish, measured and gracious, was in the home of my friend Nur with his grandfather and grandmother who spoke Turkish with this kind of style. His father had already lost it by and large.

1 During the sixties, after I had been in Israel for five or so years, I was invited to dinner at a friend's home a newspaperman (Eliahu Salpeter). At the dinner I sat next to another newspaperman, his name Yoel Marcus, a Hungarian Jew. When he found out that I had immigrated to Israel from Turkey, he exclaimed, "Ah I have some relatives in Turkey!" For the sake of politeness I asked him what their names were and he said, "Feridun Nigar and a brother of his, I am the son of his cousin!" I nearly fell from my chair. With all the illusions I had and the fantasies I had entertained about his being a Sarayli, to think that he was a Jew from Hungary who had so assimilated into Turkish life was a staggering experience. After all, you have got to give it to the Jews sometimes. Even most anti-Semites would agree!.

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Haldun, who was two years my senior was also a resident at Feridun Bey's. He was studying for a BA in literature and arts. We played poker together "Tête à Tête", but more importantly, we talked a lot about politics. He was a dedicated Marxist. I was also developing that way, but talking with Haldun my Marxist leanings solidified and I turned into a communist of sorts, but neither of us was interested in looking at the events in the country from a Marxist perspective, or search for fellow spirits outside the school. Our interest seems to have been entirely academic. Haldun was not much interested in Turkish politics, but I was. My Third Form year of 1945/46 was a year in which major developments occurred in Turkish politics. Turkey had started to take its first steps to become a parliamentary democracy. The expectation was that all future elections would be open to competing political parties, with the results of the elections determining who the ruling party was going to be and with the remaining parties being recognized as legitimate opposition. In early 1946, four members of Parliament established the Democratic Party. Formerly they were members of the People's Republican Party (CHP) founded by Atatiirk but had become its outspoken critics. I followed these developments closely and completely identified myself with the new party. Two newspapers led the struggle for democracy, the Tan (Zekeriya Sertel), and the Vatan (Ahmet Emin). By chance or not by chance, these two dailies were also outstandingly pro-Allied powers during World War Two. Sometimes towards the end of 1945, demonstrations took place against these papers by hoodlums who entered them and wrecked their printing machinery offices and all, while the police were watching but doing nothing to protect the dailies. The Vatan managed to quickly repair the damage and reappear again. The Tan closed down for good. In our group, little interest was shown towards local politics, despite the developments of momentous significance that were taking place in the country. As an enthusiastic supporter of the Democratic Party, I was spoiling for arguments with supporters of the CHP. I found two in my class, Giirbtiz, and Kazim who was the son of a CHP MP. I had endless arguments with them, though as can be expected, they led to nowhere.

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Refiye She was an "evlatlik" (adopted girl or boy), that in affect was a bonded laborer. The "evlatlik" system was an institution that dated back to Ottoman times, some of whose relics still survived in the Republican Turkey of my times. Its function was to provide domestic help in well-off households on a bargain basement basis. Its prevalence was pretty common phenomenon. The evlatlik system worked in the following way. A family who wanted to adopt an "evlatlik" would make a payment to the family of the young person it wanted to adopt to purchase their parental rights. These rights would be transferred to the adopting family until the adopted person became eighteen. Until then, as long as the family was not treating the "evlatlik" in any way that violated criminal law, it could do what it pleased with her or him. Having the status of a domestic, an evlatlik was not treated as a member of the family with equal status. For example, the evlatlik ate alone in the kitchen. But this way she was not different than all the domestic labor of those times, whether bonded this way or not. In my own home too, maids ate in the kitchen. The first time I saw a maid join a family table when eating was in Stockholm, and this first experience came to me as quite a shock. Later, I found that in Israel too maids eat at the family table together with the family as a matter of course. When a girl evlatlik became eighteen, it was the understanding in the system that the adopting family would find a suitable party to marry her off to. When the evlatlik was a boy, he functioned in exactly the same way except that at eighteen he would not be married off, but rather be provided an apprenticeship to learn a trade, for example at the workshop of a craftsman such as an ironsmith. Feridun Nigar had purchased Refiye f r o m her parents when she was about eight years old at a cost of T L 150, the equivalent of about four hundred dollars of our times. From day one of her arrival, she started working as domestic help, initially part time, but by the time she was twelve years old she was doing housework on a full time basis. Living in Feridun Bey's home as a lodger, day in and day out, I could see that she was well treated, with all her basic needs in food and clothing being met. Feridun Bey himself taught her how to read and write. The Nigars were good foster parents; I never heard or saw their mistreating her, or even raising their voices when they talked to her.

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However, this not always being a perfect world we live in, accidents did occur in the set-up, and in the case of the Nigars it was caused by a factor beyond their knowledge, and hence the impossibility of taking preventive action. It came to pass that their youngest son deflowered her. Refiye told me that when Feridun Bey his father, found it out, he became extremely angry with his son and expelled him from his house and never let him in into it again. There is no way I could check the accuracy of her statement concerning Feridun Bey's son, but I can say that having lodged in the house for three years, I never saw anyone visiting the house who could have been his son. Feridun Bey reconfirmed to Refiye that when she became eighteen, the Nigars would, indeed, find her a suitable party to marry. I guess it should have become pretty obvious to any reader by now that I had an affair with her. This was without the knowledge of the Nigars and that of other lodgers in the house with whom I did not have a close relationship, ibo and Kemal started lodging in the house beginning with our junior year. With their presence the relationship could not have remained a secret. How I managed to keep it so I don't want to get into, as it is a story in its own right. At the time I started to lodge at Feridun Bey's in my sophomore year, Refiye was close to eighteen years old and I was seventeen. She was the more experienced party of the two of us, as I had none, but I guess, given time, most people can learn most things. Retrospectively, the relationship was a good one. We talked a lot. She told me about her life at the village she was born in, what she could remember of her parents, and gossip about the Nigars and their friends. I did not try very hard to attract her; she looked quite ready for the relationship and I guessed that one of the reasons that she wanted me was that she was a rather lonely person, with no one in her age to talk to as an equal, even just to chat, and this is what she had in me. Come summer vacation, we separated. When my junior year started, I came back to lodge at the Nigars, but she was not there any more. I waited for a suitable opportunity to ask the Nigars what happened to her, when the question would sound like a casual one. When the opportunity came Nigar Hamm told mc, "Ah yes, she is now a married woman. We married her off to a carpenter." I was very glad about the tiding. After all the Nigars had kept their word! Retrospectively, I appreciate the relationship with Refiye rather better than I did then. For one thing, it was my first no-holds-barred relationship with a member of the opposite sex, a stable one, and one that lasted for almost a year. It would take years before I had another such one.

7 OUR GROUP IN OUR JUNIOR A N D SENIOR YEARS

Group Members Follow My Example in Moving into Digs During junior year, Nur, Kemal, and Ibo followed my example and became "digs" residents. Kemal and Ibo came to Nigar Bey's. There was now a possibility to organize for ourselves a new way of living, as we had reached a critical mass as "digs" residents, all within walking distance from school. We took the initiative to make Wednesday afternoons entirely free of classes, to enable us to go to town and do what we felt like doing. One or two days a week we saw to it that classes started at 10:20 in the morning, meaning we had no classes during the first two class hours, so that we could sleep late if there was reason for it, or even when there was none. This did not mean that we stopped studying, paying attention to our grades, etc, but simply that if we felt like doing something else not related to studying, we had the possibility to do so. A proof of this was that our grades were not affected for the worse by our schedules or by how we lodged.

The Expressions We Invented to Talk With Each Other. These expressions were rather esoteric, the result of our becoming closer. No one could understand them unless he was privy to the special meanings we attributed to them. However, the reason we did this was not for the purpose of sharing secrets, but rather to express notions or concepts, that to our minds, could be more accurately expressed in our code than by the normal meaning of the words. Here are those that I remember:

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The expression

The inventor

How is your balance? How is your ego? Decisive Ego This is like Hume 1 Civilized fun See you at Church Reactionary Dr. Griswold Our pets

ilham ílham Ibo Nur Eroi Hillary ílham ibo ilham\Nur Kemal

She is brainy and has a beautiful figure

The first two were substitutes for "How are you?" Between the two there is a difference of a nuance too long to explain. The third was with reference to a person with an ability to act in decisive manner when the situation required it, without hesitation, ifs or buts. The fourth implied a situation that does not permit a forecast of what may happen, in other words, one containing an uncertainty factor of 100 %. "Civilized f u n " meant going out with one another to spend an evening together, after seeing a film or a play, having a good meal, a bottle of wine, and then going back to school. "The Church" was our expression for one of the many restaurants that were located at the "Cigek Pazari (Flowers Passage) in Beyoglu. Hillary used to call the restaurant by that name and we readily adopted it. If one among us said to another, "See you at Church tomorrow at noon", he meant the restaurant. The second restaurant we regularly frequented was Giine§ at Bebek, on the sea front along the Bosphorus, and the third was a Russian restaurant at Ayaxpasa near Taksim we referred to as Rus (in Turkish, Russian). Today, after more than fifty years, all three are still where they were and nothing has changed in them, neither the furniture, nor the decorations, and nor the menus.

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher who lived in the 18 lh century. He was against metaphysics of any kind and maintained that there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience. He was led to question the objective validity of the concepts of casual necessity. As a most extreme example of his philosophy, he maintained that there is no way to predict with absolute certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow. The most one can say is that it is very highlyprobable that the sun will rise tomorrow.

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The word "reactionary" meant something entirely different than its political meaning. Tlham, who invented this codeword, was the least politically conscious member of our group, and the usual meaning of the word meant nothing to him. To him a reactionary was a person who did not appreciate sufficiently the good things in life: a good book, sailing and playing tennis in the summer, an interesting conversation with a friend, a tasty meal polished off with an appropriate bottle of wine, and finally at the end of the day, and these were his words: "Going to bed not unaccompanicd". He wrote all this to me as a dedication in the book he gave me as a present for my eighteenth birthday. The name of the book was "Authority and the Individual" by Bertrand Russell. Dr. Griswold was our chemistry teacher whose wife did a little bit of sleeping around among faculty members. He did not seem to mind it. Adopting a "Dr. Griswold" attitude meant tolerating such goings on as a husband. Mrs. Griswold was an attractive lady, and the only Turkish she knew consisted of Turkish songs with risqué overtones, which she sang to all on social occasions. A "pet" was a girlfriend. That is how ilham referred to Sumru, Belma's sister, who was ilham's steady girl friend. Eventually Nur picked on tlham's idea and started to refer to all our girl friends as a collective, ie "Our pets". The rest of us followed. In either our third form or freshman year, Nur was courting a girl called §efika, a rather archaic name even for the times of my story. Nur used to rave about her whenever he had a chance. When we asked him what her virtues were, he used to reply, "She is brainy and has a beautiful figure". We finally all met her. She turned out to be a nice girl with a nice figure; I was never able find out how brainy she was; but for sure she was not particularly good looking. So whenever Kemal talked about having met a girl who was not particularly good looking or even less than that, he would say, "she is brainy and has a beautiful figure". The use of the description as a code word eventually caught on and we all used it to describe girls whom we though were not particularly good looking.

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Living Together at Feridun Bey's I remember an occasion helping prepare ibo for his monthly English Literature test: This was in our junior year. At the time Ibo was studying 19th century romantic poetry in his English literature course, comprising Woodworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. Hillary was going to give his students five quotations from their poetry and they were expected to identify the author of each quotation and explain why they thought so. Being an Exact Science student, I did not take English literature, but it was my job to help ibo prepare himself for the exam. All I had to do was to read extracts from his textbook and ask him to identify their authorship and give the reasons why he thought so. Well, it was the early hours of the night and I started doing my job, and all this, in the rooms we were sharing, ibo was doing very well in identifying most the quotations I was throwing at him. At some point, I felt that I was not giving him a hard enough time, so I gave him the following quotation: "Though the moon was lonesome shining through the tree". Poor Ibo looked lost over this one. He made two or three guesses but all were wrong. In the end I felt a little compassionate and decided to extract him from his agony. I quoted the second line of the couplet: "Though the moon was lonesome with my baby like you and me". And the refrain went this way: "Pitchin' up the boogie / The boogie woogie woogie." He then immediately recognized that the quotation was from Jean Krupa, the most famous drummer of our times, and a leading swing bandleader. Ibo wanted to kill me! One day, in our junior year, I returned from class to the rooms I shared with ibo. He was not in, but the room looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. My bed was overturned, next to it near the window a chair stood upside down. A reading lamp was overturned on my desk near the chair. I remade the bed, and turned up the other pieces of furniture while wondering what could have happened. I did a little reading. It was time for dinner and no one had turned up. Following an impulse, I decided I was going to go down to Bebek to have dinner all by myself.

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Walking along the seafront on my way to Giine§, and enjoying the fishing nets that had just been pulled out from the Bosphorus that were brimming with fish, I came across Kemal, Nur, and ibo. They did not look surprised about seeing me, but turned around and walked towards Giineg with me. At one point one of them cxclaimed, "It seems you got our message!" I was surprised and asked, "What message?" They all burst laughing and asked, "Did you not get our message?" I said no! Then they laughed even more loudly. Kemal then told me that they had decided to have dinner at Giine§, wrote a message to me that they would be waiting for me there, and left the message on the desk near the window. But then Kemal thought that this Erol would never find the message unless they devise some way to leave a trail that would point to it. So it was his idea to overturn the bed, the chair and lastly the lamp on the desk, and leave the message right under the overturned lamp. Well, despite all of this, I had failed to notice the piece of paper! We had our dinner and returned to our rooms. I looked at the table and the message was there right in plain sight! Half way through our junior year, ibo and Kemal came to me with the news that Kemal might have developed a contagious disease. So Kemal asked me if I would agree to swap rooms with him. I, of course, said," yes" though with a heavy heart. The diagnosis turned out to be TB. Kemal did not complete that year, which was his last one at RC. In our senior year ibo and I continued sharing a room. It was a great experience. My relationship with Nur had diminished quite a bit. Though he still remained in the group, and was its unacknowledged de facto leader, his availability had been reduced to a large extent, and was restricted to specific purposes. His relationship with ibo continued with more intensiveness. Together, they were RC's editors of a literary publication in Turkish called "izlerimiz" (Our footprints) produced jointly with our CC sisters. At times, the two shared night escapades with some of them. Nur and I did not see each other alone often. Now it was my turn to enjoy a closer relationship with ibo. I incurred no feeling of deprivation for the change, and in fact, it was an improvement, if anything. Beginning with the middle of our junior year when I had exchanged rooms with Kemal, we started spending a lot of time together. There were fewer fireworks when we were together than when I was with Nur. We talked a lot, and ibo was a good and sympathetic listener to all my problems. In fact I considered him my best friend from the time we started sharing rooms, and this continued into the next period as we both went to school for a year in Stockholm and both of us studied economics.

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ibo was the son of a sea captain, and he spent some years as a toddler in his father's ship. He was a great swimmer and sailor. The swimming part was not a big deal, as we all swam well. However, the sailing part was another matter, ibo taught me sailing, and very patiently too, turning the sailing to me in his dinghy, at times a little anxiously, since on one occasion, I got close through my ineptitude to capsizing it in a turning maneuver. But he bore all my mistakes rather well, and in any case, I can proudly state that I never capsized his dinghy, not even once!

Our Teachers I will here present some among my college teachers of memorable character including two among them who had the most influence on my upbringing, and most probably on other members of our group. Dr. Philip Ulyott was an Englishman. He held a Ph.D. f r o m Cambridge University where he became a don after receiving his degree. He must have been in his late twenties or early thirties in 1946/47 when he first taught me in freshman year. He was tall, blond, lean, and athletically built. He always wore thick glasses, and, with his slightly protruding chin he exuded authority that generated a little fear among his students, a fear that didn't leave them even when he flashed his whimsical smile. His tone of speech was mostly ironical and mocking. Philip came to RC in about 1940. He taught biology, physiology and hygiene to students of the freshman and sophomore years, and in addition, to Exact Science students such as myself he taught psychology in the senior year. Lastly, he was also the head of the biology section of RC attended by junior and senior students, and taught most of the courses of the section. He had extensive hobbies outside his working hours as a teacher. His principal hobby was measuring Bosphorus currents. This gave rise to rumors that he was a spy working for MI 5 . 1 personally doubt that this was the case. However, he never denied the rumors in a categorical fashion, and these whispers added to the mysterious air surrounding him. Painting was his second hobby. Lastly he was an accomplished linguist. He spoke excellent Turkish, no mean accomplishment for a foreigner. He reputedly spoke German like a native German. Also, he spoke some Serbian.

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There was never a dull moment in his classes. Overall, he was a good teacher; he was the perennial actor, always putting on a show. He went in for effects to illustrate whatever it was that he was teaching even when these effccts were, to put it generously, mere magician's tricks. On one occasion, Philip wanted to impress us with the conccpt of matter consisting mostly of empty space, with molecules moving about in it all the time. So he produced a book on the subject and asked Nur to read aloud from it for the benefit of the class. The text described a man standing on a handkerchief. By some divine command the man started getting smaller and smaller. The continued diminution in the size of the person standing on the handkerchief ultimately brought him to the magical world of moving molecules. The two pages that Nur read concluded with the following rather "dramatic" statement: "Matter is not continuous, as it appears to be. It is mostly made of empty space with molecules dotted all over it that are continuously moving!" Well, one might think this was the end of the matter. However, it most definitely was not as far as Philip was concerned. When the reading was done, Philip produced a microscope that magnified objects a mere 500 times. He then produced a bit of olive oil. He told us that he would mix the oil with another liquid which would split the oil into drops that were small enough so that, when put under the microscope, they would enable the observation of molecular movement. He then put the liquid into a test tube and shook it up. He took a drop of the mixture on a glass slide, and had the whole class, about 25 of us, form a queue. Each student was invited, one at a time, to look into the microscope to "observe molecular movement!" In the first round, about fifteen of the students confirmed that they could observe molecules moving. The other ten admitted to him, a little sheepishly that they could not see molecules either moving or not moving. He gave an indulgent smile to them, claiming that perhaps something had happened to the light reaching the microscope, but that if they looked a second time they would surely see molecular movement. In the second round six more declared that they had seen molecules move. The four of us left, including Ilham and I, remained obdurately skeptical, still maintaining that we could not observe the much-coveted sight of molecules moving. At this point Philip lost a bit of his patience, put a fresh drop under the microscope and declared that if these skeptics were unable

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to see the motion like the rest of the class, then there must be something wrong with their eyesight. In this third and last round, we, the remaining four, caved in and joined all the other pupils in declaring that we too saw the molecules moving. I did this without real conviction. The way he graded students' exams is a story in its own right. He had three categories of students. The bulk of them, towards whom he related indifferently, he graded correctly. There were students whom he liked and consistently gave them higher grades than they deserved. He lowered the grades of those he disliked, depending on how strongly he disliked them. The worst story to tell about the consequences of his feelings for some of his students was about one with whom Philip developed a rather close personal relationship. This student was an athlete. As a student he was mediocre or worse, and was studying in the "Arts" section. To get his degree it was required of him to write a thesis on literature, but he did not have the vaguest idea as to how to go about it. Philip wrote it for him; however, in the process he got carried away and wrote a real heavyweight piece, rich in language, metaphors and detail. I can name a few students in the arts section, who, if the thesis had been submitted under one of their names, it would have gotten top grades and won kudos. However, coming from the student in question, the teacher that read the thesis smelled a rat. The faculty then decided to test the student to find out how much he knew about the thesis he claimed to have written. During the test it quickly became evident that not only was he not the author of the thesis, but that he had not even bothered to read it through. He was then asked whom the author was and when he demurred he was told, cut and dried, that if he did not divulge the name of the author he would be sent down and never get his degree. So the athlete relented and gave away Philip's name. It was then Philip's turn to be interrogated. He admitted that, in a weak moment, he had given the athlete a little assistance and promised that a thing like that would never happen again. He somehow got himself off the hook, God knows how. It could have been the school management's reluctance to make a scandal, and possibly loose Philip as an instructor, since after all, despite his shenanigans, he was a good teacher.

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Philip was a dyed-in-the-wool homosexual. A few years after his graduation from Cambridge and his appointment as a don, he was sent down because of his homosexual escapades. In an environment such as Cambridge University at that time, where homosexuality was pretty prevalent and by and large tolerated provided that a reasonable degree of discretion and decorum were observed, his being expelled tells something about how flagrant his case must have been seen to be. Outside his class hours, he maintained close relationships of two kinds with selected students. The first was with students he seduced, and the second with brainy students. The last and biggest offence that Philip committed occurred during the mid-sixties much a long time after our graduation, in the way he marked exams. This time two students were involved with their end-of-year final exam. Philip had failed them. The two lodged a formal complaint to the school management, which this time around was unable to sweep the matter under the carpet. A teachers' committee was formed to reevaluate the exam papers. Their conclusion was that both papers were largely undergraded and that the students who wrote them should have passed the exam by a comfortable margin. This time Philip found himself in real hot water. He tried to get out of the whole thing by declaring that as of late he had not been feeling well in his mind; he said that he was sorry about what had happened, and that he would be prepared to make whatever amends would be required of him. The school management ignored his pleadings and initiated dismissal procedures against him. However, he was not dismissed in the end. Before the procedure was completed he took his own life. Sometime before this, he had formed a liaison with a taxi driver that had developed into a stormy love affair, but ended at some point, with the driver leaving him. It seems all of this was too much for Dr Philip Ulyott. He found a large gas oven into which he could fit, turned on the gas, got inside, and ended it. He was about 50 years old at the time. Hillary Sumner-Boyd was middle height, thin, with delicate facial features, replete with an aquiline nose, and thinned, half standing blond hair. Hillary was an Englishman also who got his MA at Oxford in literature. In 1944 he came to RC to teach. Outside class, Hillary had a wide range of interests mostly related to art, but in addition, he was interested in history and politics. Still, his main interest was literature, the subject he taught in his classes. He loved to produce and direct plays. He did one or two of them every year.

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Ideologically and politically, Hillary was a Trotskyite and a member of his party. He actually belonged to a group of people whom Trotsky had expelled from his party. At the time of their expulsion, Trotsky had called them "Petty Jewish bourgeois from the Bronx". As far as Hillary was concerned, the statement was a little on the ludicrous side because he was not Jewish, he did not come from the Bronx, and he was an Englishman from England. Even after his expulsion, Hillary remained a staunch supporter of Trotsky. Hillary was a heavy smoker, and best of all he liked French Gauloise Bleu cigarettes that have nicotine content twice as much as Turkish tobacco does. Hillary liked his drink, but still within reason. He kept an open house for his students from all his classes. He would often dine with his students out of college, usually in Bebek, at our favorite haunt, the Giine§ restaurant. He would participate in their wenching escapades, in which, members of our group did not take part. Hillary taught me American literature in my sophomore year, and world literature other than American and English, in my junior year. It was clear with him, that he thoroughly enjoyed himself imparting his knowledge on the subject. In the process, he reflected his personal world in which literature played such a major role. His lectures, were in fact, a personalized running commentary of what he thought about the stuff he was teaching us. Just to give an example: The first chapter in our American literature textbook was devoted to Cotton Mather, the chief witch hunter of Salem. The piece was an account of a particular witch trial that Cotton Mather had witnessed. Hillary dutifully started whatever he was expected to say, but soon enough he was making it quite clear that he did not think much of Cotton Mather, to the point of expressing wonderment as to why he was included in a textbook on American literature in the first place. But when in our junior year it came to Dostoyevsky, this entirely different matter. Everything he told us about Dostoyevsky with eyes shining. He gave us "Crime and Punishment" as the assignment book for the year and made it clear to us that if anyone appreciate the book sufficiently, he would not think much of him.

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Hillary was at times a rather absent minded person. One day he came to class wearing one black shoe and one brown shoe. From the way the class reacted he rightly perceived that there was something basically amiss in the way he looked. Lowering his eyes and looking at his shoes each with a different color he exclaimed, "My God! Are both these feet mine?" The monthly tests he gave us normally contained some questions, for each one of which we had to write one or two paragraphs. On one such occasion, he came to the class but instead of giving us the questions, he told us, "I forgot to prepare a list of questions for you; just write me an essay on any subject you like." and left it at that. I had just finished a book called "Our Empire Story" and in it was a chapter on the struggle between France and England to achieve supremacy in North America. The chapter described why England won and France lost. I made this the subject of my essay, even though it had nothing to do with American literature. Well, he gave me a ten for my essay. To Nur and Ilham he routinely gave 9-9.5 in all their tests. My grades were more in the 8-8.5 range. However, during that whole year I never heard that he gave a ten to anyone else, and I was proud of my ten! I am no expert on pedagogical subjects, and therefore do not wish to express an opinion on whether Hillary's teaching style was a good one from a pedagogical view point. However, I can assure everyone that 1 enjoyed every minute of my time in his classes and learned from him a lot. Mr. Burr was a typically eccentric Englishman who was our Zoology teacher. He seemed to love his subject to a point that gave us wonderment. His favorite species were insects on which he lectured us with his highest level of enthusiasm. I was determined to get him off his zoology track to find out what else was of interest in his life. I had just seen a Walt Disney film called "The Three Caballeros" and in it was a piece on Bahia, with a woodpecker now and then coming into the scene to ask one of the characters, "Have you ever been to Bahia, no?" If the answer was "No" then the wood pecker would exclaim, "Oh, I am so sooorry for you!" So during question time in the class I got up and asked him using exactly the same words and imitating the Hispanic accent of the woodpecker in the film, "Sir, have you ever been to Bahia, no?" He put on a big smile and answered, "Indeed I have, I saw there some cockroaches that looked so interesting, and such pretty specimen too!" I just gave up.

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During the last class at the end of each academic year, he would traditionally take us to see the zoological museum of the school that was located on the top floor of Washburn Hall. This was an interesting little museum, featuring reptiles, birds treated by a taxidermist, human fetuses in various stages of development preserved in chemical solutions, and various other items. On the occasion he would bring with him a briefcase just like those of the present day except that it could not be locked. As soon as we entered the museum, one of the students would, deferentially, take from him his briefcase so that ostensibly, he would not have to be burdened with it while showing us around in the museum. He would graciously give it. The student who took his briefcase would then withdraw unnoticed and two more of us would join him. The three, would open the briefcase, and by tradition, and as expected, it would be completely empty except for one sheet of full size paper, and on it would be written the questions that would appear in the end of the year examination. The contents would then be quickly copied by long hand (No copying machine those days!) after which the three would join the museum tour and at its end again deferentially return the briefcase to him. One of the questions he would give, we knew ahead of time, and it was, "Draw the process of Evolution from the Ameba all the way to the Descent of Man and show all interconnections between intermediary species." The answer to this question earned 60% of the points and there was no year on record where Mr. Burr did not include it, in his end of year exam. Quite clearly, Mr. Burr did not like to fail his students. Failing them would just cause a headache to him and he liked to avoid it. Roy (I forgot his family name) was an American World War T w o fighter pilot, a really handsome guy that got the secretaries and other female administrative staff of the school to swoon whenever he approached one of them. Roy taught English. In the end he paired up with the most gorgeous among them who looked like a near perfect copy of Yvonne de Carlo, one of the most attractive and popular film stars of the times. I don't remember what her job was, exactly, but whatever it was, Kemal resorted to inventing personal problems on subjects she handled so that he could be near her as frequently as possible. The day Roy's relationship with her became generally known became a day of grief for Kemal. As he was only seventeen years old at the time, Kemal did not have a chance with her, as she must have been at least five years older. It is just that Kemal did not like the idea of her getting attached to anyone!

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One thing about Roy, he really liked his drink, probably more than any one else did among the teaching staff. He claimed that the right time in the day to start drinking martinis was eleven o'clock in the morning. If one does not do that, then the martinis that follow during the rest of the day do not taste really good! On a Christmas holiday when the school was closed, Nur and I came across him at Beyoglu at eleven o'clock in the morning. He invited us to have martinis in a joint of our choosing. We all went to one and he ordered. And when I asked him, "Is it not too early to have a martini?" He offered the explanation I gave you. Robert Allen had been a Sergeant Major of World War One vintage in the British Army. He was flatfooted; an attribute he must have acquired later in life as in such a condition, there is no way in the world he could have been inducted into any army, and least of all becomc a Sergeant Major. Our group referred to him between ourselves as our "Flat Foot Bobby". He had an easily identifiable cockney accent; I doubt it if he had ever finished high school. Once or twice a week he taught us "spcech" of all subjects, with his cockney accent. About half the time, we had to learn by heart monologues of a very English English origin; one I remember started with the sentence, "A sharp shower came on as I walked along the Strand, but I did not put up my umbrella!" The other half of the time he told us amusing stories out of British history, some of which he probably made up. He had a lot of stories to tell about Henry the Eighth and his wives. His official highflying title was the "Dean of Discipline" of our school; as such he was addressed to as Dean Allen. This was, in fact, his main job and took up most of his waking hours. He spent them mostly in pretending to terrorize us; but he did not mean it, as he really had a golden heart and we all knew that. We, of course, all pretended to be terrorized, and everything went fine. Just as one example on the way he made us conform to school rules was the way he handled smoking. It, of course, was an offense that was strictly punishable. One exception was the existence of a smoking room for juniors and seniors where they could smoke to their heart's content. This was not such a big room and the smoke in it was so dense that there was no need to light up, just stay inside and breathe the air. So most students smoked outside, and with such a large campus with wooded areas, finding a spot where one could comfortably smoke was not a problem. Some students started

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smoking at the age of fourteen and by third form at the age of sixteen, a good half of the student body were regular smokers, not to mention freshman and sophomore students for whom the proportion was higher still. All these could of course not use the smoking room. So what did Dean Allen do to enforce the "no smoking rule"? He used to go around the campus area at irregular hours, and every time for sure he would catch a few delinquents and handed out punishments. But there were some spots that he never checked on, so anyone who knew these places could smoke in them without fear of being caught. I have no doubt in my mind that Dean Allen knew exactly where these spots were but even as a Dean of Discipline he believed in the principal of "Live and let live". One last thing about Dean Allen was his wife Bella. She was of Russian origin and spoke English with a recognizable Russian accent. She had red hair and green eyes. Believe it or not, she was reputed formerly to have been a ballerina, presumably when she was young. In the mean time she had become quite corpulent. As a couple they looked like a case of Mr. Chalk having married Miss Cheese; but strange as it may sound, they lived together rather harmoniously. When we met them outside class, I could not discern the smallest sign of friction between them. Bella was a very sought after person among campus teachers, and especially those with their own eccentricities. One last fact about her was that she was Jewish, but this was a well-guarded secret and she only mentioned it to one or two selected Jewish students whom she trusted. When no one else was within ear shot she would whisper, "You know, I am Jewish, but Shhh! Don't tell it to anyone!"

Socializing with our Teachers During College Years There were many and various cultural and extra-curricular activities provided on the campus of RC. In fact, I doubt if there are too many campuses in the world that could hold a candle to RC regarding the richness of it campus life. Concerts of classical music, both European and Turkish, and later jazz concerts were shared with our sisters of the American Girls' College, better known by its original name of Constantinople College, or better still as CC. CC was located on a hill along the Bosphorus, about half an hour's distance from RC, nearer town. It was the equivalent of Roberts College, except that it

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did not have an engineering school. RC and CC jointly held annual banquets and balls during our junior and senior years, and some dancing parties. Students of the same school produced together plays that were jointly attended. The two schools shared literary and annual publications that they jointly produced. All these were opportunities for members of both sexes to intermingle. In addition, there were, in RC, purely male affairs, a debating society, a chess tournament, and a ping-pong championship. In fact, there were tons and tons of sports; there was an interclass football league, interclass basketball matches, and in both cases teams from other schools were invited to play. We had an annual field day in which all standard sporting events were held. There was a separately held cross-country race, of about half Marathon length. However there was one type of activity that until now I have not mentioned that I feel confident was unique to RC, and this was the degree of socialization that went on between teachers and some of the students, and at times, the friendships that were formed in the process. Only a small group of the students, probably not exceeding five in each yearly class were privy to this aspect of Campus life. Members of our group, including myself, had the good luck and privilege to take part in this life, to one degree or another. Outside of class, teachers and students were or more or less equals, with the only difference being age and of course life experience. But during class time, the normal teacher to class relationship applied, and we all fell in. In class, it was as if the other relationship did not exist. What follows below are some examples of the kind of relations we had outside class I personally experienced. I am sure each member of our group could produce additional ones, to mine. Students in other classes could produce additional ones too, I am sure. It was in January 1947 in our freshman year. The Christmas\New-Year vacation was over and semester examinations were to follow within a week or two of the start of the second semester. It was a Saturday, and the mathematics exam for the first semester was to be held on the Monday following. I don't know how it came about, but the four of us Roy, Jimmy, Nur and myself decided that we were going to spend Saturday night painting the town red. Jimmy was 21 years old, one might say just a kid, but for a seventeen-year old student like myself, he was of an

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impressive age. He was my mathematics teacher. Jimmy Eels was an American like Roy, blond, with the physique of a lightweight boxer but a very brainy guy. He had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he had got his degree in mathematics. Nur and I phoned our homes and told our parents that we would not be coming home for the weekend because next week were semester exams and we would be studying at school over the weekend to prepare ourselves. The first half of what we said to our parents was true, but not the reason we gave for remaining at school. I had no need to study mathematics over the weekend for the simple reason that I had already studied during the week and was ready for the exam and so was Nur. We assembled at College at about eight, and decided to have dinner at the "Church". By the time we got there it was close to nine. We lingered over our dinner until about eleven. We then transferred to the back streets of Beyoglu to look for bars, and it was not a difficult job to find one, as there were so many of them. Unlike its American or European equivalent, a Turkish bar had at the time, a live band; and in that sense it is was more like a nightclub; but you could not have food in one, just drinks. Lastly, a bar provided female company to its clients if they wanted any, though not necessarily of the most reputable kind. As soon as we came in, Roy, in particular, started to throw his money around, in big spender style, buying drinks, and Jimmy followed though a little more modestly. We all danced. At some point we decided we did not like the place enough and moved on to another one. By this time Roy and Jimmy were pretty high, but they could still walk, though a little unevenly. Nur and I were pretty high, too, but two notches below them. We moved to another bar and followed the same routine as in the first. After a while it was getting close to three o'clock in the morning. Nur and I decided that it was time to quit and talked them into the idea. This was really fortunate as will become clear. We left the bar and flagged a taxi to take us back to RC. We asked for the price of the journey; it sounded reasonable so we got into the taxi and arrived at RC at about three thirty. When it came to paying the driver a problem propped up: it appeared that we had not enough money left between us to pay the agreed sum. Everyone threw in what he had left, in banknotes, but it turned out that this was not sufficient. Then it was the coins, and that still left a small balance to pay.

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At this point, Roy produced a box of matches from his pocket and offered it to the taxi driver to make up for some of the difference! The driver looked at him in amazement. Getting the message, Roy then produced a key and gave it to the driver who asked him, "What does it open?" Roy told him that he did not remember! At this point, the driver gave up on us and drove away. As Jimmy came out of the car, he passed out on the ground. Nur and I were still standing. Nur took care of Roy and I of Jim. I raised him, put an arm around his waist, and practically dragged him all the way to Hamlin Hall, and then up three floors to his room. I put him in his bed and left, and then I went to mine. On Monday, our mathematics exam was held faultlessly. By that time, Jim had become well sobered. He came in primly, very dignified, checked whether all was in order, found that it was, and left the exam hall. We briefly exchanged greetings in a pretty perfunctory manner. It looked as if our Saturday outing never happened. As I mentioned earlier, at College there was a debating society that conducted debates among the four classes leading to one of the teams being declared champion for the year and awarded a prize at the school assembly at year's end. Nur was chosen as the leader of the debating team of the freshman class. He chose me as his number-two and Kemal as the number-three debater. Our adversaries in the first round of the competition were the senior class, three years older than we were. The subject of the debate was "Resolved that English be adopted as the International language of the world". We were the team that was to defend the thesis. My assignment was to show that English was superior to any one of the likely alternative languages we chose, namely, Esperanto, French, and Chinese! We decided that the first step to prepare our case was to pick the brains of teachers that we thought well of, and ask them for direction. Philip Ulyott was among the teachers we had chosen. We called in at his home, Nur, Kemal, and myself one evening at about eight. We did not make an appointment with him before calling. In those days you just dropped in at RC. He greeted us as if we were his royal guests, ever so nicely, with a big smile. We sat around in his living room in comfortable armchairs, and with all the carpets on the floors, paintings hanging on the walls and other interesting bric-à-brac, there developed in me a feeling of coziness. We told

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him why we had come. He was most attentive and gave us useful suggestions on how to prepare our brief. Above all, he gave us passages to quote from what he called "Linguists of international fame". We dutifully took all of the quotations down, long hand. Even in this first meeting, after an hour or so we stopped talking about the debate and went on chatting on a variety of subjects. It was about eleven o'clock when we left his house. He asked us to keep him updated on the progress we were making in preparing our case, and we agreed that we would be visiting him every week, same day and same time. The second visit we talked even less about the debate. He offered us vodka to drink in very small glasses. This was the first time in my life I had drunk vodka, and in fact hard liquor of any kind. My first glass of vodka tasted like fire, but I thought it tasted great at the same time. After a year, I found out that one of the names of the "experts" he gave us "Crumpacker" was the name of the manufacturer of his oil tubes. A second name he gave us, a "Chauvin Chamberry", he probably invented as well, now that I think of it. All in all he gave us considerable help, and contributed not a little to our victory in beating the senior class debaters. We then had to confront the winner of the sophomore and junior debate. Somehow none of these two classes could get their act together to produce their debating teams. As a result, the school decided to cancel their match and declared us, the freshman class, as the school winner. At the end of the year, we were duly awarded our prizes during a Monday morning assembly hour. There is more to write about our social occasions with Philip. In our visits to him there were two subjects he particularly liked to talk about. The first was Freud, and the second Darwin. He held forth about the workings of the subconscious and of the super ego. He was a passionate believer in psychoanalysis and maintained that any thinking person should go through analysis. The aim of such analysis was to strengthen the ego and learn how to live with one's subconscious and super ego, but at the same time avoid being driven by them in an erratic and contradictory fashion. His other pet subject was Darwin and the Survival of the Fittest. The rule of the survival of the fittest, according to Philip, applied not only among species but among members of the same species as well, including, of course, human beings. He encouraged us to think that we were an elite group. Actually we did not need much encouragement in this, as that is what we

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thought about ourselves anyway, at least unconsciously. Our weekly visits to Philip continued and we included two other members of our group, namely Ibo and Ilham. Half way through the year the meetings began to peter out although they did not stop completely. For reasons I can't identify, our relationship with Philip soured somewhat. It was taken up again in our sophomore year after the summer vacation, but we met less frequently. Our allegiance was now turned towards Hillary. Sex did not come up as a subject in our long dealings with Philip. The easy explanation, as I have already mentioned, is that he was totally uninterested in women. Nevertheless though perhaps I am naive, he did not approach any one of us for anything other than intellectual pow-wowing. I am assuming this on the basis of my relations with the members of my own group, which were very close. If anything like that was happening between Philip and any one of them, I am sure I would have gotten a whiff of it. During the final exams of our sophomore year, when he taught us hygiene, one of his questions was to draw a male sexual organ in full detail, with all its parts and write up their functions. Where appropriate, we were to use colored pencils. (It was a standard requirement of his to come to semester exams equipped with colored pencils.) A few days later, five of us, were invited to his home for a light supper. At the end of the meal he said, "Let me mark your exam papers", and he did just that, in our presence. He then suggested that he also marks the "sexual organ question" in all the other papers written by the other members of the class, about twenty in number, provided that we are agreeable that he would not reveal the names of who turned in which answer. We, of course, all agreed. Then, with us looking on, he marked them all. I remember one particular paper in which the student had drawn a huge penis stretching diagonally from one end of a page to the other. The penis was drawn in red and the testicles in blue. Watching us exhibit some mild form of shyness, confusion, or both, he put on his whimsical style and voice and he remarked: "Gentlemen, each according to his taste!" None of us asked him what he meant by that. Somehow, also during our senior year, the relationship continued, though we saw him much less frequently. Philip was instrumental in getting Nur and ilham into Cambridge, Nur to Peter House, and ilham to Christ Church. The two consistently got the best results of their classes and they well deserved his assistance. I sincerely believe that without his help they would not have gotten into Cambridge, well deserving as they were as at that time recommendations f r o m persons trusted by the university were an essential element for admission.

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With Hillary, members of our group had a continuous relationship. As Nur got into theater acting on a large scale, they became thick friends. After Nur, other members of our group started establishing ties with Hillary. I remember at an early stage when I was still calling him Mr. Boyd, in line with the normal custom of "Mistering" our teachers, he told me a little brusquely one day, "Please don't call me Mr. Boyd. That is my father's name", and from the way he put it I got a distinct impression that he did not like his father all that much. And when I asked him innocently and seriously as to whether I should call him Mr. Sumner instead, assuming that Sumner was his mother's family name, he just laughed and said, "You can call me Hillary". I spent quite a few sessions in the "Salon" Hillary kept, where I met many of my older peers from higher classes. The talk mainly centered on literature. Most of the time I was at the listening end of the conversation, but my tastes in literature were formed during these occasions. The literary fads of the day were Hemingway, Steinbeck, and to a lesser extent, Don Passos, Faulkner, and the last, but towering above them all, was Aldous Huxley. In poetry it was the Eliotidy, led of course by T. S. Eliot himself, and his cohorts, Auden, Lewis, and Spender. Also, there were a few others of minor interest, Dickinson, Pound, Nash and Lindsay. We read Isherwood. We also read the translations of Russian classics, above all Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekov. French literature we did not touch because no one among us could read French, although Gide, Proust, Sartre and in poetry Beaudelaire, were frequently mentioned names. We all professed an interest in painting and sculpture. Huxley was some one we paid particular attention to. With today's perspective, he was no more than a passing fad of truly mediocre stature, but we read his books avidly, considered his ideas, and almost tried to breath him in. Hillary warned us of his mediocrity, and told us how superior Gide was to Huxley, and that Huxley's best book, "Point Counter Point", could not hold a candle to Gide's "Les Faux Monnayeurs" on the same subject matter. But nobody was listening. In poetry, T. S. Eliot was the rage, and in particular his "Waste Land", singing about "How he lost his faith in the values of his time in the aftermath of World War One", and how "in Ash Wednesday" he recovered it again by becoming a dyed-in-the wool catholic. To an overwhelming extent Eliot's preoccupations became our own. Again with today's perspective I think that

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T.S. Eliot is a vastly overestimated and oversold poet, and I believe that many share my view. His famous 'Waste Land" was later described by some of my friends at LSE as an intellectual salad, with its ingredients borrowed from a wide range of sources. I fully shared their view, and still do so today. What is remarkable about our intellectual preoccupations in those days was our almost total ignorance of what was happening in Turkey in the literary field or in any other intellectual field. There were exceptions. We all loved the poetry of Orhan Veli. Of course there was Nazim Hikmet, who I believe is the greatest poet the Turkish nation has produced over the last seven hundred years, and who has finally been recognized as a poet of world stature. Some, but not all of us read him, but we talked little about him. He did not preoccupy us half as much a T. S. Eliot did, even though Hikmet towered over Eliot by a large margin. The reason why anything that had to do with Turkish culture never entered Hillary's salon was a rather prosaic one, and that was that he spoke practically no Turkish. Those days among the tens of expatriate staff 1 knew, only two teachers, Philip Ulyott and David Garwood, had a good command of the language and spoke it fluently. The language of our writing, thinking, and at times even speaking between ourselves was English all the way. With Belma, I corresponded a whole year in English. Ilham was the most extreme among us in this respect in that he ceased to write anything at all in Turkish except in his Turkish classes. Nur was a little better, contributing some writing to an annual RC literary publication that appeared in Turkish. I myself read a little modern literature like Orhan Kemal and Mahmut Makal. I read Turkish papers daily. This may not amount to much, but compared to other members of the group I was way ahead. As products of the school we had all become dyed-in-the-wool Anglophiles. We related to England and English culture as a religious Muslim does to the Kaba. It is no wonder that five of the six of us ended up studying in England, four at Cambridge, and, myself, at the London School of Economics.

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During the years I knew Hillary, I had become a real "fellow traveler". We had arguments, with me praising the virtues of Stalin while Hillary defended Trotsky and maintained that it was Trotsky who was right, and Stalin who was wrong. These were the only occasions when Hillary got vexed with me, and exclaimed that before I could express an opinion on who was a good communist and who a bad one, I still had to learn a lot. I had just started my sophomore year. One evening, some time in October 1947 Haldun and I were walking across the campus, after we had had our meal at the tuck-shop when we came across Hillary who, with his eyes shining, announced to us that he had just heard from the radio that Mukden had fallen. Mukden was the capital of Manchuria, and it had fallen to the armies of Mao Tse-Tung. This was the first real victory the Communists had won against the Kuomintang and f r o m that point onwards they started winning victory after victory on a smooth course, until they had taken over the whole country by July 1948. Hillary suggested that we go down to Bebek to have a beer at Gtine§ to celebrate. We did not have to argue about a great event this was. So we went down to Bebek, to Giine§, to have our beer. One thing about Hillary was that once you became his friend, there were no limits as to what he was prepared to do for you, as long as it was outside his teacher to student relationship with you in class. Some time during the 1947/48 school year, for some reason I can't remember, I was spending the night at Hillary's and he gave me his guestroom with two beds in it. When I was already in my bed, he came in and sat on the other bed to continue the chat we were having, again I don't remember the subject, but somehow the talk turned to the Truman Doctrine. Harry Truman had just declared the USA's commitment to defend Greece and Turkey against any attacks from her Communist neighbors in the Balkans, and announced a military aid package he had formulated to strengthen the armies of the two countries. In the year the doctrine was announced the Greek civil war was at its peak. Hillary began holding forth against the doctrine in a rather animated fashion, claiming that it was really a hoax and that all the US intended to do with the military aid package it had announced, was to dump into Greece and Turkey its useless stockpiles of military equipment of World War One vintage! These were the years the Cold War was raging, and as far as Hilary was concerned, Turkey and Greece were two innocent by-standers that could be handily treated as a dumping ground for the purpose. I was arguing back, but only on the World War One part that to me sounded preposterous, even from my left leaning view. It was already eleven thirty in the night, and I felt that the time had come to go to sleep.

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At this point, a loud banging was heard on the outside door. Hillary looked miserable and exclaimed, "This must be horrible Nur!" They were so close to one another, so I supposed his reaction represented only a protest on the demands some friends may make on you at times. I did not know what to say, but ended up saying "What are you going to do?" He answered, "Of course I will go and open the door". Just as he was on his way, a second loud bang was heard. Nur may have thought that the first one had not been heard. My room was just facing the entrance, and when Hillary got out he had left it half open, and as a result I had a good view of what happened. In a few moments I saw Giilen appear at the threshold. She took a single step and stood, not continuing further inside. This was the first time I had seen her in my life, and she could not see me, and thank God for that, because anyway, I intended to lie doggo. Giilen certainly did not look to me like a femme fatale. In fact she looked a little lost and not very comfortable. Nur had not come in yet. Perhaps Hillary was having some difficulty in finding accommodation for them as I had taken his guest room, and Nur's visit was an unannounced one; one could call it a "surprise visit". Anyway, Hillary reappeared, and the first thing he did was to close my door, so I was not a witness to what followed. In the morning I saw no trace of them. I did not ask and was not volunteered any information, and that was just fine as far as I was concerned. My personal relationship with Hillary was not as close as I would wish now, and I regret that this has been so. Funnily enough it got closer after I graduated from RC. Whenever I came to Istanbul from Sweden or England for summer vacations, I made a point of looking him up, and he was always glad to see me. I saw him a few more times before I left for Israel. I looked him up again, in 1958 and 1964 when visiting Istanbul. During my last visit I found out that he had developed a heart condition. In my next visit to Istanbul in 1975 he was no longer living. He must have been in his late fifties at his death.

8 RELATIONS WITH THE FAIR SEX

Let me generally put it in the following way: between the legendary Don Juan and myself, and his equally legendary exploits and mine, a rather large gap existed in his favor, and this is a considerable understatement! During my years at Robert Academy, and my College years, with a couple of exceptions, I lived in conditions of famine. Being completely out of Jewish society, with Turkish society being a little behind on the subject, and anyway not belonging to a Turkish family, my opportunities were rather limited. In the Turkish society of that time there was practically no such thing as a young pair going to see a movie together on a Saturday afternoons at four thirty, eating an ice scream or a piece of cake together, even if the boy escorted his girl friend to her home before sunset.

Boy Meets Girl CC-RC Style Action started during Third Form, the last year of Robert Academy although mostly, it produced a little smoke, but absolutely no fire. The credit for the limited intermingling that did take place largely goes to the RC and CC managements that followed a long held tradition of fostering "brother and sister" relations between members of the same class. During Third form we met our "sisters" for the first time. We, both boys and girls were about fifteen years old. The best way to describe the occasion is in military terms! Each side cautiously advanced towards the other to establish contact, while constantly, surveying his flanks, right and left, to make sure that it did not run into an ambush! Eventually these meetings developed into something a little better. There was some partying of the "thé dansant" variety on Saturday afternoons outside school, in public places suitable for the occasions. At private homes, only two class parties were held during the whole four-year period of our College years, the first in our sophomore year at the home of one of our "sisters", and the second in our senior year, by Miimtaz, a classmate. However, on the whole, relations remained tepid except for the privileged very few. Again with a few exceptions, not even simple friendships between boys and girls developed, not to mention affairs.

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Other than the cultural limitations on relationships tolerated in the Turkish milieu, the numbers ratio was a limiting factor too. The CC class of our "sisters" comprised about fifty girl students of which about ten were not allowed by their parents to have any contact with boys. In our boys' class there were about 70 students, to which one had to add those of RSE. That would bring the total of the boys available to about 110. Under average conditions, therefore, for every girl there were about three boys. I hope I will be forgiven for making a comparison with the musical chair game where already in the first round about two thirds of us would be left without a girl. Although to create an auspicious atmosphere for mixing it is not necessary that numbers are precisely equal, this works only up to a point, and does not apply when the difference in the numbers of each sex is so large. In such a situation there is no way to stop girls from being a little choosy about whom they greeted or even smiled at. This situation did not increase the level of comfort the boys felt. In fact many of them dropped out from the start and would not appear in the encounters. The peak social activity of the year was the annual ball given at CC by the junior and senior students, with each girl student having, as I said a choice, of three to choose an escort from. Strangely enough though, there were cases where there were girls who wanted to invite an escort but did not know whom; this is a telltale sign of what the economist, Keynes characterized as "poverty amid plenty" for the girls. As an additional indicator of how "developed" our relations with our "sisters" were, I remember, today, only nine of my sisters by name, while of my own classmates I remember more than thirty. I would challenge anyone among my classmates for a better performance of memory on this point. Well, of course, as in all cases, there were exceptions. There were always a few "stars" in our class who were not short of real girl friends. These were students in the category of leading actors, editors of joint publications and the like. Rare as they may have been, there were escapades. For example, in the class of 1947, a month before they were to receive their degrees, three pairs of the senior class absconded together to Polonezkoy to spend a weekend together. This was a small village, about twenty miles in the interior, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus. Upon their return to school, the girl students of the party were somehow found out in their "act of delinquency". The CC school management took a grim view of the happening to the point of wanting to delay awarding the degrees of the three girls; but somehow they relented.

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There were other examples. A member of our group used to spend nights at CC in the rooms of his girl friend's, which he entered by climbing straight walls and entering the rooms through their windows. Another two girls who were boarding students used to sneak out of the school to spend the night together with members of our group. However, all in all, the number of persons in our class who could claim an affair with one of our sisters or a girl from a different class in CC could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Members of our group did well, relatively speaking. Nur was way ahead in the game and seemed to be fully booked! Ibo was a good second. By the time we were seniors, with KemaJ having gone, four out of five of us, had steady girl friends from CC.

My One and Only Foray into Jewish Society Teenager Society It took place during the early part of my sophomore year of 1947/48. It lasted about two months. Michel, a classmate of mine from §i§li Terakki had entered RSE after he had graduated from the English High School for Boys, an English school located in Istanbul. Michel was a member of a "clique" consisting of about seven or eight teen-age boys. They were all Jewish except for a single Turk called Arif who was a peripheral member, putting up an appearance now and then. His membership was out of the ordinary; Michel's set was the only Jewish set I got to know that had a Turkish member. Michel's set had three interests. They were football, poker, and partying. Their interest in football had two aspects. The first was to play football with other sets, and for this purpose they organized themselves as a football team. The second was to watch the football games of the National League. As far as the congruence of my interests with them, I was poor at playing football and could never be part of their team. I could join them to watch football games and enjoy them; I was a Galatasaray fan from the age of six, and Israel or no Israel, have remained so to the present day. In poker, I mildly enjoyed the game, and could break even financially, so that playing poker was not a financial drain on me. As to how I learned the game in the first instance, I did so at home, hanging around adults and watching how they played without drawing attention to myself. Poker was so much in the air in the social circles of my parents that one could pick up how to play the game without deliberate effort.

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As far as partying was concerned, I was a novice in these, and could not bring any girls myself. Michel wanted to recruit me to his set, and invited me to a party he was throwing. It happened to be his turn to give one. In fact, for me the most attractive part of the set was the partying part. The existence of such sets was very common among Jewish teen-agers at that time, and there were very few who did not belong to one. All the members of the set were day students in various schools. To be able to spend time with them I had to act at least as a "part time day student" and sleep at home, two or three times a week during school days. As I was no longer a boarder, but was living in digs at Feridun Nigar's this was not a problem. To facilitate commuting to the school, a special bus was now available for the day students of RC, with a stop at walking distance from home. As a result, commuting from home to school and back was no longer "a mission nearly impossible". The time I spent with the set was devoted to playing poker and to watching football games during weekends. It is interesting to note that I don't remember the content of any worthwhile conversation I had with them on any subject. Talk was always functional, like which girls were going to be invited to the next party, shall we have a bite before a particular poker game, or after we finish it, or the comparative merits of football players. There was never talk about a book or newspaper article that had been read, none on politics or an abstract subject of any sort. The parties the group held were given about once every two weeks in the homes of set members, but unlike Mellina Mercuri's celebrated film "Never on Sundays", they were given always on Sundays. Altogether, there would be 15-20 boys and girls, participating in about equal numbers. Among them, there would be established pairs, called "flirts". Some others would be loosely paired up, and if so, the relationship was of low survivability. The girls were mostly from French schools with Notre Dame de Sion, and St. Benoit in the lead. By these years all young Jews could talk Turkish fluently, although still with a slight accent. But this notwithstanding, in parties, French was still the commonly spoken language. A typical party would start between four and five o'clock in the afternoon. The first phase would consist of dancing, mostly to swing music. After an hour or more, there would be a break for a buffet. No alcoholic drinks were served, even beer. By the time the buffet service was over, say around six

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or so, it had usually become dark. In the third and last phase, lights were switched off, and with the exception of the few who had not succeeded in doing so, all present paired off, retired to a suitable corner of the house and started a smooching session. The few that remained unpaired, talked to each other, and one among them kept the record player on with slow music, mostly for the sake of appearances. The party would break up between eight and nine o'clock. Two weeks after Michel's party, I volunteered to give a party at my home for members of the set. The routine that followed was just as the one I described. During the third phase of my party, when the smooching cession had begun, a pair broke off and the girl made a bee-line towards me, and without even knowing my name and I her's, she put her cheek against mine and we started dancing to slow music. All this happened fast, and in a most unexpected fashion, and I was really not prepared for it. I tried to make conversation with her, but she would only speak French. I tried to speak French to her, but my French that until eight years back was my mother tongue, had deteriorated to the point that I could not even ask the time of day correctly. The result was that with the same suddenness that she came to me, she dropped me like a stone. In her eyes, I must have been a really hopeless case. After my party, my relationship with Michel's set petered out fairly rapidly. Parallel to this foray I was also invited to a party by a different Jewish set. It seemed to be following the same routine as the previous one. But this one did not go anywhere either, and in this case I took no initiative to make it go. I never again tried to create a Jewish social circle for myself.

Belma Belma was an attractive, good-looking girl, tall, but not too tall, slender like her Circassian mother, with light skin, almond shaped eyes, soft brown hair, and intelligent. She was an honor student of her class most of the time. At CC, the last meant a minimum average of 8.5. Her father was a dentist. She was the grand-daughter of a Sheyh-ul-Islam, the highest rank in the hierarchy of the Muslim religion.

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We met for the first time in the second half of the junior year, probably towards its end. On each occasion of a "do" with our sisters, we somehow ended up being together. We must have met like this, three or four times, and then came the end of the year. At our last meeting, I asked her for her phone number to phone her during the summer. She refused point blank. That did not stop me from thinking about her during the whole summer. With summer over, our senior year had started. Two weeks after the start, a concert was to be given at our school, the first one of the year, and of course we invited our sisters. This year, I decided to court Belma more deliberately than I had done in the previous year, but how to go about it? On this point I was lost. I had two advisors on affairs of the heart, Nur and ibo, and I consulted them, ibo offered me his usual approach, namely that I should circle around her suggestively but in indifferent profile, as if I don't care that much one way or the other about a possible relationship, and this he said should make her come to me. Nur with his "decisive ego" approach, said: "This will not do!" He favored the frontal assault approach. He insisted that I write a letter to her, not beating around the bush, to the effect that during the whole summer, I did nothing but pine away for her and spent sleepless night thinking about her. I should conclude with a statement on how much I loved her. Nur was advising me to risk the whole till. I decided that I was going to write a letter on the lines Nur recommended and add in the end that if she comes to the concert, I will understand that there is mutuality in our feelings towards each other. My God! With perspective, I never made such a bold declaration in writing in my whole life to any member of the opposite sex. Well, I did not get an answer to my letter, so I started fearing that I had lost out. Then the day of the concert came, and our sisters started to trail into the concert room. I did not see Belma at first, but she was the last to come in, accompanied by her two best friends. As soon as she saw me she left them, approached me and with a soft smile, said "hello!" It was as if the gates of heaven were opened in front of me. After the concert was over we walked to the school exit, a walking distance of about fifteen minutes. I asked for her for phone number. This time around she gave it to me. The number was 53, the shortest telephone number of a person I have ever known! Belma lived in Arnavutkoy, within walking distance from CC. At the time, the locality was not connected to Istanbul's

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direct phone network. One had to phone to the Arnavutkoy central phone exchange and ask to be connected to the number. During this first meeting since I wrote my letter to her, we did not even hold hands! Despite our having established a relationship it still developed rather slowly. It followed three separate but parallel paths. I phoned her three to four times a week. We maintained a written correspondence, exchanging letters at least once a week. I still have her letters. Lastly, whenever there was any RCCC sponsored activity we would meet. Eventually, we started meeting outside our schools, but not before a couple of months had gone by, when we started to meet outside school afternoon events of "the dansanf type. A major crisis developed when our relationship had passed a little more than a month, and my "Djidjino" syndrome, which I described in Part I, hit me in full force. It was not much past our fourth or fifth date when, as we were about to part, she told me that she wanted to put an end to our relationship. When I asked her why, she answered, "I heard that you are Jewish." I had really anticipated this kind of trouble, and to remedy its consequences, I had initiated preemptive action in practically the first or second of our dates. I had told her that Nadia, who also studied at CC and was a year our senior, was a first cousin of mine. Nadia never hid her being Jewish, but nevertheless was well integrated into the CC social life. She answered that she did not mind that, so I thought that my message was clear even if a little indirect. I did not have the heart to tell her in plain language, "I am Jewish!" But the indirect way I hacl put it to her turned to be an insufficient declaration. She answered me, "I remember you saying that, but I thought that only your mother was Jewish. I did not think that you are Jewish on both sides." In perspective, given the times, with her being the grand daughter of a Sheyh-ulIslam, there is a limit to how harshly I should judge her. Be that as it may, we parted without saying anything else. I felt absolutely crushed. Here I was, at the age of 19, having for the first time established a relationship with a girl with whom I was in love, and it had to go to the dogs because of the Jewish monkey that was sitting on my back! During the weekend, when I was sitting around with my parents at home, I remember making to them without prompting or any introduction, the following statement: "I see no future for myself anywhere in the world except in Israel!" I had, of course, sympathies for Israel by then, but going

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there to live was not in my mind even remotely; I had blurted out the statement without premeditation, in a shooting-from-the-hip fashion. My parents looked surprised and even somewhat worried by my declaration, as I had, until then not even hinted that such a possibility had entered my mind. However, in their usual way of never really being interested to know what I felt about things or why, they did not ask me why I said what I said, even though it was completely new to their ears, and pretty radical too. Going back to school with a new week beginning, I phoned Belma and told her that I would like to meet her one last time so that we can separate nicely. She agreed to a date, presumably our last one. It must have been a Wednesday or Thursday in an afternoon after class time. I offered to take her to Mecidiyekoy that was then out of town, about an hour's travel from school, at the end of the tramway network. "At present, Mecidiyekoy is heavily urbanized. We got off the tram and walked further into the countryside until we found a café to sit in. This café was a rather rustic looking place with its tables made of unpainted wood weathered with time, which made them look as if they had grown out of the soil just like trees. The café was located in the middle of a field of daffodils that stretched out in all directions as far as one could see. The weather was fantastic, blue skies and all. My God! What a backdrop in which to say adieu forever, to a cherished love! We sat in a table and I ordered two "Gazoz", the equivalent of the spirit of our times. Then I took the floor and started holding forth, on and on and on. Surprising myself, instead of taking an "adieu" tack, I did exactly the opposite. My message to her was, "What a silly thing it is for us to separate for no reason other than that we are of different religions." I don't remember in how many variations I delivered the message, but by the time it was over, more than an hour had gone by. Belma hardly said a word. When I finished she said nothing either. I accompanied her to her home in total silence. I had no idea, which way the cookie was going to crumble. So on the Monday of the next week I phoned her at noontime. A female who had answered the phone told me that Belma could not come to the phone, because she was busy. I thought that this was the end. As I left the phone booth I ran into Ibo and ílham and told them that it was all over. But in the afternoon of the same day she phoned me at Feridun Bey's and started talking about our next date and what she proposed that we do together. She did not refer to our

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Mecidiyekoy date or to what had triggered it. It was as if it had never happened. She never brought up the Jewish agenda again except on two additional occasions, the first one was after six months when she told me that two of her best friends had Jewish boyfriends and how nice they were! The second occasion belongs to the next part and T will tell it then. So it looked as if I had achieved victory, but it did not feel that way. It felt as if no matter how long into the future the relationship would last, I would never be the same person again. A thought flashed through my mind: what if she had found that I was Jewish before I had sent her my letter? There was no doubt in my mind that in that case I would have received no positive response to my courting her, and as a result my self esteem would have taken a further battering without my even knowing the cause of her refusal, namely my being Jewish. This experience led me to feel that something deep inside me had been permanently damaged and was beyond repair. Nevertheless, our relationship continued and intensified. We talked on the phone no less and we wrote each other no fewer letters. The difference was that we were seeing each other more frequently, probably something like once or twice a week not only at school, but outside as well. We took to taking long walks in the countryside, and also somehow we were going out dancing more often, sometimes into the first hours past midnight. The last, I did not know how she managed but I never asked. The year was 1950 and CC was holding its annual ball, and as expected four of us got our invitations. We were told that we would sit down to dinner at eight o'clock but that we should show up not later than seven thirty. We decided to assemble at N u r ' s ' home and from there take a taxi to a flower shop, buy flowers and then take a second one to CC. By six o'clock we had all assembled at Nur's' home, but somehow things began to get delayed. At six thirty, I started in my usual "delicate" way to tell my friends that if we don't leave now and take a taxi we will be late. Nur shushed me down. We left at seven. A little later, I said that now we don't have the time to buy flowers if we are to be on time. I was outvoted. First we went to "Sabundjakis" to buy orchids for our girls. The shop still exists today; it is not owned by a Greek any more but by a Turk who has kept its Greek name nevertheless, probably to maintain its historic reputation and its status as one of the best shops in town to buy flowers even today. During our time it was the number one flower shop in the city.

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We arrived at CC at five minutes to eight. Everyone was already sitting at their tables. The only girls left waiting for their escorts were the four who had invited us. They were too furious to say anything and hardly greeted us. Belma did not speak to me for fifteen minutes after we sat down, and I think rightly so. In the end she relented. She knew that I am a punctual person and could not think that it was my fault that we were so late, and she, of course, was right. Everything went well after that. The ball was over at about eleven. Our girlfriends went away to change their ballroom dresses into normal dress and we all went out together to spend the rest of the night. The first phase was at the pavilion of "Park Oteli" at Ayazpa§a, to dance to the music of Perez who was a Cuban with Rumba tunes being his "forte". In June we all graduated. I continued to see Belma. This went on until my departure for Stockholm in mid-September. The last time we met we went to Sanyer near the Black Sea end of the Bosphorus on the European side. When we separated, her parting words were, "I will wait for you".

9 THE JEWISH ANGLE IN MY COLLEGE YEARS

The National Environment and Jews The period can be divided roughly into two parts. The first was from September 1946 to the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. The second period lasted through the end of August 1950. During the first period, once the Second World had ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany, anti-Jewish attitudes were toned down. The first period is characterized by the beginning of the democratization of the body politic by the establishment of the Democratic Party (DP), and the holding of multiparty elections. The first such election held in 1946 was largely rigged, but still resulted in the election of about sixty members of DP into the National Assembly. For the first in the history of the Republic of Turkey, more than one political party was represented in the Grand National Assembly. The top political leadership, though still remaining in the hands of CHP, started to issue statements showing a significantly improved attitude towards Jews. The press was not viscerally anti-Jewish any more, like it had been during World War Two and the years that preceded it. Nevertheless, a considerable amount of discrimination against Jews still remained. This first part of the period is documented in Rifat Bali's latest book. 1 The first milestone of the second part of the period was the UN resolution partitioning Mandate Palestine, and the immediate break out of hostilities in November 1947 between Jews and Arabs. The second milestone was the annulment of the British Mandate, the declaration of the State of Israel, and the invasion of its territory by the armies of its Arab neighbors in May. The third milestone was the start of the mass immigration of Turkish Jews to Israel in June 1948, that with a small interruption of a month between mid-June to mid-July continued throughout the period almost to its end. The rest of the book of Rifat Bali is devoted to this particular part of my

^Bali 2, pp. 43-84.

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story. 1 An important milestone towards the end of the second part of this period concerned the Turkish body politic. In the spring of 1950, it held a noholds-barred democratic election in Turkey. As a result, the CHP was swept out of power after it had kept it for 27 years as a single party political regime. There are few examples in human history where such momentous change had occurred peacefully. Despite these positive developments, and paradoxically enough, with the establishment of the State of Israel and the start of mass Jewish immigration to it from Turkey, the occasion developed into one where a viscerally anti-Jewish press resurfaced again, in the form of a very pro-Arab posture it adopted on the Arab-Israeli war and towards Jews who were immigrating to Israel. The kind of Jew-baiting that was practiced did not distinguish to a fine point between the Jews that left for Israel and those that stayed behind. The Bali book on the period contains many quotations from the newspapers of the time and is littered with cartoons on Jews whose viciousness exceeded the ones that appeared during World War Two Years. The Vatan, which though one of the more important dailies in Istanbul was the only one that maintained a balanced view of the conflict without taking sides, but because all other papers were anti-Israeli, in relative terms Vatan was perceived to be a pro-Israeli paper, relatively speaking. All the newspapers were hostile towards Israel, which was fighting for its independence, and in favor of the Arabs. The degree of hostility varied from the mild, to the visceral. 2 The Cumhuriyet, a daily that was pro-Nazi throughout the war, was the most vociferously vicious towards Jews. A senior member of the paper, Omer Riza Dogrul had a special column in the paper whose sole objective was Jew baiting in the form of being anti-Israeli. Even long after the war ended with the defeat of the Arab armies, and the new State of Israel firmly established, he kept on writing his anti-Israeli articles. 'saJil 2

T h e press had no problems about hitting below the belt when explaining why was it that Vatan was "friendly to the Jews". Faruk Fenik, who was the Vatan correspondent sent to the then Palestine to cover the war, arrived in February 1948, first covered the Jewish side that was at one of its lowest points during the war. He came out with some of the grimmest descriptions of the fighting with the Jews sustaining most of the casualties. Then he crossed over to the Arab side, and after what he saw there, the backbiting, the chaos and the incompetence, he sent an article to his newspaper writing "Whether we like it or not the Arabs are going to loose this war". The article arrived at the Vatan paper towards the end of February but was printed only during the first week of April, the day after the Jews took Haifa from Arab militias. Preceding the article was an apology from the editorial board of the paper, mentioning the date the article was received and stating that it was not printed immediately because they thought that what Faruk Fenik written too far fetched to be credited.

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Curiously enough, the Government had no hand in the development of this very anti-Jewish press campaign. In fact one of the last acts of CHP before transferring the reigns of power to DP was to recognize the State of Israel in October 1948. The DP upheld this decision. Beginning with about 1947, full freedom of the press had been achieved. It seems that the only explanation to the anti-Israeli/Jewish campaign the press had adopted during these two years had grass root approval to it.

A Jew Among Turks, a Turk Among Jews Without being one, without meaning to do so, and without being aware of what I was doing, I was leading the life a Donme. During these four years of my life, I lived a double life, the first and by now main one as a Turk, or rather as a Jew among Turks with a special status and the second, as a Jew, through having some sort of family life and a little beyond, something I could not cut myself off from entirely, even though it was a pretty sorry one. I took all the precautions in the world, to a compulsive degree, that the two sides of my life never met, and in fact they never did. But, no matter the degree of success I achieved in separating my two lives, the feeling of insecurity, about my place under the sun was considerable. Just as I was a Jew in the eyes of a Turk, I was a Turk in the eyes of the Jewish circles my parents moved in. I was considered by them too pro-Turkish and was not liked for that. In other words, I was getting the worst of both worlds. My life as a Jew in my Jewish environment was influenced by a noticeable change of attitude among Jews concerning the overall Turkish environment they lived in. In the preceding period, during World War Two, Jews felt continuous fear as to what the next day would bring them. Paradoxically, just as things were looking up, on how they were being treated in their Turkish environment, all the suppressed hostility, that had accumulated in years, in particular during the war years, and was buried in fear, surfaced. I could not share this hostility they expressed against Turks for the simple reason that I was trying to become one myself. Here are a few examples of this hostility:

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In the conversations in my mother's circles Turks started to be increasingly referred to as "Vedres" (Greens). The qualifier green had two aspects. The first was related to green being a traditional color among the Muslims of the world, but worse still a "Vedre" was someone comparable to a fruit, which had not ripened yet and never would. Male society also used the expression although for some reason to a more limited extent. Of course a Jew would not use this expression in the face of a Turk out of sheer fear, while a Muslim could use the expletives he liked in addressing a Jew without fear that he would come to harms way as a result. On occasions, when some of my mother's friends addressed themselves to me, of course, always in French, because my French was as dead as a doornail I answered them in my native Turkish. When I talked like that their body language was quite clearly telling me that they did not appreciate much the native Turkish I spoke. They later complained to Mother that I spoke Turkish too well, in fact "just like a Turk". According to Mother, this intimidated her friends, and presumably their daughters as well. Members of my Jewish milieu of teenagers already spoke Turkish fluently, but still with a slight but identifiable Jewish accent. As I had mentioned earlier, in boy-meetsgirl situations the dominant language was still French. It was no wonder that after having come back from Biiytikada, Mireille did not even acknowledge my greetings in the street when we occasionally crossed each other. Peppo, who was my youngest uncle on my mother's side, and with whom I had close relations gave me lectures on a number of occasions that always started with an opening sentence like, "Stop giving yourself Turkish airs. You know that you are Jewish through and through, and everyone else knows that too." The lectures proceeded on not a very kind content about Turks. Peppo had not forgotten that his oldest brother Mordo had committed suicide once he found out how much the Haker-Salinas Partnership and his brother Alber were expected to pay under the Capital Tax. Neither did he forget that the tax had totally ruined his family and his own future. Kapuano who was the family into which Father's uncle Barzilay had married into also treated me to a comparable lecture on what he thought about Turks. The gist of the lecture was that the only kind of making a living Turks are good at is to take the money of others, and all they know what to say to some one who is a Jew is "ver ver ver" (Give, give, give). Kapuano had been severely hit by the Capital Tax. He was a well-to-do person with a 1942 net asset worth of TL 135,000. He was taxed TL 135,000. As he did not want to

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go to Agkale he paid the full amount and in his words after that he had no money left to take the tram to go home. In time with his two able sons Buko, and Izi, Kapuano managed to retrieve his position and become much richer than he was before paying the tax, but he never lost his bitterness over the experience. Hearing him talk to me like this was an unsettling experience, and I felt embarrassed to hear him. After he died, his two sons first settled in Israel and then moved on to Milan. Raphael Margonato was born in Izmir, and married to Emily, an Adato relative. In the thirties he had immigrated to Milan with his parents. In 1943, after Germany occupied Italy Raphael and Emily returned to Turkey, and of course, as would normally be the case, he was called up and found himself, in a forced labor unit, and served for a two-year period. After he was released from the army, the only subject he was prepared to talk about most of his social time was his military service, how awful it had been, how corrupt the army was and that there was nothing one could not buy in the army provided that one paid the going price for obtaining it. Of course, coming from plush Milan where he had lived ten or more years to be introduced to the hardships of a forced labor brigade around Gelibolu, where he did pick-and-spade work for two years, is not the kind of experience one would cherish for a life time. However, Raphael never showed an awareness that had he not been able to find refuge in Turkey he and his wife would most probably have found themselves at Auschwitz with the inevitable end. A couple of years after the War was over he went back to Milan. Moni Adato was a second cousin of my father. Sometime in 1946, less than a year after the war had ended, Moni visited our home one-day announcing to us that he was leaving Turkey for good to live in the Belgian Congo and had come to say good-bye to us. My parents were most surprised to hear of his intention. He told us that after what he had been through during the two years he had been in the army, he can't bear the thought of remaining in Turkey even a single day longer, than is necessary, and added a few more disagreeable words. It took me sometime before I could put together his story. Moni was a civil engineer who had graduated from the Technical University of Istanbul in 1944. He was the only Jew in his class. Immediately following his graduation he was inducted into the army as was normal. But because he was Jewish he was appointed to a forced labor unit to work at an army quarry that produced gravel and rock material that was used in constructing roads, fortifications and other civil works.

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At the time, this kind of production was not mechanized. The work process started with detaching large chunks of stone from the quarry by using high explosives, and then breaking them up into small units by hammer and chisel. Moni did the last for the whole two-year period of his military service. He wanted to become a highway engineer and some could say that this was a good way to start him off. However, this was not Moni's view of the matter. Immediately upon his release from the army some time in 1946, instead of looking for a job in the country, he started doing the rounds in all the Consulates located in Istanbul in search of a country that would accept him as an immigrant, and issue him a permit to work. With World War Two just ended getting new immigrants was not a high priority item on the what-to-do lists of European countries and North America. The only country that was willing to grant him a visa, and give him a work permit as well, turned out to be Belgium, but only on condition that he accepts to serve in the Belgian Congo as a district engineer for a specified number of years in a remote province in the east of the country. Moni accepted the offer. After having served the required number of years he managed to get an immigrant's visa to the United States, where he settled and lived in until the end of his life. With this kind of experience being quite common for my existence as a "Turk" in Jewish circles, my main existence in Turkish circles as an "accepted Jew" was not a bed of roses either. During our Third Form year Nur was our class president. He was preparing a one-page photo album with all the students of the class being shown. He took on the job to paste the photos, and having completed the job, he proudly showed me the product in the presence of his aunt Nigar Hamm. As we were looking at what he had done, he announced to us in a high handed manner that all the Jews, the two Greeks and lone Armenian in the class he had put in the lowest two rows, and Nigar Hamm, his aunt sniggered as she heard him. (Remember the non-Muslim cadets of medical school at their army summer camp that had to wear white gym shoes instead of regulation army boots, and were positioned in the last two rows of their company so that they could be identified as such). My picture was among the top rows, and without doubt Nur did not intend to give me offence by showing me what he had done, as after all I was one of his best friends. My location in the album surely showed that he did not consider me as "one of those Jews", even though by now he well knew that I was one. I did not give away that I had been offended, nor the feeling of being undermined that I had already felt in comparable situations.

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A couple of months past my Jewish identity crisis with Belma, one day, when having dinner together at the "Rus", ibo told me, out of the blue, that he had thought about Jews lately, and had come to the conclusion that he does not like them, and that it would be only fair to let me know it. This notwithstanding, he added, " Erol why don't you get married to a Turkish girl and this will help you to feel more a real Turk, just like us". The implication from what he said to me was that firstly he did not associate me with the "typical Jew" he had in his mind; and secondly he was trying to say, "even though we like you and all that, you will become more comfortable about thinking that you are truly one of us if you marry a Turkish girl". What an astute comment! Such a good friend! As a reply to what he said, I hummed and hawed and did not give him a straight answer on what I thought about the matter. Retrospectively, I now think that my subconscious had already taken the strategic decision that I could never become a real Turk, but did not bother to communicate this decision to my consciousness. At conscious level, I continued to live in my make believe world that I was a Turk, and never mind how insecure I felt over the matter, and if a few contradictions appeared now and then, and here and there, so what! During my college years I was not subjected to diatribes and invective directed at myself as a Jew at a personal level. A few unfavorable innuendos were still directed at me about my being Jewish, with Gtilen being the most noticeable person that made them. However, the frequency of such incidents had now dropped very sharply. Even with Belma, I had succeeded in settling the problem. However, I continued to hear them about Jews in general and these undermined me no less. What I needed was an extra layer of skin to protect me from being hurt by them. I did not know where to look for one. Ibo and I were having lunch one day at "Church", when a British Navy officer of Commander rank turned up whom Ibo knew. Without waiting for our invitation he sat down at our table. He was a tall, handsome fellow and could have come straight out of Horatio Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, had it not been for the contemporary uniform he wore. Without exaggeration, half his conversation that lasted the best part of an hour consisted of making antiSemitic remarks about Turkish Jews. This was too much, even for ibo. tbo did his best to stop him in a tactful way, but was not successful. I am assuming that the Commander had not an inkling of my Jewishness. Had he known, he would not have made such remarks, but most probably instead of sitting with us for nearly an hour he would have begged to be excused, and walk away in ten minutes.

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The Jewish Students in Our Class By the middle of our College years, the number of Jewish students in our class, not counting myself, had grown from the lone Rifat to nine. For a class of about seventy students, the number of Jewish students had become significant, but their presence was hardly felt. One of the reasons was that all except one of the new eight were day students. Traditionally, day students participated less in the campus life of the school than boarding students did. However, there were a lot more important reasons why this was so. What the average class member thought about a Jew was no secret. The Jewish students of our class were under no illusions on the subject and therefore fully reciprocated by keeping their relationship with the majority of the class at arm's length. They were not going to take any chances to get near when the result was not in doubt, namely the sustenance of verbal injury. As a result Jewish students largely kept to themselves with one or two minor exceptions. I can't remember any conversation taking place between a Jewish and a Turkish student other than occasional functional ones like on asking the other what the time was, and even these were rare. The Jewish students of our class rarely attended events in campus life such as concerts and plays; they did not participate in social activity with our sisters, such as dancing afternoons, balls and banquets. They had their own, exclusively Jewish social lives outside school. In this respect they followed the general rules applicable in Jewish and Turkish circles. In those days only a rare Turk appeared in Jewish circles, and a rare Jew in Turkish ones. A particular incident epitomizing the prevailing relationship climate took place at the end of May 1948. Israel's war of independence was in full blast, and the Jewish Quarter of the old city of Jerusalem had just fallen to the Jordanian Legion. It was now the turn of the new city to come under heavy attack; Jordanian artillery started to shell it with incendiary shells, starting fires all over. It was touch and go whether the new city would hold out, and in fact, whether the State of Israel, itself, that had been declared less than two weeks before. Izak was entering Washburn Hall to attend a class, and Orhan, of intellectual pretensions, was sitting on an iron parapet at the building entrance, just hanging out. When he saw Izak, he addressed him in a loud voice full of sarcasm and malice, "izak, Kudus yaniyor, Kudiis cayir cayir

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yamyor!" (Jzak, Kudus is burning, Kudus is going up in flames!) Poor Izak did not even look at him but directed his eyes to the ground. I felt exactly like Tzak, but of course, said nothing. Jerusalem is supposed to be the third holiest city of the Muslim religion after Mecca, and Medina. And yet, Orhan, the Muslim that he was, could not care less about the shelling of Jerusalem, as long as it was the Jewish part of the city that was being shelled and was burning, and in fact it sounded as if he was pleased about it. He was wearing such a mean smile too as he was uttering these words. He must really have hated Jews. As far as my personal attitude to the Jewish students of the class, it was generally standoffish just like the large Turkish majority in the class, as if acting like that would make me more of a Turk than I was. Like all others, I hardly exchanged greetings with them. Exceptionally, I would exchange a few words with some. Needless to say, in perspective, I am now quite ashamed of my behavior. Paradoxically, I was more exposed to anti-Semitism than my Jewish classmates, because I was trying to get into the Turkish mainstream while they with being under no illusions, were wisely maintaining their distance, with distance acting as a good protection from being hurt.

The Awakening of my Jewish Consciousness at National Level The beginning of the awakening occurred at the home of Bension, a relative of about my age. One day in the summer of 1943, at Biiyiikada when I was staying at their home Bension played for me on the piano the opening bars of Hatikva, which later became the national anthem of Israel. He then declared that this song is going to become just that, as he put it, "Once we have a state of our own". I had no idea what he was talking about, and did not even react, either to the song he played, or to his comment. But peculiarly enough I still retained the event in my memory right to the present day. In 1946/47 during my freshman year, we studied ancient history through the demise of the Western branch of the Roman Empire. The book mentioned that Jews have been an independent entity only for a limited period, and since "The Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians and the Kingdom of Judea by the Babylonians" after which they had never been independent again. Much later I found that this was entirely wrong.

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Each chapter in the book covered a particular country, and the last section in each one of the chapters was called "Civilization". On the contribution of Jews to civilization the book had a single sentence, and I am quoting the precise words, "Jews did not make a significant contribution to civilization except the "Tevrat". By comparison, the Chapter on the History of the Huns got three pages in the book, including a section on their "Civilization", about three fourths of a page. The section started with the words, "The often made statement in European history books that Huns lacked a civilization is categorically untrue." The Tevrat (In Hebrew the Torah) constitutes only the first of three books, which together are called the Tanach in Hebrew, and in Turkish Kitabi-Mukaddes (The Holy Book). For some reason, the author of the history book preferred to use the word Tevrat, and not Kitab-i-Mukaddes which includes the nine other books that form part of the fourteen. Presumably he may have thought that the other two did not deserve mentioning in a section devoted to civilization. In the two others are the Minor Prophets, which the Muslim religion recognizes as such and has given them Muslim names. For example, the minor prophet Yona is known as "Yunus Peygamber" in the Muslim religion. Perhaps the author of my history book was not aware of the finer points of his own religion. At the time I knew practically nothing about Jewish history except bits and pieces Grandma Salinas had told me. The chapter instilled in me a feeling of inadequacy and a considerable sense of inferiority. As a gut feeling, I felt that Jewish civilization and culture deserved a little more space than it had received but I had nothing to go by to show this. Leaving their inaccuracies aside, at best, the one and a half pages were patronizing, and at worst denigrating. At the time of my facing Jewish history as my history textbook, courtesy of the Turkish "Historian", an insurrection was in full swing in the Mandated Territory of Palestine. The "Etzel", an organization that had broken off from the establishment of the Jewish Community of Palestine had started one against the British in the summer of 1944, one year before World War Two ended. With the end of the war, and following the reception of information on the extent of the holocaust, the insurrection escalated from its modest beginning of the previous year, and by 1946, was in full swing. At the time, the main military organization of the Jewish Community, the "Haganah", was mostly active in smuggling Jewish refugees from former concentration camps into the Mandated Territory of Palestine. Otherwise it kept its powder dry, and concentrated on preparations for the war with Arabs whose approach could already be observed in the horizon.

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As viewed from Istanbul, the "Etzel" was the chief star of the show. Its exploits against the British produced in the Jewish Community of Istanbul, admiration and identification with the Zionist cause. What Etzel was achieving, in fact, was no more than twisting the tail of the old British lion; nevertheless, it was still tying down about 100,000 soldiers of the British Imperial Army, and getting headlines in the media all over the world.

The State of Israel is Declared On November 29, 1947 came the partition of Mandate Palestine into two states, a Jewish one and an Arab one. The war started immediately the following day with an attack on a bus journeying between Tel Aviv and Petah Tikva, and the burning down of a Jewish shopping area immediately outside the western wall of the old city of Jerusalem. All Jews in Istanbul followed, sometimes with anxiety and sometimes with pride, the ups and downs of the war, which initially, were mostly down. The prospects began to look up in April and first half of May 1948. The State of Israel was declared on May 14 th . In the morning of May the 15 th the first thought that came to my mind as I woke up was, "Now we have a State", and the next thing that came to my mind was the one and a half pages on "Jewish history" I had learned from my text book on ancient history during the previous year. Among RC and RCE students who were not Jewish, representing a large majority, the Arab-Israeli war did not evoke much interest. The only exception was Nezih, who was the nephew of the Governor of the Istanbul Vilayet, Liitfi Kirdar. Nezih, was Turkish but of Iraqi nationality. He was studying at RSE and boarded at Feridun Bey's; his room was next to mine. His family was a leftover from the days when Iraq was an Ottoman province, most probably an old, well-established, and well-to-do family of Turkish origin. The interest Nezih showed in the war was entirely understandable. He was the only student at school I know of, who, though not Jewish, talked about the war almost incessantly. He bragged to all who were willing to listen to him, how the Arabs, and in particular, the Iraqis were going to drive these awful Jews into the sea as they deserved. Those listening to him did not react to his declarations either way. It looked to me as if they did not care much, one way or the other. I expressed some guarded skepticism about his claims but got no counter reaction from him or from anybody else present in the conversations.

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With the invasion of Israel by the armies of five Arab States on May the 15 th and during the next two weeks, it almost looked as if Nezih's prediction was about to come to pass. The Israeli army that lacked heavy weapons was barely holding its own against Arab armies while incurring large casualties. The lowest point was reached when the Jewish Quarter of the Old City fell to the Arab Legion on May the 25 t h . About that time we got news from the Razon family, relatives of my mother, that their youngest son, Moshe, my mother's young cousin, had been killed in action near Ein Shemer on April 16 th 1948, about a month to the day before the establishment of the State. We all grieved. Aykut, my Father's second youngest brother was glued to the radio all day long. The cause had swept him off his feet. Once the Turkish Government allowed the immigration of Jews to Israel he became active in organizing the Jewish mass immigration to the point of even neglecting his daily work leaving everything to his partner who was also a family member. Father and his brother Barzilay next after him could not care less. At the time, and in the few preceding years, a lot of Zionist activity went on in Istanbul, though of a semi-clandestine type. I did not try to get anywhere near it. I could have tried to establish closer contact with the Jewish students in our class. Retrospectively, I found that they were all Zionistically inclined, in fact, more than I was at the time. As soon as they graduated from RC, most of them immigrated to Israel. It looked as if my Zionistic inclinations had nothing to do with Turkish Jews. It was something between "me and Zion", ludicrous as this may sound. The probable reason for my having adopted this posture was that when in public, I was still not prepared to shed my identity as a Turk, for whatever it was worth. The first truce declared for a four-week period on June the 10 th provided the Israeli army a breathing space it much needed. With the reception of heavy weapons and the combat experience it had gained during the first round of the war, the strengthening of the Israeli army accelerated. When fighting resumed on July 9 t h , and for the Israeli army, it was like traveling on a level and straight road. There were still high casualties, but we were winning the war now, and there was no question about that. The signing of armistices during the winter of 1949 put a formal end to the hostilities.

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Beginning with the first days of June, just before the first truce was declared, Nezih strangely fell silent about the war. He stopped bragging about what the Arabs were about to do to the Jews. It was almost the end of the school year, and one day our paths crossed at Feridun Bey's garden, with he going out and I coming in. I asked him as casually as I could what the deadline now was for throwing the Jews into the sea. He looked at me and there was fire in his eyes; he exclaimed "I want to kill some Jews now!" Though the statement seemed to be directed at me personally, nevertheless, I did not feel a threat to my life. Knowing Nezih well enough by then, I knew that he was not capable of killing even a chicken.

A Flag is Hoisted An event took place during the autumn of 1949 that 1 remember with much regret today for having missed it. It was a Sunday morning. Mother sent me on an errand to carry something to her younger sister's home located a tenminute walk from our home. We lived on the main street of our quarter. I started walking on it; it looked more crowded than one could expect for the day of the week and the time of the day. It did not take me long to realize that the crowd was mostly, if not all, Jewish. A little past our house, there was a tram stop. A tram stopped and disgorged a crowd of people and these too appeared to be Jewish from their talk and demeanor. They were all dressed in their Sunday best. Just about as I was to turn left towards my aunt's I saw additional streams of persons converging towards a particular direction. For the love of me I could not think up of what could be the point of attraction. I did not ask anyone what all this about. After all they all looked like Jews and I did not wish to have traffic with them no matter my growing sympathies with Israel. Anyway I fulfilled the errand and returned home without even bothering to tell my parents what I had seen. A few hours later, after we had had our lunch Nessim Ojalvo, and his wife Rashel, Father's youngest sister Rashel, turned up at our home unannounced. This was unusual, as they lived too far away from us to drop in like that. So what brings you here, we asked them. Nessim answered with his eyes shining, "Vinimos ver el Bayrak i lo vimos" (We came to see The Flag and we saw it). Our next question was: "Which" flag? We could not think up what holiday was involved. Nessim answered, "Don't you know? The flag of Israel of course, didn't you know that today an Israeli Consulate was to open,

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and we heard that they were going to hoist the Israeli flag and we came to see it. 1 I then asked Nessim where this consulate is located. He gave me the precise location, and I knew where it was. It was a fifteen-minute walk from our home and this was the direction the Jews I saw walked towards. Father, Mother and us two were too stunned to reply. Nessim continued to visit the consulate to see the flag that was hoisted every Saturday, for quite a few weeks as if this was his religious duty to do so. Eventually he immigrated to Israel with his family. In perspective, the hoisting of the flag was a historic moment indeed. Istanbul was a town established 2500 years ago, was continuously lived in, and during most of these years was the capital of major empires, the Eastern Empire of Rome, Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. The year of the establishment of Istanbul roughly coincided with the year of the first destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. No less than 2500 years had passed since the founding of Istanbul, and a flag of Israel flew for the first time in the city, even if on a modest occasion such as the establishment of a consulate would represent. All this took place within a walking distance of a quarter of an hour from my home, but I still missed the opportunity to witness the event. Today, I could kick myself!

^Bali 2, p. 273- the precise date of the opening of the Consulate was September 17, 1949.

10 CAREER CHOICE

Engineering? Psychiatry? Economics? The desire to bccome "something" first occurred to me as soon as I started studying at Robert College. Studying at the RSE was perceived as being prestigious, and practically all students at RA aspired to enter the engineering school, but not everyone who tried was accepted. Students with grades higher than average stood a better chance, and obviously, in particular those with good grades in science courses and mathematics. Like a large majority of students of our class, I too wanted to become an engineer. I informed my father of my desire to study civil engineering. He sounded pleased about it, but added, "Yes, you will become a textile engineer". I hadn't the slightest notion what a textile engineer is or does. I did not ask father to enlighten me on the subject. However, the notion vaguely entered into my head that this was what I wanted to become. Among members of our group, this kind of penchant towards becoming engineers continued for a while. Towards the end of our Third Form year, on a bright spring day of 1946, Nur gathered our group together telling us he had an important question to put to us, and that we had better meet in a wooded area just outside campus so that we could smoke without Dean Allen catching us in the act. We did this, Nur, Ilham, Kemal, Ibo and myself. We sat in a circle in a wooded area of the campus, and lit our cigarettes. In my case, it was the first one I had ever smoked. So Nur put to us the question, "What do you want to become?" He was the first to talk, and told us that he wanted to become an actor. To me this was shocking news. What about our common determination to become engineers? Then Kemal spoke and declared that he wanted to become an artist, without specifying the art form he was interested in. ilham and I stuck to the notion that we still wanted to become engineers. Ibo said nothing but I assumed that he too still wanted to become one.

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In one of our visits to Philip Ulyott during our freshman year, this question came up, and sensing that there was still an element of strong support for studying engineering, his brow became creased as he told us: "Gentlemen, engineers are persons whose mechanical skills we all benefit from. However, in their make up, they remain like children all their lives and go on playing with expensive toys. W e need them all right, but let us not become one of them". This was the first occasion when a speck of hesitation entered my mind. Did I really want to become an engineer? However, if at the end of the year, I could have transferred to the R S E from Freshman College to Freshman Engineering, I would have done it, though more through inertia than real conviction. A t this point, the Gods intervened and the school management decided that to enter the engineering school one had to remain in college through sophomore year, and then go back to become a freshman engineering student. So I was given an additional year's respite to decide whether I really wanted to become an engineer. M y decision matured during the sophomore year. What Philip had said about engineers was not out of my mind for a moment. A t Hillary's parlor the words engineering or engineers were not mentioned even once. A t home my career as an engineer was viewed as a textile engineer. B y this time no member of our group still thought of studying engineering, and I got the impression that ilham, too, who was the "Last of the Mohicans", looked as if he had lost interest in wanting to become one. The end of the year was a turning point as the five-year-old rule that students are not moved from one class to another whether in A , B , and C would not apply any longer. A student that wanted to become an engineer would transfer to RSE. The remainder would have to choose between Arts, Commerce, Exact Sciences and Biology. Nur, ibo, and Kemal chose the Arts Section. Tosun went to commerce. Ilham and I went to Exact Sciences. M y reasoning for taking up the Exact Sciences was disingenuous. It went like this: Father wanted me to become a textile engineer. A t R S E , the specializations comprised civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. If I wanted to become a textile engineer then I had no business in transferring to RSE. However, not to abandon a future engineering option, the compromise would be to get into Exact Sciences. Again, like in the past, Father did not appear to be much interested in my choice. When I informed him about it, he just nodded his head absent-mindedly and that was the end of the story.

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During my junior year I tended to think that I wanted to bccome a psychiatrist but I appreciated the fact that to do this I had to go to medical school. So I started telling people that I wanted to go to medical school because I wanted to become a psychiatrist. I was first asked why I wanted to become a psychiatrist. In answer, I started holding forth about Freud. In my father's milieu, mentioning Freud was the equivalent of waiving a red rag at a bull, and everyone I talked to acted like one when I mentioned the name. The reaction came immediately, and that was, "if you want to go to medical school why don't you become an MD first and decide about becoming a psychiatrist later". What they said made eminent sense. I then started thinking about becoming an economist. As I mentioned earlier, I had become a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist by then. According to Marx, the history of mankind was determined exclusively by economic factors. By studying economics I thought I would be learning the secrets of the universe. 1 went to my father and informed him that I had changed my mind and now wanted to become an economist, and gave him my reasons for wanting to do so. This time father really got upset with me. He asked me, "What about becoming a textile engineer?" It seems he had not taken the psychiatrist bit too seriously, and my new wish to become an economist sounded to him more real and dangerous. Then he delivered what was, in his mind, his decisive blow against the idea. He said, "If you study economics you will be poor all your life". I answered him without hesitation, "So what, as long as I learn the secrets of the universe!" The argument did not end in a conclusive fashion, but continued many more sessions, with neither him nor me yielding our ground. In the meantime we were now in our senior year. Following Nur and ilham, Ibo, too, was accepted at Downing College, Cambridge, to study economics, thanks to an uncle of his, with a connection with the college, but he was to enter it during 1951/52 and would have a year on his hands after his graduation from RC. Tosun was also angling for a place at a Cambridge college, but it had not come through yet. I was the only one left in the group with nowhere to go. In June 1950, we all graduated. My situation had not changed. Again, like at the time I had graduated from §i§li Terakki, my parents did not show the slightest concern, and they appeared to be uninterested in my university schooling. As I had mentioned earlier, Ibo had one year on his hands before he could start at Cambridge. He somehow got in touch with a school attached to

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the Stockholm Hogskola (University) called the Graduate School for English Speaking Students. This was a school where students could study economics, political science, and sociology in the context of Swedish experience on the subjects. During the first three months of the school year they would be learning Swedish, to be able to read local publications written in Swedish. Sometime towards mid-August Ibo applied and was accepted with his RC BA being considered sufficient to acquire graduate status. It was already mid-August, and with university term to start before mid-September, I was in the same situation as in September 1942, when I had graduated from the §i§li Terakki School and had nowhere to go. Now Nur intervened a second time in my life, the first time had been on how to write a letter to Belma, and now, this second time, his intervention again produced decisive results. Having heard of Ibo's acceptance, when we were all together one day, he said to me, "Why don't you apply to the Hogskola, too, and see what happens". I was already feeling like an ass about not having applied to the school in the first place like Ibo had. And now I felt I was too late, and had missed that boat. Once I heard Nur, my spirit revived and I said to myself, "What the hell, what have I got to loose?" So I applied. Within ten days, I received application forms. They wanted letters of recommendation from two of my teachers. I rushed to Hillary, and of course, he said he would be glad to give me one. What to do about the second? With the summer vacation on, I had problems finding someone who would give me a recommendation. In the end, I turned to Dean Scott, "The Number Two" person in the Robert College hierarchy. He had taught me a single course in my Third Form Year and I would not have been surprised if he had not remembered me. I visited him and told him what I wanted. He said, "Sure, come and pick it up tomorrow this time." I did that, and he gave me the letter with a smile. The letter was sealed but I had an impulse, probably originating in the devil that ended with my tearing up the envelope to find out what he had written. It was short letter in his handwriting, comprising two sentences. The words I remember still: "He is a very intelligent fellow capable of doing excellent work. His grades have been lower than his potential, due to absorbing outside activities."

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Now this was a very nice letter to write! I had little personal contact with him, but it seems he knew us all. Only once in his class, when he saw me reading a book called "The Ashanti-War" by G.A. Henty, he took my book into his hands, leafed through it with some affection and exclaimed, "Ah, I read this book too, when I was your age!" Perhaps that did it. 1 put the letter into a new envelope sealed and mailed it. In a week's time, a cable arrived at our summer home close to midnight, at a time when my parents were having one of their usual rows, and Father, feeling that he was not getting his point across to mother had smashed the radio screen with his fist. The cable was from Stockholm University and it started with the words, "Stockholm Hogskola accepts..." This was one of the happiest moments of my life. I rushed to my mother, embraced her in such enthusiastic fashion that in the process I threw her on my bed. To Fathers' credit, he did not argue with me about studying economics this time, but immediately agreed. There was not much time to loose. University was to start on the first day of the second week of September. I went with father to purchase my Istanbul-Stockholm one-way ticket. Its cost was 1400 Turkish Liras (About US$ 500 then, and US$ 3000 at present values). I was on my way within a week. Flying a DC-4,1 left at 8:30 in the morning and arrived at the Stockholm airport, at Bromma, at 19:30, with stopovers at Munich and Copenhagen.

My Robert College Years, a Summing-up The DC-4 that took off from Ye§ilkoy airport that Friday morning in September signed off my eight years at Robert College, some of the most formative years of my life. At the time of my arrival in Stockholm I felt that for me Turkey was like a disaster area. It took me many years to understand how my family problems, my false conversion, my experience of antiSemitism and even the demand made on my identity to switch from left to right-handedness all conspired to undermine my feelings of self esteem. I had arrived at RC with a firm determination to become a Turk, as commanded by my father. I quickly found that there was no welcoming party waiting for me. In fact it was the opposite. Robert College was a great school to which I owe a lot, in fact my whole new life, but it was definitely not the place to transform a young Jew, saddled with a lot of personal problems into a

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Turk. In fact, and again retrospectively, it seems the main purpose of Robert College was to make Europeans or New Englanders out of Turks. This point I had entirely missed at the time, and in assimilating into the culture of Robert College, I was not really becoming a Turk, but rather a New Englander or European. For the purpose of becoming a Turk, I was in the wrong place. I succeeded in finding refuge in my little group who were all Turks, but they, too wanted to become full-blooded Europeans. In assimilating into them, I thought that I was becoming a Turk, while in fact I was really becoming a European. In brief, I had no future in my family, none in the Jewish community of Istanbul, and none as Turk in Turkey. My nascent identification with Israel looked at the time, like Israel did, a lean cow that could hardly stand on its four feet; it needed to be fattened quite a bit before it would amount to anything worthwhile. Above all I had failed to make real progress towards becoming a Turk. I was treading on the wrong track. I could never share, even with my best Turkish friends the pride I felt as a Jew when the State of Israel was declared, 1878 years after the Romans wiped out the last Jewish state. I could not share my deep anxieties over how long the newly born State was going to survive when five armies invaded it, my sense of loss over Mother's cousin who had fallen in battle, my not infrequent anti-Semitic encounters and how deeply they hurt me, All these things I did not see, as I boarded the DC-4 at Ye§ilköy airport, and some of the most important things I did during those years, were done as a sleepwalker.

IV MY UNIVERSITY YEARS 1950-1954

10 MY STOCKHOLM INTERLUDE

The First Few Weeks My DC-4 landed at Bromma Airport on the same Friday at seven thirty in the evening. The school secretary Per-Axel Hildemann greeted me in the airport and took me to my new digs at the house of the Director of the "Tilska Galleri", a museum for paintings. The museum was in the middle of a park called Waldermarsudde, situated just outside the town limits of Stockholm. The house I was to lodge in was inside the park too, within walking distance to the museum itself. The park had a view of the Stockholm estuary. The setup was like a repetition of my former digs near RC, at Feridun Bey's home next to the Agiyan museum. The view from the estuary was as gorgeous as the one of the Bosphorus I had enjoyed at Feridun Bey's home. Mr. Hildemann told me that a banquet was being held at the Stockholm Hogskola to welcome the new students of my school, and that if I did not spend too much time unpacking I could still attend the banquet. I dumped my suitcases on the floor without opening them, and told Mr. Hildemann, "Let us go". He drove me to the banquet in his car. Of course, he too had been invited. There were some seventy to eighty students in four classes. With the exception of a Frenchman, an Englishman and two Turks (ibo and I), they were all Americans. Many among them had fought in World War Two, and had earned their GI Bill of Rights, entitling them to a grant from the Federal Government to cover their university fees, their textbooks, and a monthly living allowance of 75 dollars that was sufficient to survive modestly. Quite a few of them were victims of the McCarthy era, among them an ex Third Party member, a UCLA professor who had refused to sign the loyalty oath, and a trade union organizer who, for his activities in some southern states, was beaten to a pulp and hospitalized for two months.

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Initially, I felt as if all the problems I had left behind in Istanbul had just disappeared. It was as if the monkey on my back was no longer there, though later I found that the feeling was an illusion and that, in fact, he had merely fallen asleep for a while. Initially, I got on rather well with the students of our group, and, in fact, became a rather popular person. I generally got on well with the Swedes as well. I learned their language pretty fast. My good friend Ibo was around all the time. We were in the same class. We continued the close relationship that we had developed when we were lodging at Feridun Bey's. We had our "civilized fun" outings, and dinners together in Stockholm, just like in Istanbul and this was by choice, as unlike when in Istanbul, we could have had as much female company as we wanted. At times, I found myself acting like Ibo's food taster concerning potential girl friends. I had the responsibility for testing the dishes, and ibo had the pleasure of their eating. There were times I felt a little sore on the matter, but in perspective, it felt worse than it really was. Sweden felt smooth, orderly and comfortable, without the visible signs of extreme poverty and wealth. In the streets one could just not see ill clad people. What Swedes called their slums, in the south of the city, and they were so proud of their existence, were buildings of substantially higher standards than those of average housing in Istanbul. Comparing infrastructure such as street pavements, lighting and water supply, the difference was larger still.

Belma, the End In the plane on my flight to Stockholm, a sense of emptiness towards Istanbul filled me. The only exception to this feeling I experienced was the remembrance of Belma. In fact, for me, there was nothing good in Istanbul but her. As can be expected we initially corresponded even more frequently than we had in Istanbul. There was not a single day that I was not either writing a letter to her or receiving one from her. In a while this disposition started cooling off as I made strides into my new environment. After about a month I got a letter from her, and in it was a photo of herself, and behind it was the following sentence: "Do you recognize this Chinese girl who would give two years of her life to marry you." Truthfully, it was not a very good picture of her, her cheekbones stood out more than in real life, and her eyes, too, looked a little slit eyed. No doubt this is why she had referred to the picture in a humorous vein as a "Chinese girl". Be that as it may, I almost panicked when I read the message at the back of her picture.

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I was to celebrate my twentieth birthday in two months, time, and the last thing I had in my mind was marriage. The result was that I wrote a letter to her telling her that I did not love her anymore. I wrote this in simple language that probably sounded a little brutal in its simplicity. As could be expected, I got back a letter expressing shock. The second sentence in the latter read, "Now I don't have to worry about your being Jewish anymore (!)" I showed the letter to Ibo, and his reaction was, "This is not a nice thing for her to have said". I did not answer her letter. So my Jewish handicap had not died, but was just buried a little, and in a moment of crisis it had quickly surfaced in full force. When I got back to Istanbul in April 16, 1951, having phoned a school friend not belonging to our little group, he told me at one point in our conversation, "Hey, did you know that the day after tomorrow your Belma is getting married to Tun?". When I asked him how all this could have happened so fast, he said, faster than you think; they had already become pretty thick by the time the New Year started. Those days, women were under great pressure to get married as soon as they finished school and sometimes even sooner. Boys were not, but then they felt the pressure coming from their feminine peers, and a lot of them just could not resist. It looked as if it had not taken long for Belma to recover from the rupture between us. Truthfully, if she had set her mind to getting married as fast as she could, I don't think she could have made a better choice. Tung was about six months younger than me and he must have just celebrated his twentieth birthday when they were married. T u n f , with whom I played bridge, was my best friend outside my group. Their marriage lasted for just a year; it ended with Tune's tragic death by drowning in Qubuk dam near Ankara. Tung was an exact science student like I was, and was absolutely great in physics. It is possible that in his

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untimely death the world may have lost a great physicist. 1

I apply to the London School of Economics A little past a month after my arrival in Stockholm, I was visiting Tony, the sole Englishman in our class. For some reason he was called away. Profusely apologizing, he told me that he would come back in an hour. I don't remember how it came about, but he gave me a book to read on economics. The name of the book was "Supply and Demand". It was published as a Cambridge Economic Handbook. Its author, Henderson was a fellow of All Souls' College at Oxford. I started reading the book and it had an effect on me like the introduction of fire into my blood stream. I did not feel that the hour had gone by when Tony returned. As soon I returned to my room I continued reading, and finished the book by the end of the next day. Fifty years past, and the book still holds a choice position in my bookshelves. After reading it I decided that this is the kind of economics I wanted to study. As the title of the book implies, its subject matter was purely capitalistic, flatly contradicted Marxist economic doctrine, and I still called myself a Marxist. I never gave the contradiction a moment's thought. After all do sleep walkers think about their actions? A few days after having finished reading the book, I applied for admission to LSE to the academic year of 1951/52. I got a reply to my letter asking me to produce two letters of recommendation, and was told that I had to pass an entrance examination before I could be admitted, and lastly, that they would make arrangements with the Stockholm Hogskola so that I could take the exam under their auspices. I wrote to Hillary for a letter of recommendation and asked the second one from Professor Gunnar Hecksher who gave us lectures on Swedish history, and then on the Swedish institutions that handled social subjects. He agreed to give me a letter of recommendation. Tun? had three hobbies in life, namely classical music, bridge, and physics. We became friends through playing bridge together. He shared a room at Hamlin Hall with a nice guy also in our class who was the son of Recep Peker the Prime Minister. Once the three of us got together, finding a fourth was not difficult. The great thing about Tun? was his physics. In physics classes, he usually wore a bored expression on his face. It took me a little time to realize that physics was a major hobby of his after class hours. He read quite a lot of on the subject. It seemed that he knew more than what the teacher lectured about at any time, and that was the reason why he was bored. He never studied for his exams in physics but always got top grades. On a number of occasions in class I saw him doodling in his notebook, not listening to the teacher. I looked at the notebook; it looked as if he was drawing complicated things but I had no notion of what they were. After class once, I asked him what it was that he was drawing and he said, "Oh, I am just drawing an improved electric circuit system for RC"! Tun? was my guru in physics. I would go to him and he would straighten me out, especially on Einstein's relativity theory to which we were getting exposed in class. According to what I heard, his death occurred in the following way: Tun? and Belma lived in Ankara at the time, and they had gone on an outing to the f u b u k dam in the company of a third party who was one of their friends. At the time Belma was pregnant, and was expected to give birth within about two weeks. At one point, seemingly on an impulse, Tun? jumped into the water that was very deep, even though he did not know how to swim. Somehow he could not be saved.

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Gunnar Hecksher was the son of the famous Eli Hecksher who wrote a book on the history of mercantilism. The book is considered a classic on the subject. What was special for me about Gunnar Hecksher was that he was a member of the Hoger party, the one representing the conservative extreme right of the political spectrum of Sweden. I was, at the time, of the firm belief that anyone who was not a true socialist must be either a fool or a knave. Hecksher appeared to be neither. This was most puzzling to me, if not downright upsetting. His lectures I most enjoyed, and they did not sound like the views of a real reactionary whose main purpose in life was to make a lot of money by exploiting his labor force. I did not know what to make of him. I decided that he must be a freak of a sort, although he did not sound or behave like a freak either. I took the L S E exam a little past the new year of 1951. The exam consisted of four parts. The first was a text that needed editing (this was to test our knowledge of English); the second was a piece out of Dr. Johnson's biography by Boswell. I was asked to summarize the two-page piece into a single paragraph. The third and fourth parts were the really interesting ones. The third part contained a single question, to wit "Is freedom declining in England?" and the fourth "Other than the issue of war and peace what is the issue of the greatest importance in our day requiring attention?" I am giving all this detail to demonstrate what entrance examinations were like fifty years ago. Tests involving true and false statements and "psycho-metric" tests had barely been invented, and were still not in wide use. The third question I answered with ideas straight out of the lectures I heard from Gunnar Hecksher. The fourth question I answered with ideas I had got out of a book I read of Philip Wylie; Bob, a fellow student had given it to me. To end with a little joke, the absent minded person I am at times, after having finished the first part involving the editing of a poorly written text, I went on to the second part without paying attention as to what was asked of me. This new section contained the Boswell text, an English classic of the eighteenth century, and I continued editing, and believe it or not, I found things to edit, until I fortunately caught myself in this preposterous act and quickly erased all my "improvements". Peoples' minds work in strange ways at times. Here was a young man born in Turkey, who after studying eight years in an American school in Istanbul, had no problems to editorially improve Boswell's work.

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Left-wing adventuring in Stockholm These were the hey days of the cold war. The war between the two Koreas was at its peak. Chinese intervention in the war on a massive scale had just taken place. The fortunes of the US army were at one of their lowest points. As a result of the massive intervention of the Chinese army just before McArthur's "home for Christmas" offensive, Seoul was lost to the communist army for the second time. The Swedish left was acting as if the Korean War was its war, and its representatives at the school were doing all they could to disrupt the normal functioning of the student union. No union meeting was free from left-wing heckling, and at times it looked as if physical fighting was about to break out in a most un-Swedish fashion. I was, of course cheering the left all the time. In one of these meetings when everybody had gone away, and with only the lefties remaining, I drifted into their group and they accepted me without asking any questions. After this point I started participating in all their does, including those of a monthly periodical called Clartee, though without contributing to its contents or helping in its publication in anyway. There was one woman in all these meetings with jet-black hair who was obviously not Swedish as she spoke Swedish with an accent, which finding out that I was Turkish, began showing a special interest towards me. She started phoning me where I lived and asking me questions like "When are you going to come forward and join the struggle?" Perhaps she was trying to recruit me. Left-winger that I was, I still was not ready to join any struggle. Not getting results, she gave up phoning me at some point, but in meetings, etc, we still said hello to each other and talked a little. One afternoon in mid-March, as I was getting out of school, I was approached by a man wearing a raincoat just like the kind warn by persons in espionage stories. He introduced himself as a member of the Swedish Security police and started asking me questions like "Were you in Lidingo last Friday night", and when I gave my confirmation that I was, the next question was "What did you there?" I was very surprised. At the time Lidingo was an out of town suburb across the estuary. A car was needed to follow me there. Was it possible that I was being followed all the time but was not aware of it? The agent then asked me a few more questions, and then pointing out to an attractive young Swedish woman who stood next to us, asked me if I knew her. I said no, and added that I wish I had.

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The person left me without saying anything more. I thought that the whole thing might have been a gag, though I had no inkling as to how it could have originated. I laughingly told the story to a Swedish friend. He answered me: "there is less reason for you to laugh than you think, because Swedish Security asked me questions about you a few days back". (So they had even found out who my Swedish friends were). The only reason I could think of for their paying attention to me was that Polish girl. It is possible that the Security Police was tapping her phone, and finding out that she had phoned me a number of times, it wanted to know more about who this Erol Haker was. I was not bothered again after this encounter and two weeks later I had left Sweden for England

I leave Stockholm for London The Swedish school I had been going to did not turn out to be a great academic experience. The best part of it was learning Swedish. I found that learning a language I did not know a word of was great fun. By the end of my six-month stay in Stockholm, I had become quite good at it, could read newspapers fluently and even literary works. Other than those of Gunnar Hecksher, I found most of the lectures at the school dull; learning my subjects did not act as a challenge to me. I even found time to study subjects with no connection to what I was studying, namely the works of Marx. I spent quite a bit of library time on the subject, to the point of becoming fully familiar with his doctrines which to me, were what the New Testament is to a devout Christian, and never mind about Henderson's book on supply and demand. After a heady start, my social life had declined. With my school life limping, there was little cause to keep me in Sweden. I was not the only one who felt that way about the school. Bob, a bright and restless young American, told me one day that there was nothing left for him to learn at the school that was worth his while. He added that at this point, he much preferred to spend his time bicycling in Europe. In the last day of February, he just left the school. Two more students followed him within a week or so. I left, myself, in the last day of March. I remember that the night before my departure, Stockholm had its worst snowstorm of the year.

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It seems other students, including tbo, continued to trickle out. The school year would have normally ended at the end of June. Ultimately, all those that had left the school before completing the year got their diplomas as if they had fulfilled all the requirements of the school year. I left Stockholm by train to Goteborg, and from there, by boat, to London. After sailing at sea two nights and a day, I arrived at Tilburry at the outside end of the Thames estuary at seven o'clock in the morning. This was the first time in my life I was setting foot in England. I had been much looking forward to this moment. With all my RC teachers in the background, I had become a true Anglophile, and thought of England the same way a devout Muslim thinks about Mecca. The introduction was not an auspicious one. The weather was grisly and depressing. From Tilburry to Kings' Cross, one of the central railway stations of London, I traveled by a train composed of rickety old passenger cars. The distance from Tilburry is about thirty miles but it took the train almost an hour and a half. The train traveled along the dock areas and slums of the city. The damage inflicted by the Luftwaffe in 1940 and 1941 was still visible. The debris had been cleared way, but everything else, truncated houses which even if restored could not have been pleasing to the eye, bombed out docks, broken pavements, were all there. All along I noticed at most only a few people. It was as if the whole area I traveled across had been visited by an enormous catastrophe, and all its inhabitants had left. I got off the train at Kings' cross, got into a cab, and asked him to take me to a near-by hotel. He said "All right Gov'," drove me a couple of blocks and landed me near a dismal looking building with a signpost saying "Hotel so and so". In the morning of the next day, I went straight to LSE to find out how I had done in my entrance exam. I was directed to a large room with a host of secretaries and a wall-to-wall desk facing the entrance with two standing receptionists who were answering queries on any subject one could think of, like where can I make a phone call? After some time, I managed, though with some difficulty, to get the attention of one of the secretaries, gave my name, and asked her my question. She exclaimed "Ah!" produced a list which had obviously been thumbed through many times before, and said, "You have been accepted!" and turned her eyes to the next guy who it seems had a registration problem of a trivial kind.

MY The

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an

anti-climax.

I

guess,

subconsciously, I was expecting to be handed my trophy in a ceremony, with a live band in the background playing some gay tune. The acceptance meant that much to me. Later I found that only 19% of those that took the test were accepted. A l s o , later, I found out that this was typical of L S E , nothing personalized. When I got my degree three years hence I learned about it by looking at a list posted in the bulletin board containing the names of persons who would have their degrees posted to their home address. If your name was not there, that was tough luck, and meant you had failed to get your degree. I had not seen ilham and Nur for a year, ibo had received one or two letters from Nur when in Stockholm, ibo showed the letters to me. It sounded as if they were having a rather lonely and unhappy time. Back at R C w e already knew that English society was rather reserved towards foreigners, and breaking into it was not an easy task. I had raised the matter with Hillary in relation to Nur, and he had replied, " D o n ' t worry, Nur will rape them as soon as he arrives"! W e l l it seemed that Hillary's forecast had not come about. Eventually, Nur did get into the inner core of Cambridge life but only during his third year, ilham never did, except for one or two English friends he made. Perhaps things are different now and Cambridge may be more of an open society than it was.

My Trip from London to Istanbul B e f o r e the end of the week, I started my return trip to Istanbul. I crossed the Channel with the N e w Haven-Dieppe ferry and took the train all the way to Athens. From Athens to Istanbul I traveled by boat, first class courtesy of Father. The trip took about two weeks, with stopovers in Paris, Milan, Belgrade, and Athens. This was the first visit of my life to these places. Traveling from West to East by rail was quite a learning experience. The further east one traveled, the more the railway speed dropped, the bumpier the journey became, and above all, the dirtier, and the smellier lavatories. With this experience behind me, and for many years to come, I could pinpoint with some accuracy how far east I had traveled, which country in Europe I was in, based on the smell of their lavatories. Today, this cannot be done any more, as the more eastern countries have caught up with the west in this regard.

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Nothing particularly memorable occurred to me in the places I visited. The only exception was Belgrade. The rift between Tito and the Cominform had already taken place in 1947, with each side hurling bitter invective at the other. Even after the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform, Tito had remained loyal to it for a while, hoping that the rift would somehow be healed. By 1951 Yugoslavia had lost hope and started to reach out towards the non-Communist world, though ever cautiously at the beginning. When I asked for my visa in the Yugoslav Embassy in Stockholm, I identified myself as a long time socialist who wanted to learn why the break had occurred between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. The response to the intended purpose of my visit as I had declared it was prompt and most positive. I was ushered to the second floor of the embassy, offered coffee, and a lot of material to read. I remember one document called "Trade Relations Between Socialist Countries", that was using the Marxian surplus value theory to show how the Soviet Union had exploited Yugoslavia. Upon my arrival at the Belgrade railway station, I was greeted by a personality no less than the President of the Student Union of Belgrade University, his name Tomas Martelanc, a tall, lean Slovene. (When I visited Yugoslavia again in 1974 on a couple of World Bank missions, I found out that he had become a big shot in Slovenia, as the General Director of a State Enterprise.) We had a chauffeur driven car which took us to Moscow Hotel, the best one in town, but a pretty awful one by all standards, in which neither the elevator nor the water tap in my room were working. Be that as it may, there was no doubt that I was being treated as a VIP. I spent four days in Belgrade, and Toma was most of this time with me, took me around, and showed me all the sights. On the night prior to my departure he took me to a performance of Narodna Kola, the country' folk dancing group that was a great experience, the starting point of my love for Serbian folk music. Toma accompanied me to the railway station to send me off. Other than the pleasure of going around with him, the experience was a pretty awful one. This was the first and last time I visited a real Communist country, and its drabness was unimaginable. There was an absence of life in human faces. At some point, when it looked as if I was about to run out of money, I managed to sell an old pair of shoes of mine in the "Belgrade free market" with assistance of a Yugoslav Turk with whom I struck up an acquaintanceship. I received US$ 150, for the shoes and the cash straightened me out until the end of the visit.

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The Annulment of our Conversion to Islam, Summer 1951: One afternoon on a weekend, Father collected the family, as he usually did when he had an important announcement to make. In the meeting, he admitted that, now, he thought that our conversion to Islam was a mistake. He said that he now wanted to go back to the Jewish religion. For effect he added, and not a little dramatically, "If I want to close shop on Saturday as an observant Jew, I want to be able to do it without a bad conscience." It went without saying that his two Muslim partners could not care less if he had converted again or not, as long as the store was kept open on Saturdays like everyone else's. As I had come of age, he could not convert me back without getting a power of attorney from me for the purpose. The situation was now very different than the one thirteen years back. Actually, by now, I had nothing against the idea of reconversion, in principle. However, with all that I had to go through over the last thirteen years, I decided to play being difficult. I told him that after having gone through the agonies caused by my becoming a Muslim, for which he was directly responsible, I had somehow made an adjustment, imperfect, as it may have been, to the very difficult situation he had created for me. I did not feel like going through the new set of agonies he appeared to be set to inflict on me by a reconversion process. Hearing me out, father became rather uncomfortable and with his eyes gave me a pleading look as if he was telling me, "Erol please help me get out of this mess of my own making." Peppo, who was present in the meeting, supported my viewpoint, declaring that there was an element of validity in my case. He, too, had a few grudges against Father and was enjoying himself thoroughly to see how his face looked after I gave my little speech. In point of fact, I felt that I had ceased wanting to be a Turk, and I did not have any problem about giving him the power of attorney he had asked me to give. However, the attitude I took was that if Father wants something from me, no matter what, play "difficult to get" and punish him in the process. So I told Father that I would sleep over what he asked from me, and would give him my considered answer the next day. In other words, let the bastard sweat it out a little. He probably had a bad night over the matter and the possibility did give me a little pleasure.

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Next day was a Sunday, and in the morning I told him that I was agreeable. I could see the sense of relief written on his face. On the Monday following, we went to a lawyer and I signed the power of attorney he wanted. However, the reconversion to the Jewish religion turned out to be a little more complicated than Father had bargained for. Father thought that with Turkey being a secular state, it was all a matter of going to the authority issuing national identity cards, and providing them a written declaration that he and members of his family wanted to go back to the Jewish Religion, and ask the authorities to issue us new national identity cards with "Jewish" entered as our religion. The official with whom he talked told Father, "Fine, but you have to apply to the religious authority in the country and get confirmation from him that you are no longer a Muslim." Father did not know that in the Muslim Religion, apostasy is a crime punishable by death! Of course there are few Muslim countries in the world, with Turkey certainly not being one of them, where such an offense would be punished in such a fashion. But despite this, to find an imam who would agree to give you a "discharge" from the Muslim religion, just because you asked for one, was a pretty tall order. So what to do? At this point Menahem Adato-Haker a cousin of Father's and one of the most resourceful and creative lawyers in town entered the act. The rest of the story I got from him. Menahem knew well the Mecelle (Islamic Law) from his law studies at the Darulfunun (Istanbul University) from which he had graduated in 1920. He requested, from the religious authority, all the records of our conversion that had taken place in 1938. He started to go through them with a fine toothcomb, and with the assistance of the authorities in question "discovered" some procedural defects in the conversion process. Armed with a written statement containing the defects, he revisited the imam who was going to decide on the matter, who, after having read Menahem's statement, exclaimed, " Ah, but your client and his family have never really been Muslims!" Menahem then asked the imam if he could put into paper what he had just said and give it to him. The imam agreed to do this, and armed with this piece of paper, Menahem revisited the Ministry of the Interior and requested new national identity documents for the members of our family, Father, Mother and their two children, who by now had become young men. This time around the new identity cards were issued with no difficulty. In the paperwork, the reason for the change of religion was described as a correction of a mistake by which the 1938 conversion was annulled!

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As for as closing down the store on Saturdays, father continued not to do so throughout his life until his retirement. What religion he happened to be adhering to at any given moment did not matter.

The Story of Melahat Who became a Real Muslim From the above it was clear that the little adventure Father had started to cross the line that separated Jew and Turk, had failed. Could it have succeeded if it had been properly handled? Over a period of fifteen years, beginning in the late forties, I know of four other cases that were successful. They comprise two young Jewish women marrying two young Turks, and two young Jewish men marrying two young Turkish women. In three of the cases a conversion to the Muslim religion preceded the marriages. I will confine myself to the story of Melahat who was the daughter of a friend of my father's and whose story I am more familiar with than those of the others. Melahat was about my age. Her former Jewish name I do not remember. Her father Henri did exactly the same thing my father had done in 1938: assumed the name of Hayri, gave Turkish names to all the members of the family and they all espoused the Muslim religion. His motives were pretty similar to those of my father. The act was a purely formal one, devoid of meaning. The family of the now Hayri Bey continued their lives as if nothing had happened just as ours did, at least so he thought, until Melahat sprang a surprise of some dimension on them. The family had a sleep-in maid who was a devout Muslim and prayed five times a day as required by the Muslim religion. Somehow, a close relationship between Melahat and the maid developed, in the process of which Melahat started asking her questions like "Why are you praying?" and "What does it mean?" At some point when Melahat told the maid that she, too, would like to pray like her, and asked would she teach her how, the maid said yes, and soon they started to pray together regularly, though only at times when they were alone in the house. This was a big secret between them, and so Melahat's parents never found out what was going on. At some point Melahat started going out with a young Turkish man. Soon enough they fell in love, the young man proposed to her and she said yes. All went well with the family of the young man whose father turned out to be no less than an Admiral of the Turkish Navy! The family was a

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conservative lot, observed religion though without being either bigoted or fanatical. Once they got to know Melahat, and found out that her adoption of the Muslim religion was heartfelt, genuine, and with no ulterior motives attached, they welcomed her into their family with open arms. On the side of Melahat's parents things did not go that well. She told them about the young man, adding that he was the choice of her heart, of their intention to get married and in the end mentioned casually that he was Turkish. Hearing this both her parents blew up on Melahat, telling her that she would be doing the greatest mistake in her life in marrying a Turk. Melahat replied that she had expected that they would be very happy about this outcome. After all she added, "You told me that we were now Muslims and I acted like one, so what is your problem?" She concluded that this was the first time she had heard about the real motive for the conversion of the family, and if they did not like the idea of her marrying a Turk that was tough luck for them. The parents knew that they had lost the battle. The couple got married soon after. Eventually, something unexpected happened again. Despite their initial opposition, Hayri Bey and his wife became reconciled with the idea to the point of becoming friends with the Admiral who by then had retired. As evidence of this friendship, I was told of the assistance the Admiral provided to Hayri Bey during the October 1954 riots in Istanbul directed against Greeks. The riots were not aimed against Jews. However, Hayri Bey's shop for textile products was located in the neighborhood between Eminonii and Sirkeci that at the time was surrounded by Greek shopkeepers. There was a fair chance that his shop would be set upon by mistake, and in a few cases this was in fact what happened to isolated Jewish shops in other areas. So when hearing of the riots about to break out, the good Admiral donned his ceremonial uniform replete with his sword, and posted himself in front of Hayri Bey's shop until the riots subsided. All the shops of Greek storekeepers were ransacked. Hayri Bey's was the only one in the area that remained unscathed.

12 LSE, THE FIRST YEAR, 1951/1952

Studying at the London School of Economics In Great Britain at that time there were incomparably fewer universities and other institutions of higher learning than today. As far as economics was concerned, LSE had the reputation of being one of the two best universities in Great Britain where economics was taught, with Cambridge being the other. It was the best in the teaching of political science and sociology. It took me just a few days to appreciate that the school fully deserved its reputation. Compared to other universities it had its share of superstar professors, like Mead teaching international economics, Oakshott for the history of political ideas, and Karl Popper who taught logic and the scientific method. However, what set it apart was the high quality of a middle range of professors and other lecturers who knew their subjects well and were first class teachers. The lectures were of the highest standards and more often than not were a pleasure to hear. The number of lectures a student had to attend did not exceed eight hours a week and added to them were fewer hours of classes. Attendance was not compulsory; there were no roll calls. Essentially, lectures were, for the pleasure of listening to them, for picking up related reading references, and for whetting one's appetite to study their subject matter further. If the lectures did not provide these, one could drop them, but still make sure that one had the reading references. Studying at LSE mostly meant spending time in the library where the run-of-the-mill student at LSE was expected to spend an average of about four hours per day. Any one who did less than that, could as well drop out of the school, as his prospects for passing his exams were very poor. A necessary condition for being an above average student, was to spent at the library more like five to six hours a day.

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Exams were few, relatively speaking. The questions one was asked offered a wide choice. For example, in the Part One exam, on the subject of Economic History, one had to answer only four out of nineteen questions in the exam. Many of them were repeats of previous ones. For example, there was no year in which a question on the wool trade between England and the Low Countries in mediaeval times did not turn up. Obviously, LSE never intended to test its students on subjects they had not studied adequately, but rather what they could get out from a subject they had. LSE exams grading was very tough, about a fourth of the students failed them and dropped out. There were many cases of students who failed their economic history exams even though they had a choice of answering four out of nineteen questions. At LSE, an honor system was adhered to during exams. There was one so-called supervisor in an exam room with fifty students, and he spent most of his time sitting at his desk, reading a newspaper. The questions were of a kind that made cheating in exams pretty useless. If you had not understood the question you were asked, had not properly studied its subject matter, and were not equipped with an adequate talent for expressing your thoughts well in writing, then you would fail to provide a satisfactory answer to the question, even if you came to your exam with ten books, out of which you were permitted "to cheat". At LSE there was a personal tutoring system as well, though on a more limited scale then at Oxford or Cambridge. Within a week of my arrival, I was invited to report to my tutor. In this meeting, the tutor asked me to write an essay with the title "Is Pleasure the Only Good?" As a source he gave me a single book by John Stuart Mill, its name if I remember it right "On Utility". It turned out to be a book of five hundred pages. He told me that he expected the essay in a month, which sounded reasonable provided that I had nothing else in my plate, which was far from being the case. Fortunately, I knew something of Mill before coming to LSE, and my supervisor probably assumed that anyone who came to study there surely has some knowledge of Mill's writings; otherwise he had no business in wanting to be an L S E student! In any case, I did submit my essay on time, and got a good grade for it. Campus life at LSE was almost nonexistent. The school was situated in central London, and physically it lacked a campus. The campus life at LSE could not hold a candle to that I had enjoyed at RC for eight years. The student population was an itinerant one. Perhaps, I also expected young Hillary's and

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Philips who spoke Queens' English and had wide ranges of interests. Reality turned out to be substantially different. The average student came in, heard his lectures, attended his classes, spent time at the library and went home. Most students lacked interests outside their studies, and came in just to learn and get their degrees. They were from working class, or, lower middle class origin, and spoke English with country accents that grated on the ear. The school had a lot of foreign students, probably not less than a fifth of the total student body, though many of them did M.Sc.s' or studied for diplomas specially designed for foreigners. Among the students were quite a few from colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, or from recently "liberated" excolonies in Asia. This was the first time in my life I had met people of such background in large numbers, and it seems I singularly lacked an ability to communicate with them. During this first year it should come as a surprise to no one that, outside any time I spent in study, I felt lonely and miserable. London itself felt awe inspiring, but pretty run down too, as the war had ended only six years back. There was still a lot of privation. Products like cheese (only a low quality Cheddar was available, dubbed by the English as "Mouse Cheese"), eggs, sugar, and chocolate were still rationed. Arriving in London I thought that 1 would feel like a fish that had finally found its natural waters. In fact I felt more like a crayfish, which though at sea, was crawling around on barely immersed rocks along the coastline. Seeing a play or two, or going to a concert now and then, did not ease this feeling. I probably felt a little more parochial than I care to admit even now. The climax came when getting into a bus along Piccadilly Street, three stops from the circus, I asked the conductor, "Could you please tell me if this bus would take me to Piccadilly Circus"? I must have looked totally lost. Looking at the expression on my face, the conductor said in his cheerful Cockney accent, "Sure we can Gov", answered "yes" to my question, then showed me with some flare to an empty seat, and added with a big smile, "Please sit down. We can tell you the time of the day, too, if you like!" There are few specimens in this world that can beat the sense of humor of a Cockney. When the three-week Christmas and New Year's Vacation came, I took the first boat back to Sweden accompanied by ilham, ostensibly on a skiing holiday, but truly to see the few friends I had left behind, mostly Americans who had stayed on as spiritual/political refugees, and a couple of Swedes, including a girl friend. It was an enjoyable vacation.

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Dr. Reed my Psychiatrist It seems the difficulties I was experiencing in adjusting to LSE were not uncommon ones among the student body. Students hovering around nervous breakdowns, with some breakdowns actually occurring, were not unheard of. In my own specialty of international economics, one of my classmates chucked it all, despite his having successfully completed Part I, and half way though his third and last year, took refuge in a farm in Normandy. He started to work there as a farm laborer. We received a postcard from him telling us how healthy and wonderful his new life was, away from the one he had abandoned. He further wrote what degenerates he thought we were in espousing conventional values such as academic achievement. Matters came to a head in the winter of 1952, during my first year when a student managed to find his way onto the roof of one of the two LSE buildings and jump from it to his death. At this point the school management got alarmed to the point of contracting the services of a psychiatrist and making him available, free of charge, to those among the student body who felt they needed psychiatric assistance. As has been obvious from the previous chapters, I had come to LSE with quite a few problems of my own, and LSE seemed to be adding to them. Although I was still quite far from wanting to throw myself from the school roof, or going to France to work as a farm laborer, I thought that it might not be a bad idea to talk to Dr. Reed. So I made an appointment with him. His first obvious question, one that I had expected, was why I thought I needed psychiatric assistance. I held forth for the best part of ten minutes, explaining to him as well as I could what my problems were, as I perceived them. He listened to me carefully without saying a word, and when I ended my little "presentation" gave me an initial diagnosis on the quick, lasting less than a minute or two. It was so succinct and incisive; I was so impressed that I remember it to the present day, word by word. He told me the following: "You have been, and continue to be a battleground for three separate sets of forces, the first is between your father and mother, the second between the Adato and Salinas families and the third, between Turkishood and Jewishhood. The three sets combined are pretty heavy weight stuff to bear, even for strong shoulders. For the level of sensitivity you are endowed with it is a wonder that you are not in a worse state than you appear to be.

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We should be continuing our dialogue and in particular, we should explore ways of reducing the level of hostility you seem to be confronted with in your normal life, while in particular making an allowance for the fact that the world is full of people that in various degrees don't like Jews. It is important for you to find out which of your difficulties are the result of your exposing yourself and befriending persons who don't like Jews, and which are the result of your own personal difficulties that need to be remedied". With this starting point I had about 25 sessions with him over a fourmonth period. How much did I benefit from them? - In perspective, not very much. However, there was one area where the initial improvement was noticeable, and that was in my relations with members of the opposite sex. In contrast with almost the whole length of the year, I now had two girl friends simultaneously and one of them Hulda, was Jewish, in fact an Israeli born Sabra. In addition, and for lack of time, I had to decline a third, also a Sabra. One last point, as my sessions with Dr. Reed progressed, I came to realize that he himself was mildly anti-Semitic or a little more than that, at both religious (You crucified Jesus Christ) and ethnic (Being an Englishman) levels. However, this did not affect the way he treated me, and I still think so to the present day. I don't think that I followed Dr. Reed in distancing myself sufficiently from anti-Semitic persons as friends until I settled in Israel. However, there can be no doubt that my eventual immigration to the country was a way to reduce to a minimum my anti-Semitic encounters. I have to give Dr. Reed credit for making this explicit to me.

I Become a Zionist Firstly a nutshell definition of what Zionism as formulated by Theodore Herzl in 1896 in the First Zionist Congress of the World: "The objective of Zionism is to create in the land of Israel, under law, a safe refuge for the Jewish people" 1 As the ideology developed, some changes occurred in this definition, the idea of a refuge faded out, and instead, came the objective of reaching nationhood with all the trimmings of one in economic social and political senses, with reaching full statehood becoming the ultimate objective. Implicit in these developments was the assumption that Jews, can be treated as truly equal to all the nations of the world only if they establish a state of their own that takes its place as an equal member to all the states of the world. ^Herzl, Volume 12, p. 244.

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Now the truth in the original definition, its development, and its various interpretations have been the subject of fierce debate for more than a hundred years, not only between Jew and Jew, but also between Jew and Gentile, and Gentile and Gentile. The debate included bitter arguments about even the very location where such a state should and could be established. Lastly, who is a Zionist has become a subject of many jokes, cynical and otherwise, with Jews themselves mostly cracking them. The last thing I have in mind in this story is to get into the controversies about Zionism, taking sides over the main arguments or their variations, or putting into writing some of the by now, classical jokes on Zionism. All I want to do in this section is to confine myself to the subject of how I caught the fire. The person who triggered Zionism in me was Malcolm, a Zionist and a fervent one at that. I guess 1 was ready for it, but he was the one that lit the match under me that produced the explosion. The first thing I did was to start learning Hebrew in earnest. At that time I could not even tell the letter "Aleph" (A) of the Hebrew alphabet. Until then I had run into Hebrew texts occasionally but rarely. The letters did not look terribly appealing to me in aesthetic terms, and this really inhibited my curiosity to know what their texts were about. However, once having decided to learn Hebrew, I had to overcome my distaste and go ahead. I started with the rudimentary letters, and in my second lesson I came to the first Hebrew sentence I could read in my life that had a meaning. It was a short sentence and went, "Kol Yisrael have rim "1. This simple sentence in Hebrew, written in Hebrew letters I now could read and understand had an electrifying affect on me. From that moment onwards I stopped not liking Hebrew letters. Incidentally, the first sentence I uttered in a conversation was "Lah eynayim shehorot ve hem yafim" (Fou have black eyes and they are beautiful), said of course to a young woman, a little humorously, as well, as if I was boasting to her on the progress I had made in learning Hebrew. The correction swiftly came, " not hem yafim but hen yafot". I had just made my first two mistakes in speaking Hebrew. Many more followed, and keep doing so right until today.

This concise sentence is most difficult to translate into any language, accurately. Kol Israel means, all Israelis, but also all Jews. Haverim, means friends, partners and comrades all rolled into one word.

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Malcolm was not only a full-fledged Zionist, but a determined Marxist as well, and the combination suited me to a tee. I became a member of the London Branch of Hashomer Hatsair, an Israeli Zionist youth movement that was part of an extreme leftwing party in Israel called Mapam. I attended the fortnightly member meetings of the branch and also went to the lectures they organized given by guest speakers on subjects of current interest. Through Malcolm I got to know fellow spirits, and chief among them were Malka and Phico. Both were born in Turkey. Phico was an RC graduate preceding me by three years. He immigrated to Israel immediately following his graduation in 1947. During the war of independence he served throughout its fourteen-month length in the Palmach, a crack outfit in the Israeli army, and was badly wounded in the very last day of the war.1 Malka, who was a few years younger, had immigrated to Israel three years earlier, and joined the same left-wing Kibbutz. She was sent back to Istanbul to establish a branch of Hashomer Hatsair. She failed miserably in her assignment, but that was not her fault. Those days it was not difficult to recruit young Jews to Zionist youth movements in Istanbul, but not to the extreme left wing variety. In fact, Phico was Malka's only recruit and that is how they met. There were other English Jews of the same disposition, and practically all members of the small Israeli student community. We became a set, and during this year I had no social life at LSE other than the one I had with this group. The friends I made among this group turned out to be most useful four years later when I immigrated to Israel, helping me look for a job and generally making me feel integrated from day one of my arrival. Those were the times of the Mordehai Oren trial in Prague. Together with leading members of the Czech Communist party who were ministers at the time, he was arrested and tried. Oren was an Israeli, a member of a politically very leftwing Kibbutz and a personal friend of Slansky who was Phico left Istanbul illegally in a Rumanian cruise passenger ship, and traveled illegally as well, as a stow-away passenger, without a passport and without a ticket. When the boat docked in Haifa he was equally illegally smuggled out. He moved to Gvulot, a Kibbutz in the far Negev that during the War of Independence came under siege for almost a year, first by Palestinians and then by the Egyptian army. He participated in fighting off of a number of attacks directed at the Kibbutz. When, in October 1948, the army finally lifted the siege on the western Negev it wanted to discharge him, claiming that he had already done his share of the fighting Phico refused and he continued serving. At the end of December 1948 when the Israeli army attacked the Egyptian army for the last time and crossed into the Sinai for the first time the armored personnel carrier he was fighting in received a direct hit. He lost an eye and was badly burned (about 85% of his body). He went through a few plastic surgery operations but still remained looking pretty bad. Finishing LSE he joined the Bank of Israel (The Central Bank) as a researcher, and eventually became a lecturer of economics at Haifa University.

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the most senior member among those who were tried. On the strength of this friendship the Czech security police decided to arrest him as well and put him on trial with the rest. Our set spent a lot of time debating whether Mordehai Oren was guilty or not. I did not buy the guilty claim either. But I said to myself, if the leadership decrees something then all the rank and file must fall into line, whether a verdict of "guilty" has a base in truth or not. I believed that for the triumph of socialism it was permitted to lie when necessary. In one of the party meetings, I gave a talk on my experiences in Yugoslavia, full of cock and bull stories, pretending that I had seen US military personnel around, and such nonsense. I was given a standing ovation Much later, as I was having lunch with Malcolm I told him what I had done and that I had deliberately told untruths in that little speech I gave on Yugoslavia. Malcolm became livid and said, "You are a spoiled bourgeois brat". Retrospectively, maybe he was right! But his reaction really threw me off. Did they really believe in the truth of the bullshit they were dishing out most of the time? M y level of discomfort started rising appreciably in subsequent branch meetings. I started to observe some personal qualities most members came equipped with which I did not like. The whole lot looked nervy, and totally devoid of a sense of humor. During all these times I did not hear any one of my fellow party members laugh once. One day towards the end of the school, I tendered my resignation. This was a gut reaction, inexplicable to me on rational grounds at that time. In fact I had abandoned the socialist illusion before I had a really good reason for it. The ideological basis for abandoning Marxism I acquired in the year following as I will explain further.

My Old Group Nur, Ibo and Ilham were at Cambridge. Tosun would start his studies there next year, but in the meantime he had turned up in London. He really had no specific reason to come to London other than being bored in Istanbul. With all of us in England, he, too, wanted to be there and enjoy himself in one way or another. I could see him more often than I saw the others who were at Cambridge. As I had mentioned earlier, one thing about Tosun was that he was the only member of our group who was not in the least antiSemitic. As a collective he did not care at all about Jews, one way or the other. To him they were people just like anybody else.

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Tosun rented a flat with two young English girls who were studying drama. The flat was in Bayswater, a couple of houses next to where Christie had lived and murdered some fifty women. By the time Tosun had arrived Christie had been apprehended, tried, and hung a few months before. The house where all these murders had occurred looked like a very ordinary one. I had to pass by it each time 1 visited Tosun, and would always rub my eyes to make sure that I was not dreaming. To think that fifty women could be killed in a house like this with none of the neighbors having any inkling, tells something about how intimate social life was in London. Tosun did strange things. He struck up an acquaintanceship with a British Army Veteran from World War One, and told him that his father had fought the British and earned many citations for bravery in action, and that he keeps the medals he won during the war to the present day. With his engaging manner, he was promptly invited to attend a dinner where other World One British veterans would be present and tell them about his father's exploits. Tosun of course accepted the invitation, but before attending the dinner he did some reading on World War One, and then went to a store in Shaftsbury Avenue that sold military mementos of old times, bought a few medals put them on his chest and went to the dinner. He then told an enchanted audience the story of each medal and how his father had won it. Tosun did not come from Istanbul with a lot of money in his pocket. Despite his impecunious condition, Tosun was among the first two of us to own a car. Nur's father had provided him with a brand new 1952 Jaguar. Tosun's was a pre World War Two (1937) MG model that he bought for three hundred Pounds Sterling. How he could have paid for it I don't have the vaguest idea. The M G was a great car when it was running, but occasionally got temperamental, and in fits refused to run. Sometime in spring I had an urge to learn to drive a car. Tosun obliged and I fooled around with the car a couple of times, less than an hour, all in all, with Tosun sitting next to me in the car and showing me what to do. At the end of the hour we both agreed that I had learned how to drive! On a spring weekend, I asked Tosun to lend me his car for the day telling him that I would like to drive it to Oxford with a date. As I have already mentioned, the car was not always reliable. Behind me I had one hour of learning how to drive, but of course, without a driving license, and I was not going to be driving alone but with Hulda, my Israeli girl friend. Retrospectively, I don't know who was the more irresponsible one of the two of us, Tosun for lending me his car with no hesitation, or I, who asked him to lend me the car. Whatever the answer to the question, there is no doubt that Tosun was a great friend, the best one could have.

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As to the outing itself, it was completed without incident, drivingwise. With the 1937 M G and my one hour's driving practice, we drove to Oxford on the A l , that at the, time was the most important trunk road in the England. We looked at the sites in Oxford, had lunch, and got back to Tosun's to return the car in one piece. With today's roads and traffic I probably would have made ten accidents during the day. The decisive reason I got away with it trouble free was that in those days traffic was light during weekends even on a road such as the A l . I continued to see my friends at Cambridge about once a month, traveling there over the weekend, and on a few occasions spending one or two more days past the weekend, attending lectures in economics with ibo and in philosophy with ilham. In the spring of the year, I went to Cornwall on a week's holiday with ibo. Group members would occasionally visit London and we would meet then. However, all in all, and without wanting it, I was slowly distancing myself from the group, as my newly acquired Zionistic outlook I could not share with them. There is one last story I would like to tell about my first year in London, an incident that took place in the spring of 1952, which, though not strictly relevant to my main theme, is very relevant to the times. It illustrates how things have changed so radically since then; it has to do with flying. Giilen was visiting Nur during the Easter vacation, and after spending some time with him in Cambridge, had to fly to Zurich to return to her school. They had come to London on a Saturday to go out at night and slept at Tosun's digs. Giilen's plane was to depart on Sunday from the airport at Croydon, south of London, as Heathrow had not opened yet. Departure time was twelve o'clock. For some reason I had not seen them the day before, and therefore I came to Tosun's to say hello to them and accompany them to the airport. I came in at about nine o'clock; Nur and Giilen were still asleep. I told Tosun that we should wake them up and Tosun said no, and this being his place I accepted his word. They got up at ten twenty. By the time we got out of the house and into Nur's Jaguar, Nur, Giilen, Tosun and myself, it was nearly eleven o'clock. Nur drove like a lunatic, but by the time we got to Croydon Airport it was five minutes before twelve. Croydon was a small airport at the time. It had a fence, and as we drove along it, we could see in front of us the small air terminal building, and standing in front of it was a plane with Swissair markings. The plane was boarding. Obviously we would miss the plane.

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However, just before wc were to reach the terminal building, I saw a gate in the fence guarded by a single Bobby. I told the group, "Hey, instead of going to the terminal, why don't we go to the gate, tell the Bobby our problem and ask for his permission to go through. We can drive right to the plane and put Giilen on it". Nur drove the car to the gate, and spoke to the Bobby. Nur was a great talker in such situations and could talk anyone into doing whatever he wanted from them. The Bobby gave one look at us; we must have looked like a bunch of lost kids who meant no harm to anybody. And a real miracle occurred. He opened the gate for our car. We drove to the plane; Giilen climbed the stairs and was one of the last passengers to get on. Thus, check-in, border control, and security control were all for the birds. In today's world, we probably would have been arrested as suspected terrorists and spent a few days in a jail before we could have cleared ourselves. Such were the times and such were the Bobbies in them.

Recovering My Lost French Hillary had instilled in me a love for French literature, novels, plays, or poetry, classic or contemporary; he added that the best way to enjoy them was to read them in their French originals. In the summer of 1952, I came across a course at the Sorbonne called "A Refresher's Course in French". It sounded just like what I needed. I registered and spent six weeks studying French, five hours a day. I made rapid progress, much more rapid than I thought I would. It seemed as if I was not learning a new language, but rather that I was bringing back to my consciousness what had receded a long time ago. In no time I started reading quantities of French literature, perhaps with a vengeance to make up lost time; going to plays, films, and lectures on all sorts of subjects. This diving into French continued with much intensity for quite a few years, before the pace slowed down. Featured in my reading were modern play-writers and authors, Giraudoux, Aymée, Anhouil, Sartre, and Gide. I devoured classics as well, Marivaux, de Maupassant, Stendhal, Flaubert, l'Abbé Prévost, Balzac, and others; I enjoyed poetry from Verlaine, Mallarmé, Baudelaire and others.

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My Business Future As Father Sees It Almost immediately upon my arrival home in Istanbul after my French course, on a weekend afternoon, Father told me that, now that I had studied a year in Stockholm, and a second one in London, as far as he was concerned I had completed my education. It was now time that I start to make a living. The Good father that he was, he had set up a partnership for me with Hayim, a cousin of his, who was going to be the sole agent of a major Swiss pharmaceutical company that was interested in starting a business in Turkey. Father was contributing the initial capital until such time as the business could finance itself through the profits it made. I said neither yes nor no, but did not object to starting off just to see what it was like. I appeared at Hayim's modest office at eight in the morning. It consisted of a single office room and an additional conference room with a large table covered with a tablecloth made of green velvet. On the table were a large number of envelopes arranged in a number of rows, probably more than a couple of hundred envelopes, with some papers inside. Hayim explained to me that the products of this particular firm were completely unknown in Turkey at that time. His idea was to apply individually to all the doctors who had practices in Istanbul to acquaint them with the products of the Swiss company, with the hope that physicians would begin prescribing them to their patients. Hayim handed me a list of physicians he had taken from the Medical Association of Istanbul. My job was to copy in longhand the addresses to the envelopes, one by one, and then seal them. To be fair to Hayim, he probably had filled the envelopes himself, as I did not see any other person in the room who could have done the job. At this point he obviously felt that he could not afford hiring staff. I dutifully started working at it. I don't remember how long I stayed, but what I do remember is that I had not finished the job when I left. I also don't remember whether I came back the next day, but if I did, that was my last day of work at Hayim's. The experience was quite an anti-climax following the high-flying stuff I was studying at LSE The next day I went to Father, and without beating around the bush told him that I didn't want to become an agent for selling Swiss manufactured drugs. I also added that I was in no way prepared to give up my studies for a B.Sc. Econ, and saw absolutely no connection between a B.Sc. Econ and selling drugs in Istanbul, even if Swiss ones.

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As can be expected, Father did not take what 1 told him well. He told me that in refusing his proposal I did not appreciate the good that he is doing for me, and how rich I would get if I pursued the course he had set for me. I told him that completing my studies was more important to me at the time than becoming rich. We got into an argument, as usual, with inconclusive results. I was aware that he could have stopped paying for my studies, and that would have been their end. To make my position clear, I told him that if he would not continue to pay for my studies, then I would go to Israel and join a Kibbutz. From this point onwards, he said nothing more. In September I returned to my studies in England unhindered, this time around with my brother, who had been accepted to Leeds University to study Textile Engineering. Father was determined to have one of his sons study textiles, and if I had let him down in this respect, then he would ask my brother to become one. Just a few days before my departure, I had a heart to heart talk with my mother on her initiative. The subject of the talk was marriage. She told me that within the next few years, the subject would become a real one. She said that she expected me to marry a beautiful girl from a good family, equipped with other positive attributes. She then added that all the qualities she mentioned were only necessary conditions but not sufficient ones. The sufficient condition, as far as she was concerned was that the bride to be would be from a wealthy family and she would bring with her a good dowry. As a post-script, she concluded that now that I had studied in Stockholm and in England she expected that all the wealthy families of Istanbul with marriageable daughters, of which there were quiet a few, would fall over each other for the privilege of being asked on my behalf for the hand of their daughters. No doubt mother had a high opinion of me, almost from the day I was born. My business future and whom I was expected to marry was one of the few things about which my parents saw eye to eye. They had similar aspirations for my brother, too, but being younger than I, there was no point in explaining them to him as yet.

13 LSE, SECOND YEAR, 1952/1953

I abandon Marxism for Good In the previous chapter I described how I had left the Hashomer Hatsair movement. It was a gut reaction, and not necessarily the result of an ideological turn about. The turn came about during this year courtesy of Karl Popper. Karl Popper was one of the superstars of the teaching staff of LSE and not only that but an excellent lecturer as well. I attended his lectures in his "Logic and the Scientific Method" course just for the pleasure of it, even though I did not have to in my particular specialty. Part of his lectures covered the totalitarian ideologies that were described at some length in his book called "The Open Society and its Enemies". 1 The idea underlying such ideologies he called "historicism". The basic idea underlying them is that history marches on in a predetermined fashion under its own laws, laws that can be discerned by an intelligent human being. As two most common examples among ideologies of a historicist type he gave Catholicism, and Marxism. According to the Catholic variant, history begins with the creation of the world, "Original Sin", predetermination, and the coming of Christ to alleviate some of the harsher consequences of Original Sin on humankind. The progression then continues to the apocalypse, the second coming, the rising of the dead, the last judgment, and ends with the end of time. In the Marxist case it starts off with the dialectic process, progresses through economic determinism, and the setting up of the Feudal System of Mediaeval times. The establishment of absolute monarchies with their aristocratic retinues who assume power follows. With the onset of the i p o p p e r . Bertrand Russell had the following to say on The Open Society and its Enemies: "A work of first class importance... which ought to be widely read for its masterly criticism of the... enemies of democracy, ancient and modern... His attack on Plato while unorthodox is in my mind thoroughly justified... His analysis of Hegel is deadly... Marx... is dissected with equal acumen, and given his due share of responsibility for modern misfortunes. The book is a vigorous and profound defense of democracy... timely... very interesting, and very well written."

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industrial revolution, comes the demise of the absolute monarchies, with the bourgeoisie (who are the sole owners of the means of production) taking over the reigns of power. The bourgeoisie operates in accordance with the iron law of wages, and the workings of the theory of surplus value through which, they exploit the working class. Class struggle follows, leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat and ultimately to the withering away of the state that is the equivalent of the end of time in the Catholic model. In both models there is some high authority, like the Pope or the Secretary General of the Communist party who is the person authorized to pontificate in accordance with the laws of history. Such a person has the qualifications of Plato's "Philosopher King" who has answers to everything in human existence (The "Philosopher King" concept comes under savage attack from Popper). The high priest is in the unique position of knowing what is good for every human being better than the human being himself. A bureaucracy, the Catholic Church or the Communist party backs up the high priest. The bureaucracy develops the details of the rulings of the High Priest, and hands out punishments to delinquents. In such a system the only freedom an individual has is to obey the way the High Priest runs his life. Of course, the High Priest can provide some dispensation like allowing a woman to choose what color of dress she can wear, but this freedom is a limited one, and can be withdrawn at short notice. Popper's main line of attack was directed towards historical determinism, claiming that there is no such thing, and no one, not even the wisest "Philosopher King" can forecast the future. In addition he equally attacks tribalism, which though free of historicism, is still directed at managing life by a system of unchallengeable taboos. This he does through his "Taboo Theory". Popper's effect on my intellectual construct was radical, fundamental, and, in fact, devastating. To make my abandonment of Marxism into a stable act, I required a new ideology and Thomas Hill Green provided me with one. He was an Englishman who between the 1880's and the turn of the century put into writing his political thinking. He was the leading member of a school of thought called the "Oxford Idealists". The school was a leading element in the revision of the classical doctrine of free enterprise and the minimization of Government activity to an extreme. According to Green, unfettered free enterprise was not a good idea either, and steps were needed "To meet the valid

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objection that as a one sided statement of class interests, free enterprise and the minimization of government activity to an extreme, had stood for the concept of liberty which in fact, if not in intention, amounted to a reckless disregard for social stability and security." 1 Green died at a relatively young age. Bernard Bosanquet, his leading pupil and follower, continued to develop Green's legacy through the first two decades of the 20 t h century. The revised political doctrine became the ideological base of social democracies in Europe and of the so-called "left wing liberal" ideology current in the United States. Equipped with this thinking 1 now turned my back on Marxism, never to go back.

Social Life and Friends: Towards the end of the year, we were to take our Part I final exams covering all we had learned over two whole years. The exams were crammed into four consecutive days, two a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. How it was humanly possible to survive being treated in such a fashion is a mystery to me. Had I been required to take so many exams so close to each other even twenty years ago, I would have failed them flat, no matter how hard I had studied. Well, despite all, most of us passed. Again it was a matter of going to the bulletin board to look at the lists, and hopefully finding one's name on it. As a courtesy, we were told that this time, if we wanted to hear in "more detail" how we had done in our exams we should apply to our individual tutor and he would help us out. My attachment to the Zionist set was loosened a little. Not that I had lost some of my Zionism, it is just that with their left wing leanings of the leading ones among them, I found their company less exciting. The real addition to my acquaintances was two students I had met at the course Popper gave on Logic and Scientific method. The first among them was a Greek called Kosta Goustis, who was about five years older than me. The reason that he had delayed his university education was that he had been an officer in the Greek army during the civil war between 1945-1949.

1 Sabine, pp. 607-613.

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Kosta was a big, corpulent guy, with little hair on his head, and a deep booming voice. He really looked like a vegetable seller; however, he was very bright, intellectually inclined, with a great sense of humor. He was a great admirer of Green and Bosanquet, but he had not gone through a Marxist phase like I had. We got on so well that one day he told me, "Erol, since I met you I have come to believe in the future of a "Turko-Greek Entente". I did not talk with him about my Zionist leanings, so he related to me as Turk. Fatma was my biggest find of the year. This lady was eight years older than I was, and a year ahead in her studies. She obviously had a Turkish name, but she spoke Turkish with a slight but still noticeable accent that I could not place. Through some gut feeling I decided not to question her about where she got her accent. Immediately, from day two of our meeting, I started calling her Fato§ which in Turkish is a name of endearment for Fatma, and I could see that she liked my doing that. During some of the first days of our meeting, she introduced me to her best girl friend Jackie; I noticed that Jackie was calling her Ruth. On an occasion when the three of us were having coffee together, after Jackie left us, I just could not resist it anymore, and asked her, "Fato§, what is all this about "Ruth". She said, "Ah yes, my father was Turkish, but my mother is Jewish, and I lived in the Mandated Territory of Palestine many years as a young girl". I could then immediately place the foreign sounding in her Turkish. It was the way a "Sabra" would have spoken the language. I still had the feeling that she did not like to talk about her origin. I got the details of her fascinating story during my first trip to Israel, from the mother of Didi. I will tell it in the part about my first visit to Israel. Fatog was a chubby little woman, a little on the corpulent side, but not excessively fat. She certainly did not look like a sex bomb, but she was not ugly either, and had an interesting face exuding a lot of temperament and vivacity. We became great friends, though on a purely platonic level. This was the first and last relationship of this type I had with a woman, but it worked out rather well. We spent a lot of time together brainstorming and chewing the fat. She was the one who urged me to go to the lectures of Popper. Fato§ was great fun to be with. We went to restaurants together, to movies, and saw plays. For me it was like "civilized f u n " with Ibo, all over again.

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Fatos was one year ahead of me at LSE, and in her last year of her B.Sc. Sociology. She was one of the superstars among the student body, and her company was much sought after. Two years later when I had returned to Turkey and came to Ankara to start my military service, she was of great help to me introducing me around, and helping me to get absorbed in the city. But this is a story for Part V.

My First Trip to Israel, Summer 1953 In the summer of 1953 a six-week trip was arranged through the London branch of "The Summer Institute of the Jewish Agency". The Institute was founded to interest Jewish university students in Israel, and to attract them to the idea of settling in the country. The Institute was no more than two years old. Its sphere of activity was confined to the countries of Western Europe, the United States and Canada. I believe it still exists today and its activities have been largely expanded to include the countries of Latin American and possibly others. Our group consisted of about one hundred young kids, of which two thirds were from the USA, a third from the UK, a few Canadians, a Dutchman and yours truly from Turkey. Studying in England automatically entitled me to participate. The trip was heavily subsidized by the Jewish agency. Each participant was asked to pay no more than eighty pounds sterling, equivalent to about eight hundred dollars now, that did not even cover the airfare, which in those days was much more costly than it is now in real terms. The Institute allowed me to make a stopover in Istanbul both ways, but again, at the time, this did not add to the airfare. I flew British Airways from Istanbul to the Lud (now called Ben Gurion) airport, arriving after a four-hour non-stop flight. At the time of my arrival, the State had been established only five years earlier and, and the country was still in the middle of its teething problems. It had still not fully recovered from its devastating losses in the War of Independence: 6000 dead and at least an equal number of young people maimed for life, out of a population of 650,000, all among the best of the country's youth. 1 Immediately following the Armistices signed with its neighbors in 1949, the country was hit by large waves of immigration that exceeded its total population, the immigrants mostly coming from communities in countries at a low level of development, survivors of concentration camps and, with some exceptions, all from the lowest social levels in educational and economic terms. ^Bali 3. During the Israeli War of Independence of 1947-49, 104 Turkish Jews were killed in combat, so much for the Korkak Yahudi (Jew the Coward) stereotype.

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When I arrived, about 10% of the population, all new immigrants still lived in makeshift camps with no pavements and no adequate infrastructure such as electricity and plumbing. They lived in barracks; most of them were unemployed. Since its establishment, the country had gone through a serious bout of inflation, at the end of which prices had quadrupled, all this under conditions of austerity and severe rationing. At the time of my arrival, the country was in the process of getting out of its austerity regime into a period of economic retrenchment and normalization; when this happens unemployment rises in a visible fashion. The signs of this situation one could observe everywhere, all the time, and in the smallest things. Refined white salt was unavailable, as was white sugar. Getting an egg at breakfast was a major problem. The public transport system was awful, with busses offering a level of comfort not much higher than an ordinary truck. For someone like me coming from Istanbul, vegetable stores looked pathetic and their wares mostly consisted of empty vegetable boxes. The heat was unbearable, and in most places with not the slightest relief, even from a fan. All this would be a most inauspicious way to be introduced to any country in the world. And yet, despite it all, despite my lack of familiarity with such conditions, sometimes even to a traumatic extent, I felt at home in Israel, from the moment of my arrival. I felt in a peculiar way that, despite all the mess I found, it was home to me, and all the mess, itself, was just a collection of technical and insignificant detail that no doubt will be taken care of in good time! I know exactly why I felt this way, as there was a very simple reason for it. It was that the Jewish monkey on my back had disappeared. In Israel, wherever I was, whatever I was doing, whomever I was talking to or dealing with, it was very highly probable that the person was Jewish; that same person thought about me the same way, namely that it was very highly probable that I was Jewish. People from all wakes of life, policemen, soldiers, street cleaners, bus drivers, postal clerks, farmers, workers in factories, and I could go on and on, they were all Jewish! I am at this point reminded of a story about Charles de Gaulle. Jackie Kennedy was visiting Paris, and was taking part in a state dinner in the presence of General de Gaulle. To create a little intimacy between them she addressed the General, reputedly saying, "General, I have some French

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ancestors in my family!" The general looked at her and without batting an eyelid replied a little dryly, "So do I Madame!" After his reply there was nothing left to be said on the subject by either side. Now, if on any occasion in Israel, then as now, someone would say to me, "Erol, I have some Jewish ancestors in my family!" I can't think of a better reply to give than to say, "So do I!" A couple of other reasons why I felt at home: I visited some relatives, the family of Astro Razon, who was Grandma Salinas' youngest sister, and her two sons (the third youngest had been killed in action during the war) and their families. They had settled in Israel in 1935 following the anti-Jewish riots in Thrace of 1934. They greeted me ever so warmly, as if they had known me all their lives. It was as if I had gone back twenty years and was visiting again Grandma Buka Salinas. Possibly, from up there, she signaled her young sister Astro who I was and how she expected her to treat me. Lastly I visited the family of Didi, an Israeli friend I had made at LSE who helped me a lot three years later, to be absorbed. His was an established family of German origin that had immigrated to Israel in 1927. Didi's father was the head of the Protocol Section at the Foreign Office. In any country of the world, as a new immigrant, it would have taken me years to mix socially with a person of his rank, if I could have at all, and here I was meeting him socially only two weeks from the day of my arrival. Didi's mother was most friendly with me. She came from a family, who had immigrated to Israel at the turn of the 19 th century and had personally experienced Ottoman rule, with memories, mostly positive, so it seemed. Hearing that I was born in Turkey, she laughed, said, "ahah" and started telling me stories about the Ottoman past in her life. She knew of Fatma Mansur as a teenager, though as Ruth. Fato§ had told me so little of her past as a member of the old Jewish "Yishuv" (the name the Jewish Community who lived in Israel in pre State days), but Didi's mother gave me her full story, including the story of her mother, the sister of Meir Dizengoff, the first Mayor of Tel Aviv elected in 1911. (True blue blood!) Ruth's mother was born in what is now Israel, but at the time of her birth was called Kudiis Mutasarrifligi of Ottoman days. As a young maiden less than twenty years old, she fell in love with a Turkish officer, and before they had a chance to decide about their future, World War One broke out and the officer was shipped to the front. He survived the war and as soon as it

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ended came to what was then Mandated Palestine to join his loved one who had waited for him all four years of the war to get married. As can be expected, the Dizengoff family strongly objected to the marriage, and as a result they eloped and got married. They lived like nomads for a while moving from one country to another, and in the thirties came back to Palestine, were 'forgiven", and settled down. In the meantime two children were born to them a boy and a girl. They took the "rational" decision that the boy would be raised as a Turk, and Ruth as a Jewess. After World War Two broke out, Ruth's mother encouraged her to Volunteer for the "WACS" (The W o m e n ' s Auxiliary Corp" of the British Army) with the hope that, in Ruth's mother's words "she would find a nice Jewish boy in the British Army to get married to", as after all, that was part of the bargain she had with her Turkish husband. Ruth spend the whole of the war in the British Army, but when she was released at the end of the war she still had not found a "Nice Jewish boy" to get married to. They continued to live in "Palestine" until 1947, when a new war broke out, this time between Jews and Arabs. These were very hard and fateful times, and according to Didi's mother they ran into an identification problem, and, with the question of whether there was going to be an Israel or not, they decided to leave Tel Aviv for Istanbul. In the meantime, as this often happens, the children did not go the way parents had planned them to go. Contrary to the plan, the son developed a Jewish identity, and married a Jewish girl. Ruth did the opposite, developed a Turkish identity, changed her name to Fatma, went back to Istanbul after she graduated from LSE, and joined the Middle East Technical University of Ankara that had just been established at the time of her return. Eventually she got married to a Turkish guy. Our group was lodged in the classrooms of the prestigious Herzlia Lycée of Jerusalem. This being summer, the desks had been removed, and replaced by our camp beds. But even for that they were pretty rudimentary. The food arrangements were equally modest. We were taken in buses all over the country, with all sorts of people lecturing to us, towards whom I could not work up real enthusiasm.

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The only trip that left an impression on me was the one to the Dead Sea. From Jerusalem it was a good few hours of driving by bus, at the time, and they wanted to drive us down to it as early in the morning hours as possible, and as it turned out, for good reason, too. So we left in an afternoon and drove to Kfar Yeruham, a small town right in the middle of nowhere, in the Negev, which was in the process of being established. We slept on mattresses on the floors of some houses still under construction. The houses lacked even window frames. We got up at five in the morning and arrived at the Dead Sea at about seven. We were shown some caves. We heard the story of Sodom and Gomorra, which I already knew. We were shown the remains of Mrs. Lot in the shape of the pile of salt that God had converted her into because she was too curious, wanting to see Sodom for herself, after God had visited the place in a state of fury. (Remember, curiosity kills the cat!) We then started on our journey back to Jerusalem. It was eight thirty in the morning and at the Dead Sea the heat had already become close to unbearable. I wandered what it would be like at noon; but changed my mind and quickly stopped thinking about it. 1 now and then broke off from the group, using the time to visit family and be with LSE friends. I looked up Huida and spent some time with her including at an open-air café in Ramat Gan in an old fashioned setting of a kind that has ceased to exist in most places. The café was immersed in a sea of greenery, flowers and all, and had a live band, that one could dance to. I also made one or two new friends. By the time I knew it the first four weeks of my visit had gone bye. The last two weeks of the visit we were to spend in a Kibbutz. We were given two Kibbutzim to choose from. The first was Maaleh Hahamisha in the Jerusalem corridor, which had been established about fifteen years earlier and where one could lead a relatively comfortable life. The second, called Tsor'a, about ten miles to the west, had been established only a couple of years before, where living conditions were pretty primitive. Some members of our group did not want to spend any time in a Kibbutz, and said that they preferred to be on their own during the last two weeks. Of the remainder, still constituting a majority, most chose Maaleh Hahamisha. About ten, including myself chose to go to Tsor'a.

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We arrived at the Kibbutz, which looked primitive, all right. Its membership was half South African, half Sabra. We slept in houses that, though they had window frames unlike in Yeruham, still lacked glass. As compensation, we had real camp beds; this was a distinct improvement! A kibbutz family adopted each one of us, in case we wanted to cry on the shoulders of someone. During the first week I was detailed to three work assignments. The first one was to take the machine oil and grease off some tractor engines prior to their being overhauled. I did this with a South African guy. This was a pretty messy job. We were chatting as we were doing the work, but not much time elapsed before we got into an argument. The subject of the argument was the theory of surplus value of Marx. I was arguing that the theory was a lot of nonsense, and he the opposite. I had freshly dropped my allegiance to revolutionary socialism as the panacea of all the ills of the world, and was exhibiting the reverse zeal of someone who had converted back. He was a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist. As the argument got louder and louder we were paying less and less attention to our job, and the mess we were making was getting bigger. In the end, we pulled through, and within the two days that were allocated to us we managed to complete the job. In perspective, where else in the world can one find two menial laborers arguing on the pros and cons of the theory of surplus value, and with such passion as well! My next assignment was to paint window frames for some houses under construction, though they were still not in place. This did not turn out to be either a difficult or an unpleasant job like the previous one. After two days of this, I was detailed to work in the vineyard of the Kibbutz. I was expected to cut off ripe grapes from vines. There were very few of them because the vineyard was only three years old and this was the first time it had produced grapes. The only disagreeable part of the assignment was that we were supposed to be at work at four thirty in the morning when it was still dark, and had to get up really early. We were told that limited as the yield was, it had to be thrown away and we were also forbidden to eat the grapes. We were not told the reason for the decision. So we ignored it, and when no one was looking we had our fill of the grapes we had cut.

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I don't know how these things happen to me, but at some stage, among the wiring to which the young vines were attached, I came to some loose wires that were sticking out, and not paying enough attention in the semi darkness, I got scratched by one to the point that my hand started bleeding quite a bit. I was taken to the infirmary. My wound was bandaged and I was given the day off. Well, I thought, here I am. Just arrived in the country, and I am already bleeding for it! I went back to lie in my camp bed in my abode where I had windows without glass. There was not much activity in the Kibbutz during leisure time. The food we ate was quite indifferent, but those days one could not expect more. One plus about the food was that the temptation to overeat was nil. There was no such thing as round the table conversation. I observed that the most a kibbutznik would say at the table was, "pass me the water" without even using the word "please". The kibbutz had a lawn right next to the dining room. I thought that getting up from the table I would lay on it, and perhaps others would join me and I could strike up a conversation with them. Well, I did that only to discover that the lawn was crawling with bugs of all kinds, and this was in addition to the insects flying about. So I got up and went back to my glassless abode. I had reached the Friday of the first week. I did some soul searching and asked myself the question, "do I want to spend another week of this?" My answer was, "no!" On the afternoon of the Friday I packed up and left the Kibbutz without even telling anyone that I was leaving. Just before that, I discovered that all except one boy in our group had done the same. I took a bus that journeyed to Kfar Saba where Astro Razon lived, and turned up at her doorstep for a good Sabbath meal, of a kind I had last enjoyed many years back. I, of course, overnighted at her home in a comfortable bed, and all the window frames in my room were in prime condition, glass and all. The remaining days of this second week I was expected to stay in the Kibbutz I spent in doing some sight seeing of my own. I struck up a friendship with an English girl who was visiting the country as a tourist. I revisited some of my friends from LSE and the week was gone. One experience worth recalling during this last week was the night I spent in a small hotel on Mugrabi Square on the Tel Aviv sea front. I still remember the horror of the night, the suffocating heat combined with the unbearable level of humidity, with not even a ventilator in the room. I doubt

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if I slept as much as two hours during the whole night. In the morning at the breakfast table the waiter asked me if I wanted a breakfast for Israelis or one for tourists. I asked him what the difference was. He answered, "In the breakfast for tourists you get an egg". I ordered the breakfast for tourists. In perspective, T s o r ' a eventually developed into a very nice and prosperous agricultural community. At the present time we have taken to buying a first class red wine produced in the Kibbutz (perhaps I had something to do with that?!). It now runs a plant that produces furniture of a respectable standard. Recently, we visited the Kibbutz on a nice day of spring, had a meal there, and if we had had the company of our children and theirs, I would no doubt have taken to boasting about my pioneering days in Tsor'a, though as can be expected, without giving any details of the precise circumstances, like, for example, that I lasted there only a single week. The six weeks of our visit were now almost gone, and as a last treat (one could call it the plum in the pudding) we were taken to Haifa to Beit Oren, an agricultural settlement on the Carmel with modest but comfortable facilities to receive guests. Our treat was nothing less than paying a visit to the great Ben Gurion himself, who was waiting to receive us! We filed into an assembly like-place; we sat down in a semi circle facing Ben Gurion. The American members of our group in particular broke into standard Israeli songs like Hineh mah tov ou mah naim, shevet ahirn gam yahad (How good and pleasant it is for brethren to sit together). Ben Gurion listened to the songs without reacting, and, when we stopped, he looked at us without extending a greeting, and in a most commanding manner and tone of voice, asked us the fateful question, "Who among you intends to settle in Israel?" Not a single hand went up among the hundred plus of us. An embarrassing silence resulted. Actually, it did not turn out as bad as it sounded, as time showed that five of the group, including, myself did eventually settle in Israel. I had already decided that this was what I wanted to do. However, Ben Gurion had asked the question to us in such a commanding, and I would say, almost threatening manner, I feared that if I had raised my hand he would have asked two M P ' s to come in, arrest me on the spot and prevent me from finishing my studies in England, just in case I would have changed my mind! Whatever it was, Ben Gurion quickly lost interest in us. I doubt if the meeting lasted over half an hour.

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The next day we were at the airport for our departure. The plane took off, and as we gained height over Tel Aviv, under conditions of perfect visibility I looked below, and Tel Aviv looked so movingly glorious that I promised myself, that I would be back to settle as soon I finish my last year at LSE. Given the description I have given of my six-weeks stay, most people would have drawn exactly the opposite conclusion concerning my wish to settle in the country. Perhaps some irrationality was involved in my decision, but then perhaps not. It seems I had figured out for myself what was really important for me in life. The first thing I did when I returned to Istanbul was to pack about fifty of the books I liked most and mail them to London so that when I returned to Israel from London, without going to Istanbul, I would have my books. An important spin-off of my visit to Israel was to meet for the first time in my life on a massive scale, my Ashkenazi (European Jews) cousins. I was eighteen when I had heard the word Ashkenazi for the first time. Until then, all I had managed to pick up from my family on the subject of Ashkenazi Jews was that they were referred to by one of my aunts as " J u i f s Allemands" whose distinguishing characteristic was that their males were not circumcised! With my mother it was even worse; she called them "Lehliyes" (a Ladino derivative from a Turkish word, meaning a Polak). It was known that they didn't keep a sufficiently clean house, were poor cooks, and most of the food they ate was fried. Now who is talking about being prejudiced? Well, I got on with my Ashkenazi cousins, more or less, but I did find them a little noisy, and with absolutely awful table manners. I guess I got used to them, to the point of eventually even marrying one!

14 LSE, MY LAST YEAR 1953/54

Social Life and Friends The major news was the marriage of Nur and Gulen in 1953; he was 22 years old and she 23. The marriage of Ibo and Beyza, his girlfriend for five years followed, in 1954; Ibo was 23 years old, and Beyza 22. The marriage took place in London at the municipality registrar. I was the only one of the group who was present in the wedding of Beyza and ibo. To me it was a moving ceremony, in its simplicity and taste. I don't remember any celebrations following. Kemal who had been cured from his TB had also got married around that time to a girl he had met at his sanatorium. Towards the middle of the year, he turned up at Cambridge with his wife. Thus, three out of the six of us had started to experience the pleasures of matrimony! All the three marriages turned out to be of limited duration, and within five years they were all dissolved, with Beyza marrying Kemal, and Gulen marrying Tosun. I found that I was getting distanced from my group, although in my sleep walking habit I was not noticing it. We still saw each other whenever we could. Ilham had started doing his Ph.D. in Philosophy, on a subject that required his undergoing psychoanalysis, and he moved to London for the purpose, ilham and I rented a flat together at West Kensington. But despite all this, the gradual separation was becoming a fact. About my visit to Israel lasting six weeks, my impressions and feelings for the place, and my intention to settle there, I did not breathe a word to members of our group, preposterous as this may sound. I still preferred to keep my life as a Jew an underground life. In all probability, had I raised the subject to my friends they would not have been interested in hearing me out. Fato§ had gone back to Turkey, and most of the Israeli friends I had made, Didi, Phico, Malka, and others had gone back to Israel. For all practical purposes I was back at square one. I found myself a new group of friends, all sociology students, Charles, Tony, Brian, Dorothy, and another girl, Dorothy's friend, whose name I don't remember. We went to see films, concerts, and we did pub-crawling together. No one among members of this new set was interested in politics other than marginally. There was not a single Jew among them. We were all members of the arts club of LSE.

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The most notable event I participated in during the year was with Dylan Thomas! We had invited him to give a talk to a group of about fifteen to twenty members of the club. He talked about his "Under the Milk Wood Tree", an epic poem in the form of a play. Dorothy was the organizer of the event; at the end of his talk she invited me to join a few of us for a beer with him in a nearby pub. Well, we guzzled quite a bit of beer all right. This was the only time in my life where I had a glass of beer with such an illustrious poet. Just coming back straight from Israel with all my resolve to immigrate there, it was sort of funny to find myself in such a set. Eventually after my association with Netta, who did not get on well with my English friends, I somehow lost them excepting Charles. He was the only person in my new set Netta got on well with, and as a result, I could maintain my relationship with him. The three of us went out quite a bit to concerts, and plays; we attended the wedding of Ibo and Beyza; we traveled to Cambridge, the three of us, to visit the members of my group. Charles did not talk to women, except, in his words, "to insult them". What attracted him to Netta was, in his words, "Whenever I insult her she insults me back". Charles was an Englishman who was fastidious about whom he made friends with. As a form of greeting, and to his discomfiture Netta would call to him in perfect Cockney "What-cha Charlie!" Charles always referred to her as "that horrible woman" although with some affection. When the occasion arose they would sing songs from Gilbert&Sullivan operas together, and I would feel cut out, although I did not worry about competition, because Charles lacked any interest in man to woman relationships. My third study year was called Part II Year. Everyone had to choose a subject to specialize in. I chose to specialize in International Economics. There were less than ten of us who did that, among more than one hundred students. Kosta and I were the only foreigners among them. We had our own library, cum reading room, cum club. It was locked from the outside. Each one of us was issued a key so that no one else could enter the place. I spent time with some of this group outside school as well, in particular with Kosta, who was my friend from the previous year,

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More Anti Semitic Encounters It seems that wherever I was, and whatever I could not escape antiSemitic encounters, not only in England, but in France as well. Neither one of the two sets of friends I mentioned gave me even a hint of such a disposition. I would say that none among them were interested in Jews or Jewish subjects. Kosta, the Greek, was the only exception, who was a little preoccupied with the Holocaust, asking me questions, and telling me what a terrible experience it must have been not only for those that died in it, but those that survived. I will confine myself to telling two of the encounters, neither of which was directed at me. One involved a Turkish guy, and the second, two elderly English women. Funny to think that Turkish Anti Semitism followed me all the way to England even if it did not direct at me personally. A group of us consisting of Mario Kastoryano, a friend of my brother's (who was visiting me at LSE), an English friend of mine, and someone Turkish who was studying at a different London University school, were sitting around a table at the LSE cafeteria having some coffee. At some point, the English guy asked Mario what his nationality was, and Mario answered without hesitation, "I am Turkish". I saw the Turkish guy getting red in the face, though he did not say anything. Nothing further developed on the subject, and we passed on to another. At some point both the English student and Mario begged to be excused and left the table. As soon as they had left, the Turkish guy, of course not knowing that I was Jewish, burst out exclaiming, "The cheek this Mario has, claiming that he is Turkish; how dare he do that?" I told the guy, "Mario was born in Turkey, and so were his ancestors for many generation, he speaks Turkish, holds a Turkish passport; what did you expect him to say?" He got even more vexed after hearing what I said, and told me, quite clearly, that Mario's name was not Turkish, that he is probably Jewish (good guess of his!), and if he is Jewish, he can't be Turkish! I was visiting my brother who was studying textiles at Leeds University. It was a Saturday, and we had all gone to nearby York on an afternoon's outing. York is an old and attractive city. For some reason, I strayed away from my brother and his friends on my own, and entered an antique shop full of interesting bric-a-brac. Other than myself as a potential client there was a pair of English ladies, petite and prim. I heard them argue with the shop owner about the price of an object they wanted to buy; at one point one of the ladies raising her voice a little told the shop owner, "I will buy it from you if you knock off five pounds from the price; come now, don't be a Jew".

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The shop keeper looked straight into the lady's eyes and shot back: "Madame, I am afraid I can't stop being a Jew, because I was born one!!" Hearing his answer the good lady looked as if she had just been hit on the head. She almost staggered and so did her friend. She apologized profusely; I don't remember what she said. I felt like rushing to the guy and kissing him on both of his cheeks. But instead, and funnily enough, I found myself rushing out of the shop with some embarrassment, without waiting to find out how their bargaining was finally settled.

I Graduate from LSE, I learn Some More French In June 19541 graduated from LSE. I got my degree graded as a lower second, about average for LSE. I was disappointed. But retrospectively, I was lucky even for that, as given the year I had had with Netta, I could have failed getting the degree at all. Economics as a subject of study turned out to be a big disappointment to me. It seemed to me just a process of inventing terminology for a certain type of phenomena referred to as "economics" with the hope that it would lead to the identification of cause and effect relationships between them. But this rarely happened. I had told father that by studying economics I would learn the secrets of the universe. Father did not believe that I would, and he turned out to be right. He, on his part, told me that I would die of hunger if I became an economist, but in that he proved to be completely wrong. So one point was in his favor and one in mine. Following my graduation, I went to Grenoble University for a period of four weeks to study French. By the end of this second stint, with the first being in Paris a year back, I had acquired a good knowledge of French for reading and understanding when being spoken to, though speech other than simple conversation was more difficult, and writing in the language even more so. Eventually, after I joined the World Bank, my speech much improved and so did my writing.

Netta I met Netta sometime during my second year at LSE. Our relationship was mostly confined to exchanging greetings. Toward the end of the school year, on a Saturday when activity at the school was pretty low, I came across her as I was leaving the library. After we talked for a few moments, I asked her if she had plans for lunch, and invited her, casually, to have lunch with me. She accepted, equally casually.

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Wc ate in a place near St. James' Park, a few tube stops from LSE. We then walked around for a while in the park, and I told her of my plan to spend six weeks in Israel during the summer. She sounded interested, and asked me to be on the lookout for her for what to see as a tourist, and perhaps even for an opportunity to try the place out for the purpose of living there. I said that I would, and promised to look her up on my return to London. After I returned from summer vacation and from visiting Israel, I called her and we went out on a date. This was repeated a second time, and it became obvious that I was courting her. On our third date I brought her to my digs, and after a little time had passed, she asked me if I would marry her! Of all the questions I could have expected from her, this probably was the very last one. However, I was in the middle of a pretty long dry run re affairs of the heart and was really keen on having a relationship. So I said to myself, "What the heck", and then said, "Yes". Almost immediately after my saying yes, we left my room and I took her back to the home of her parents, where she lived. Right to the present day, I could not even begin to guess as to why it was that she had proposed to me, so soon, and in such a brazen fashion while knowing me so little. One more question that could be asked, "Who was the most irresponsible party? Was it Netta for proposing to me like that, or myself for saying yes to her?" After this, we started seeing each other regularly. But it did not take long before she sprang a new one on me. She told me that she would never marry anyone who was not rich, even if she had fallen in love with him. She wanted to know what kind of income I could promise her. On that basis, she would decide whether or not to continue our relationship. I gave her my Father's income in 1953. The year had been a good one for Father, and he had made something like one hundred thousand dollars, of our times, after tax. I did not tell her that I personally had this kind of income or for that matter any income. She answered that Father's income was OK as a starting point. She asked me to give my word that I would become really rich in her terms. I replied that I would try hard to achieve the goal, and believed that I would succeed. By then I was in my normal sleepwalk, and very deeply into it, too. If I had not been, I would surely have perceived that committing myself to become rich meant a hundred-and eighty-degree turn away from the goals I had set for myself. I would have had to abandon the idea of settling in Israel after

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finishing my studies. The kind of fortune I could make, if I was capable of making one, was only in Istanbul, using Father's established business as a base. I would have to make my peace with my father, instead of alternatively fighting him or running away from him, as I had been doing for at least five years. And the greatest consequence would have been accepting the idea of living all my life with the Jewish monkey sitting on my back. For good measure, I should have added that I didn't like the idea of committing myself to matrimony with someone for whom being wealthy was a sine qua non. Netta's father was a handsome but fairly simple person, a small trader in trinkets to be given as gifts. Her mother, Ann, looked much sharper, but there was something a little odd about her that I couldn't place. Netta told me that she was mentally deranged, but it did not show in an obvious fashion. Netta was terrified that when old she would end up like her. Netta's brother, Ray, was a truly handsome fellow, but totally lacked any ambition except to make money. The family looked like one living at the margin of English society, Jew or Gentile; they appeared to lack either relatives or friends. The only girlfriend Netta ever mentioned was Sylvia. She talked a lot about her, and called her, her great friend; but I only saw her once. Her only male friend I got to know was Basil, who was a graduate of LSE in sociology. They had had a two-year affair in their past. After their separation, they still maintained a relationship of a sort. Basil used to visit her home, though irregularly. Netta also talked a lot about the wild LSE parties she had attended, but during the whole year we were together there, we went only to a single party to which she was invited. Netta was ten months older than I was. She was a well-shaped, rather attractive young woman, just a few inches shorter than me. She had brown hair, a feline sort of face, though with fine features, and cloudy brown eyes. In brief, using a British colloquial expression, she was a "looker" with a high "oomph" quota! The way she had her hair done, short and boyish looking, and the way she was dressed, often wearing trousers which was unusual for those times, fifty year ago, all made her noticeable. Netta had a great capacity to attract people, and in particular men, like honey would attract flies. Netta talked to me a lot about her past male friends, while assuring me that they were all platonic friendships. But I later saw that not all the men, whom she talked about, admired her, as she implicitly suggested.

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In the process of seeing each other regularly, opportunities arose in which I could introduce her to members of my group. Initially, they were quite taken with Netta. ibo, who always had something to say about the girls I went out with that were not always complimentary, declared that as far as he was concerned, she was the best girl I had ever associated with, and added that I should make sure to keep her. It is at this point that I lost my head about her. I guess one can call this phenomenon falling in love head over heels. However, their being impressed by her wore out within the space of a few months. As to the women of the group, they all ended up disliking her, some immediately, and others a little later. But this did not change any of my feelings for her. After only three months, I bought her a ring, we announced our engagement to my friends, and notified my parents and hers'. My parents' reaction was surprisingly mild, although they were no doubt disappointed that there would not be any dowry from this English woman. Professionally, Netta's greatest ambition in life was, so she told me, to become a singer, but had found out that she would not make the grade and gave up the idea. However, she never got over this failure of hers. She repeated this to me a number of times. Once we were listening to a record of Mozart's Exultate Jubile, a truly lovely aria, sung by a soprano. She burst into tears in the middle of the record. I asked her what the matter was. She said she would like to sing like that but she knows she can't. She told me that she had worked as a model for a painter but did not give me his name. Given the way she looked and her attractive figure I can well believe it. When I met Netta she was working in the London City Council as a senior welfare officer, making 375 Pounds Sterling a year. Those days, this was a fabulous salary for someone who had just finished university, and, to top it off, was a woman. Netta told me that she had been selected out of 300 applicants. About a month after we started going out regularly, she resigned from her job. When I asked her why, she said she did not like her job, but gave no detail.

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Within a week of her resignation, she started working as a hostess in an expensive restaurant. If a client came, unaccompanied, and wanted a female companion to dine with, she was one among those on offer. The client was obliged to pay for her meal and her drinks, and a fee of five guineas (now equivalent to about $60) for her company at the dinner table. The client's total dinner bill would have added up to US$ 200-300 of our times. Netta worked in this job from eight in the evening until about two in the morning. Later, she would tell me about what had happened, and the men she had dined with. But after a few weeks she left that job, as well, saying that one of her regular clients had started to insist that during the dinner she allow him to hold her hand! In addition, she said that the owner of the business had decided to give her one night free, a week, in order to be with her, himself. For all her possible faults, Netta was not a naïve person. So what had she expected when she accepted this job? This too is one of my unsolved enigmas about her. After this experience, Netta never worked again when we were together, with the exception of a three-month period in Ankara as an English teacher. She never made any effort to get another job. Our best times were when wc were alone, and preferably lying in bed where we spend a good deal of our time talking, with she doing most of it. Netta was an expert in telling stories of her past life, vast traveling experiences in Europe mostly hitch-hiking, where she had been, and whom she had met and made friends with. Some of the things she told me when we spent time tête-à-tête sounded implausible at times, but I never challenged her to make her think that I did not believe half her stories, and in fact I believed them all. Retrospectively I think that her stories could have involved a lot of fantasizing. Being a relatively gullible and naive person I believed every word of what she said though at times with an uneasy feeling about their truth. Other than my being a so-called "rich-person-to-become" these qualities could have added up together to be one of my major attractions for her, namely that I believed whatever she told me about herself. In addition, I was not manipulative; I was honest and faithful. However, these qualities of mine, which she liked in me, could have also bred in her a perception that I was not much of a challenge for her, resulting in some lack of respect for me.

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In her company I never remember ever being bored, even for a moment. There was always some tension in the air of either a positive or a negative kind. Something was always happening around her, and by association, around me. Going even on a simple picnic with her was marvelous, and there was a lot of give and take at personal level. Despite this, in the presence of company, the larger it was, the more we seemed to have problems with each other. After we announced our engagement, Netta's attitude towards me started to change for the worse. The balance between her pleasures and displeasures shifted considerably in favor of the latter. At one point she told me that she wanted us to break our engagement. I was having such a hard time with her that I answered, "Fine, tell me when and we will do it". The next thing I knew, she had forgotten all about my request. My life was now fully occupied with Netta more than with my studies, and they started suffering from the relationship. I started having difficulties understanding the lectures I was attending, and in concentrating sufficiently when going through my reading material. Kosta noted the difference in me. He asked me one day, "Erol what has fallen over you?" I did not answer his question. There were two reasons why I kept the relationship. The first was sheer obstinacy on my part; one can call this disposition a character defect: refusing to change course just because one has locked oneself into one. The second was loss of prestige, especially towards members of our group. I was afraid that they would snicker at me and exclaim, "Hmm, he could not hold her!" Because of these reasons, it seems there were no limits to what injuries I was prepared to sustain. By now I had completely forgotten about immigrating to Israel. I was beginning to see myself as the up and coming scion of a richer Haker family, resembling Thomas Mann's Buddenbrook model. When I started to verbalize this fantasy of mine, half jokingly, she attacked me savagely about my pretensions. But if we were to become rich, fast, the comparison should have born some reality. She failed to see the contradiction between the fantasy in what I said and the reality in her ridiculing me over it. Nothing seemed to help and I was about to fall apart; simultaneously I was asking questions to myself as to where this relationship was going and how good it really was for me. All these thoughts came to an end when I moved to Netta's home as a resident.

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About three months before the end of the academic year, one night after we had been out, I brought her to her home as usual. It was almost midnight, and her parents were already asleep. As we entered her room she told me that she wanted me to sleep over in her room as an experiment, to see how her parents would react to it. I said fine. In the morning I got up as usual. Both her parents were up already. They hid their surprise about my appearing like that out of the blue at breakfast time, but greeted me in civil fashion. From that night on, I started sleeping in her room during the remainder of my stay in London. For appearances sake, a mattress was laid out for me on the floor next to her bed. Our relationship much improved. After a week or so she started talking about planning our future. She still wanted to go to Israel for a six-month period and on the way she said we could holiday together in Europe. I said fine, but talked to her about my intention to further improve my French at Grenoble University and that I had written to them about it and elicited a positive response. We planned that as soon as I got my degree I would go to Grenoble, spend four weeks there, at the end of which she could join me, and we would start our holidaying, and separate at Athens with she taking the plane to Israel and I taking the boat to Istanbul. I would then start doing my military service and once I receive my commission about, April 1955, she would come to Turkey to live with me until I finished my military service. After this we would get married. We corresponded during the four weeks I was in Grenoble. In her first letter she wrote to me that she had a confession to make, to be fair to me, and it is that she was not sure she loved me any more, and she did not know what to do about it. For good measure she added that ilham was courting her. I fired off a stiff letter to ilham, asking him to leave her alone, and got an equally stiff reply from him, that what she had written me was a very distorted version of what had happened. I do not know who was telling the truth to the present day. Anyway, from that point onwards, love or no love, I was receiving letters from her daily, right until the day she arrived in Grenoble. We traveled to Marseille by rail, from Marseille to Genoa by boat, and from Genoa to Piraeus, also by boat. In between we visited the places we wanted to visit by hitch-hiking. I had not had previous experience doing this, and the little I had was not very successful. With Netta it was a marvel. Almost every driver stopped for her, even though they saw me as her escort.

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Things went a lot better than one would have thought. Of course, there were exceptions. On one occasion, when we were traveling from Grenoble to Marseille by rail, she asked me how long the trip was going to take. I said it would take about three hours, including a change in trains. In fact it took more like six hours. The delay did not really cause any problems, operationally speaking. However, this did not stop her from accusing me of grave irresponsibility, in giving her unreliable information, and telling me what an untrustworthy person 1 was. This went on and on right through the end of the trip even though I did not try to defend myself. A second incident I remember was at the Ufizzi gallery in Florence. Soon after we had come in and looked at some paintings with me, she burst into a fit saying that she just can't bear looking at paintings with me any longer, and stormed towards the exit in a huff, without telling me where she was going. Since I had known her Netta had complained about how much it bothered her that I had no capability to enjoy a good painting. It is true that I am a little color blind and miss hues and color subtleties in paintings. I readily had admitted that on previous occasions, but that did not make her relent on the subject. However, her extreme reaction this time around was a new one on me. I spent a little more time at the museum. Then I went out and walked around the Old City, feeling sure that by then she probably would have gone to the hotel, packed her things and left without even telling me where she was heading. I went back to the hotel to find that she was in our room sitting on the bed waiting for me. In the evening, we went to a rooftop restaurant in a high-rise building. It was in the open air with a garden made of flowerpots, ivy and other climbers decked with flowers, and with a live band playing. This was no Ufizzi experience, as she liked my dancing, the relationship improved. Also whenever we were near the sea, in a boat or swimming, my stock went up quite a bit as she herself had no experience of the sea at all, as I had, and she could look up to me in this respect.

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The crash came in Athens. Athens was a pretty crummy place at the time after the depredations it had gone through during World War Two, the occupation, and then the Civil War. She once ventured into the city alone, and had her bottom pinched a number of times by some eager Greeks. She was fuming upon her return to the hotel and asked me if Istanbul, where she supposedly was to spend the rest of her life was also like that. She wanted to hear my assurance that it was not. Netta focused on the down side of my explanations on Istanbul. During our whole stay in Athens, she continuously quarreled with me, with respite only during an evening that we spent with my friend Kosta, who by then had returned to Athens. After spending a few days there I accompanied her to the airport where she boarded the plane for Israel.

PART V FROM RETURN TO ISTANBUL TO DEPARTURE FOR ISRAEL 1954-1956

15 BACK IN ISTANBUL AND INTO MILITARY SCHOOL

1954-1955

I make a False Start After sending Netta off to Israel, at Athens Airport, I took a boat from Piraeus and arrived in Istanbul the following day, but this time with Mother! For some reason, Mother had decided that I was coming on a certain date, and she had arranged a big welcoming party, feast and all. I have no idea how she had worked out the supposed date of my arrival, as I had not given it to her. When I did not turn up on the day she expected me, she took the first boat to Piraeus, went to the police department and using her fluent knowledge of Greek and her usual charm, got some police inspector to find the hotel in which Netta and I were staying in. Unbelievable as it may sound, as I returned from the airport, I found mother sitting on the bed of my room. I had now returned to Istanbul after four years in Europe getting an education. Now it was time to reenter the atmosphere of my native planet earth and, start my readjustment process, which had not become any easier with the heavy "baggage" I had returned with, if one may call her that: namely Netta. Looking back, the strategy I should have pursued consistent with my aims was pretty clear. I should have reconciled my differences with father, assumed a low profile, initially at least, and accept his authority. Father was already nursing a grudge against me over my refusal to give up my university education half way through, in order to run the import agency for drugs he had set up for me two years before. The Netta part of my life he did not like one bit either, as Netta was not bringing in a dowry, but looked like a big spender. Father had a dread about finding himself in partnership with people whom he felt he had to carry. It had happened with the Salinas for six years, and then with his Turkish partners for another six. He did not mind carrying his own son for a while, but not if the son came in with an expensive woman from England. In any case, his plan for me, as for my brother was that we were going to marry rich brides from "local suppliers", and Netta was closing the door for me in this respect.

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Under the circumstances, therefore, bringing Netta to Istanbul that early in the game was a strategic mistake on my part of the first order. Perhaps, it was forgivable that I had not seen this clearly from distant London. However, once coming to Istanbul, and taking stock of the situation, there was no excuse for not seeing it a little more clearly. I should have convinced Netta to remain in London for the year, visiting me, and my family only for a short holiday, with the hope that they would eventually relent to our union. Instead of making an effort to reconcile my differences with father, I continued to face him in a confrontational posture. As far as the choice of where I would be doing my military service, the right thing to have done was to have pulled strings to be stationed in Istanbul, to be near Father and his business world, in order to build myself a niche in which to become rich fast. Instead, I pulled strings to get into the infantry school so that I would be stationed in Ankara, far away from home. Even if I had succeeded in establishing a life for myself in Ankara, it would not have been one as a successful businessman, as Ankara was the wrong place for such enterprise. Netta often used to tell me that I wore blinkers most of the time that limited my ability to take correct decisions about my future. Well, maybe she was right a good deal of the time.

Working in Father's Business With the two months I had available prior to joining the army, and lacking a practical option, I started working at my father's business. Since his coming to power in 1950, Menderes had liberalized the economy quite a bit, and by supporting the agricultural sector through enabling farmers to sell their produce at fixed but above market prices, he had encouraged agricultural production and induced impressive GDP growth. However, one of the prices paid for this strategy was an ever-stricter foreign trade policy, involving severe restrictions on import licensing including quotas. By 1954 the Menderes policy had started running out of steam. There was a lot of liquidity in the economy sloshing around in the form of ready cash and inflation had started to rear its head. The combination of expansionary fiscal and monetary policies, combined with strictly controlled foreign trade, an overvalued currency in foreign exchange markets, and the endemically corrupt civil service that was managing the foreign trade regime, with its plethora of import regulations,

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had created a huge unfettered capitalist jungle that offered seemingly unlimited opportunities to get rich fast. All that was required for this purpose was savvy in the art of fishing in troubled waters. Many importers benefited from this climate and became fabulously rich over a short period of time. Father was a small timer, who operated well in normal times, turning out a respectable profit, but was not the type that produced quick fortunes. When I joined his store, I saw his limitations pretty fast, and started badgering him about all the opportunities he seemed to be missing. At times, I must have been unpleasant about the way I put things to him. It seemed that he did not like my exhortations at all, and perhaps rightly so. Father awarded to me a salary of I I , 500 Turkish Liras net, after tax, a very respectable salary for the times for some one who had just started earning a living. By comparison, my starting salary as a Third Lieutenant was about half of this amount. When Father paid my salary at the end of my first month, I went straight to a record shop and bought a record of a Prado Festival performance by Pablo Cassals of some suites of Bach. I paid T L 45 for the record. When father found out about the purchase, he became furious with me and told me that I should have done this, only at the end of the coming month depending on what remained unspent of my salary. He said that buying a record immediately after receiving my salary was a financially irresponsible act, that I could not be trusted to handle the kind of salary he had awarded me, and therefore, in future, and for my own good, he was going to withhold TL 200 out of it in his safe keeping. I took my father's act as an expression of his wish to show me how he intended to control my life. I felt that I had been mortally insulted. I was numb with rage but said nothing. Inside me my resentment had reached ironhot proportions. I never forgave this act of his in my life. Before this incident Father had told me that he had established an import firm under my name. I found this to be surprising, as I thought that I was joining his business as his heir to be. He explained to me that I should have an independent outlook and start off my own business; he would help by throwing at my newly established firm a little business now and then, and provide its capital as well. Obviously he wanted to keep me at arm's length. The last thing he had in mind was to build me up as a family scion, and down went to the drain my fantasies as an up and coming Buddenbrook.

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Years later Mother explained it to me, that the reason he had acted that way was Netta. However, this argument does not really hold water because he acted this way towards my brother, too, who did not have a Netta problem, and was following pretty closely the path that father put him on. When my brother finished his military service three years later, he established a firm for him under his name, under exactly the same conditions as he had with me. The reason for his attitude towards his two sons in this respect was an entirely different one. As I had mentioned earlier, Father's game plan for me was that the big money into my firm was going to come from the dowry I was to receive at the time of my future marriage. He hoped and expected that at some point the Netta problem would go away, and his model would work. A little over a month had elapsed since I started to work in Father's store. On one occasion he scolded me in what I thought was an unreasonable fashion in the store, and in the presence of a store employee of my age. I walked out of the store for good or at least I thought so at the time. I went home, packed a suitcase, and told my alarmed mother that I didn't want to work in my father's store anymore, and neither did I want to live in his home. I overnighted at Hillary's, and the next night I traveled to Ankara by sleeper. Upon my arrival in the city, I looked up Fato§. She had been working for a year at the newly established Middle East Technical University. To put it in a few words, she opened the gates of Ankara for me introducing me around, and finding me accommodation. Fatos found strings to pull so that I could enter into a school for reserve officers in Ankara, and this succeeded. So I was all set for my Ankara life. After the end of the two weeks, I went back to Istanbul, though with much regret. The rather prosaic reason for this was that I had run out of money. So I appeared at home "With my tail between my legs" as they say. Father looked as if he had expected this to happen, and he "generously" took me back to his store without saying anything. Two weeks later I traveled back to Ankara, as my military service was about to start.

Netta in Istanbul Only one week after my return to Istanbul, I received an urgent cable from Netta, who by then was in Israel, to the effect that she wanted to visit Istanbul immediately for a one-week period, to make sure that she could really

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go through with our marriage and living in Istanbul happily ever after. We had planned it differently. I wrote back to her explaining to her that the idea of coming without making adequate preparations in Istanbul with my parents was not the right thing to do. This not withstanding, Netta came and stayed about a week at our home before returning to Israel. My parents behaved reasonably well towards her. I introduced her to some members of my family, and things went reasonably well, but not more than that; she did not become enamored with Istanbul, but just about tolerated it. When she was staying with us, I found out one thing about her for the first time ever, and that was her disposition to rummage through the belongings, the desks and the cupboards wherever she happened to be staying, and at times pilfer them as well. Before she departed, she wanted to borrow a few books from me so that she could read them in Israel. I, of course, said fine, and she picked something like five. After she had returned to Israel, I was looking for a book, found it missing, and noticed that the shelves had been thinned out to a much larger extent. She must have taken probably ten more, but without telling me. Included among them were all the books I had received as presents with a personal dedication written on the first page of each one of them. She must have gone through many more books to be able to identify all those with personal dedications in them. I never saw those books again. I also noticed that a couple of days before her departure, she started using some expressions I had used in a personal diary I had kept for a few weeks following the advice of my LSE psychiatrist. They were loose pages in a leather folder. After Netta had left Istanbul, I went through the diary, and discovered that some of the pages in which I had written down some very personal episodes were missing and in the missing pages there were some expressions she started using in our conversations.

Netta in Israel During the six months I was in the cadet school, Netta was in Israel. We corresponded as usual when we were separated and she wrote about her life there and her experiences. Orhan was my youngest uncle on father's side. He was an M D and a psychiatrist. As my fiancee, she was, of course, welcomed in his home with open arms, but she went out of her way to cause them discomfort in the way she behaved. On more than one occasion she went out on dates. For some reason, she saw to it that she was picked up from Orhan's

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home. She was really flagging it. I had no problems on the matter, but this was not the kind of thing the culture I was born into accepted, when it concerned the fiancée of a close relative. The result was urgent messages to Istanbul, i.e. is Netta really engaged to Erol? She wrote to me in her letters how surprised every one was when they heard that she would be getting married to an Oriental Jew, i.e. myself! They told her, "Is this Frenk so rich, so handsome, so clever or what?" I suppose her telling me this was to boost my self-confidence! One last episode in the life of Netta in Israel was her continued rummaging practices. After she had left Israel to join me and within a few days of her arrival in Ankara, Netta told m e that she had got in touch with Hulda, a Sabra ex-girlfriend of mine, met her, and in her words "to find out her side of the story as to why we had not worked out". She then produced a few of the letters that I had written to Hulda and gave them to me in a way that suggested that she was doing me a big favor. Netta said that she took them from her because, in her opinion, Hulda did not deserve such letters. In the process of telling me this, she made fun of how Hulda kept her "billets doux" she had received from her various boyfriends, keeping them in a round straw basket, with those of each particular person tied up with a ribbon, each of a different color. I am assuming that Netta took possession of my letters without letting Hulda know. I had not told Netta much about Hulda and had not given her, her address. How Netta found Hulda, wangled an invitation out of her to visit her home in Jerusalem, and somehow succeeded in being left alone with sufficient time to do her rummaging act, find my letters, and pick a selected few of them to return them to me will remain a mystery to me for the rest of my life.

In Infantry School for Reserve Officers In November 19541 entered the school for reserve infantry officers in Ankara as a cadet. There was nothing special in this except that only since 1947, after an interruption of twenty-five years, were Jews once again trusted enough to be commissioned as officers in the Turkish Army.

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It did not take me long after I had entered the school to realize that the army was in poor condition. It was the time of Menderes rule, and probably the worst period of the Turkish army since 1923, the year of the establishment of the Turkish Republic. Officer morale was low, caused in particular by the steady depreciation in their salaries in real terms due to accelerating inflation while their salaries in monetary terms trailed well behind. Nepotism, corruption, and pilfering of supplies were rife. To give an example, of pilfering, a couple of weeks after I had started at the infantry school, our cheese ration for breakfast was reduced to one half of its previous quantity, without explanation. We formed a committee and lodged a complaint. The cheese ration was restored to its original amount. In the process of getting it back, we found that the actual quantities of food that appeared on our breakfast table were only a third of the amounts that were stipulated in army regulations. In all fairness, if we had received the full ration according to regulation, there was no way we could have eaten it all. The only explanation I can think of was that the ration was deliberately set up so that there was enough to pilfer out of, without underfeeding the cadets and making waves in the process. Somehow somebody must have slipped and gone overboard when cutting our cheese ration by one half. With a few exceptions, most of the cadets were eighteen years old kids, just out of high school. Those days, literacy numbers were still pretty low in the country, and therefore, anyone who had finished high school was automatically considered to be qualified to become an officer, and in the case of infantry, lead and command a platoon of forty-five soldiers in combat. Once entering the school, the receiving of a commission was automatic unless it was discovered that one had some gypsy ancestors, was a communist, or married to a foreign woman. Over a period of six months, we went out on training for night combat only three or four times. In the Israeli army there was night combat training three hours a day. In the field, when learning how to fire a rifle, the calibration of rifles to individual vision of each cadet was not made. As a result few could fire accurately enough to hit a target, even if they were good shots. As it was, no records were kept of who was hitting and who was missing the target. We were not taught how to fire on moving targets, but only fixed ones. Later, having served in the Israeli army as much time as I had in the Turkish Army, i hope I will be forgiven for making comparisons, though I have done this rather sparingly. Concerning firing a rifle, putting it as an aphorism, in the Turkish army I learned how to shoot; in the Israeli army I learned how to hit.

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In the classes, I was much looking forward to learning military tactics (In Turkish tabiye) as a subject. This proved to be a great disappointment, as the officer who gave us the course mostly confined his teaching to reading out of the standard army manual on the subject, as if once one knew its contents, one did not need to think any more about how to apply them in real combat situations. Such basic concepts as the firing coverage of different weapons on a three dimensional field were not taught. We seldom took to the field to practice what we were supposed to learn. For tactical planning, we had only two-dimensional maps, while terrain has, of course, three dimensions. Training was needed to show us how to assess two-dimensional maps as if they had three dimensions, by learning contour topography and how to apply it. This we were not taught to do. During the six months schooling we received, we had to pass only a single exam. We never got the results, and, as could be expected, no one had failed it. Thus there was really no testing either in the field or in the classroom whether each individual cadet had been made into a capable officer, or not. At the end of the so-called training we received, I think many among us could not have functioned even as squad leaders, or for that matter not even adequately trained foot soldiers. Compared to the Israeli army I later served, the Turkish army was behind in all possible ways: motivation, leadership, combat skills, and others. Of course this was 50 years ago. All this may now be very different. Retrospectively, the military coup that came in 1960 should have surprised no one.

My Civilian Life in Ankara All the officers of the school wanted to take private English lessons. They had had no problems about offering compensation to cadets who could teach them English even without being asked. The principle compensation was "after" leave, and weekend leave in amounts that could much exceed those allowed by regulation. I was a great benefactor of the situation. I had up to three "afters" during the week, and was on leave almost every weekend. This, in fact, was the saving grace of my predicament. Thanks to Fato§, I had already made a good beginning entering into Ankara life before I got into the army. I used, to the hilt the free time I was able to wangle out of my student officers who wanted to learn English, in making new friends. The school was located a fifteen minute bus ride from the center of the town, so within this time frame I could transform myself to a civilian again for a little while at a time, every so often.

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However, there was a downside to my having lots of freedom. A large majority of my fellow cadets resented those privileged few that could teach English. I quickly became unpopular among large sections of the cadet body. To some extent it was a case of envy, but to some extent it was justifiable. Without meaning to, I was perceived as looking down on them. Most of the people I got to know were university people, in addition to a few civil servants doing professional work. At the infantry school, I ran into an acquaintance of mine from London, Izgan, who worked in the BBC in the Turkish section where I had also briefly worked. We saw each other outside school as well. Izgan was married to an English girl for many years, and she of course followed him to Ankara. Izgan hid her like a jealously guarded treasure (Remember the rule that a Turkish officer is not allowed to marry a foreign woman). On one occasion, traveling overnight by train to Ankara from Istanbul, I shared a sleeper compartment with §ahap, with whom I became friends. §ahap was a civil engineer who had lived in the United States for eight years and was in the process of getting re-acclimatized, working in the Highways Department of the Ministry of Works. We had that in common, and in addition, he was a great lover of classical music and had returned to Turkey with a large collection of classical music records, which was my pleasure to enjoy. Fato§ also introduced me to §erif, and Aydin, both lecturers at Ankara University. Through them I met the whole Forum crowd. Forum was a biweekly periodical resembling the English "Statesman and Nation'" was probably not of a lower standard. I was well accepted. I wrote a few articles on economic policy that appeared in the paper. §erif, I saw rather frequently. I got to know Sevim, who worked in an economic ministry, with whom I became great friends. Sevim ran a modest salon where I met more people. She introduced me to the son of one of the bigwigs of the ruling party (Refik Koraltan). There were parties to attend to all the time. During this period Fato§ arranged for me to translate into Turkish a 500-page book on Public Administration, written by an American professor. The funding of the translation was from an American institution supporting the Middle East Technical University, and the pay was very good. This was a wonderful means to show Father that I could make money on my own without his assistance.

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Curiously enough, the kind of life I started to lead in Ankara was almost identical with the one I led in Jerusalem after immigrating to Israel. It was the life of an educated professional, and not of a businessman, and very different than what my father wanted me to do. Would such a life hold a future for me in Ankara? Pleasant as it was and suitable to my taste, the answer was no. Practically all the people I got to know were professionals who were poorly paid for the work they did. Most of the people in the milieu I had become a part of, were from well to do families with their assets mostly in land. They had private incomes and that is how they could live at a modestly comfortable standard despite the low pay they were getting. At the time Turkey was still an underdeveloped country. In it, a meritocracy did not exist as it does today. To get ahead in any activity outside land ownership and business, everything depended on whom you knew, and how long you were prepared to work for rock-bottom salaries. Papa Haker was not the kind of person who was going to supply me a private income for the mere satisfaction of hearing that I had become an important person of the Ankara establishment. By comparison, the opportunities I was offered in Israel were much superior to those I would have had living in Turkey. Israel was ahead of Turkey in those days as an advanced industrial society where a meritocracy played an important role. In Israel, if you developed into a good academician, or in a career in the civil service, in a public enterprise or even in a corporation of the private sector you could count on a reasonable income and status. During the same years in Turkey, his equally worthy counterpart of the time could count on neither. In addition, in Turkey, I had my Jewish handicap. Although it was not talked about and I did not volunteer to flag it, it was there, all right, and always created a level of discomfort for me, depending on the circumstances. Even Fato§ who was at least half Turkish, was made to feel uncomfortable at times, though she did not like to admit it.

The Jewish Angle I did not declare myself to be Jewish to anyone except Sevim and I also told her all about Netta, and that I was expecting her to come to Ankara. During this period I witnessed a number of anti-Semitic experiences. I report three, two minor, and one major, that rubbed into me how Jews were perceived by wide sections of Turkish society. The major one I encountered in the army after I had received my commission, and I recount it in the next chapter.

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One incident was with Niliifer, Aydin's wife who when discussing the merits of making my future in Ankara or Istanbul, came out strongly in favor of my doing so in Ankara and not Istanbul. A primary reason for this was, in her words, that, "Istanbul Yahudi kokar" (Istanbul smells of Jews). I had not told her before that I was Jewish, and she must not have heard it from anyone else either. The second case occurred in one of our classes in the military school. An officer-teacher who was starting a series of lectures introduced himself in his first lecture, and said he wanted to get acquainted with the class on a personal level. The first question he asked the class was, "Who among you are non Muslims?" The hands of two Greek cadets went up; mine did not. He then broke into the standard declaration that all non-Muslims in Turkey are citizens with equal rights! His statement sounded to me as gratuitously made like some one who out of any context to exclaims, "No, I don't beat my wife every Tuesday and Thursday". Such a statement offered out of context, might provoke speculation as to whether he beats her on Wednesdays and Fridays! Just before we were to get our commissions we had to fill in a form on personal subjects, and again one of the questions was: "what is your religion?" This time around, I did put "Jewish". At the same time each one of us had to sign a written declaration: "I don't drink, I don't gamble, and I don't associate with foreign women!" My only major encounter on the anti-Jewish front starts off the next chapter.

16 MY ARMY DAYS, 1955-1956

My One-Day Career in the Intelligence Section of the Genel (General Staff)

Kurmay

Upon completing the military school for reserve infantry officers in April 1955,1 received my commission with the rank of Third Lieutenant. Six months later I was routinely promoted to Second Lieutenant. I was hoping to be appointed to a post in Ankara; but this time around I had no strings to pull. Despite this, and much to my surprise, I got appointed as an officer in the Intelligence Section of the General staff. When my friends in Ankara heard of my appointment they all congratulated me warmly, saying that this was a great job. Miimtaz, the boy friend of Fato§, dcscribcd its duties to me. Miimtaz, himself, was serving in the army in a similar capacity, and was about to be discharged. His guess was that I would be his replacement. He also added that his predecessor had been a particularly inept guy and that he was very happy that this time around they got it right. He told me the name of his predecessor Ahmet with who I had been at RC for many years, and T wholly agreed with Miimtaz's assessment of him. Ahmet's only redeeming features were that he was tall, good looking, very strong and good-natured, a little bit like Lennie of "Mice and Men". At RC he had failed twice to go up a class, which, in a way, was a record of a sort. He could not put a sentence together of more than five simple words, and in English, not even that. I was not so naive to think that I had been appointed to this position because of my qualifications. In those days in the Turkish Army, reserve officers were appointed to positions only on the strength of their personal connections, called in Turkish "Torpil" (torpedo). I had no doubt in my mind that I had come to the personnel department riding on a large torpedo "Btiyuk torpil", and accordingly I enjoyed priority over persons that came riding smaller "torpil"s, or had none at all to ride on. It took me some time to find out who my benefactor was.

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It seems that I had got my torpil under serendipitous circumstances without making a deliberate effort at acquiring one. While I was a cadet in the infantry school, I had developed a friendship with a person a little over my age whom I had met Ankara, in one of Sevim's gatherings. On the occasion of a drinking bout with him, he started declaiming to me a poem and asked me what I thought about it. I made some comments, including some not so complimentary ones. He told me he had written it, and asked me if I would mind looking at some other stuff from his pen and telling him what I thought of those, too, which I did. The poems did not appear to be bad, but in my mind they required improvement, and I told him where and in what direction. He looked very pleased about my comments, much to my surprise, since I have no pretensions about being a literary critic. Next time we met, he said that he wanted to do me a favor. He knew that I was in the military school for reserve officers for the infantry, and that I was about to complete my training. He told me he had an uncle who was an important person in the army and that he would pass on my name to him for treatment by "torpil". I thanked him, but didn't particularly believe that anything would come out of it. I did not even bother to ask him who this person was. As a matter of fact, I turned out to be completely wrong. I found out later that my benefactor was no less than a Full General (four stars, in Turkish Orgeneral) and Commander of the NATO army on the Caucasian front. On the appointed day, I went to the building where the General Staff was situated. I was directed into a spacious hall in the building with high ceilings. There were large numbers of maps covering the walls and a few desks. I was led to one of them where a major who had the pink markings of the General Staff on his collar, was sitting. I quickly glanced at the map behind his desk. It was a map of the Soviet Union with a lot of arrows and numbers on it on both sides of its border with NATO countries. The Major was a rather unsmiling individual, in his late thirties, with gray eyes and light brown hair. The atmosphere in the hall was rather hushed, with other officers coming and going and talking to each other "sotto voce". With all these whispers, the pink markings on collars, and the military maps on the wall, I had a feeling that I had arrived to the holiest of the holies, and was within spitting distance to God's left knee, assuming that he has one.

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The officer asked me questions about my experience in the cadet school. A few minutes after the start of our conversation he asked me whether I knew a Jewish cadet at the school without giving me a name. I said I did not. A little later he asked me the same question again, and I again answered no. It did not occur to me that he was trying to find out, indirectly what I thought about Jews. Towards the end of this first talk, that lasted probably half an hour, for the third time he asked me the same question. This time I answered that I had not met anyone Jewish at the school but that I am Jewish, myself. From this point onwards, the conversation petered out. A few minutes later he left saying that he had some urgent matter to attend to and that I should wait for him. 1 was left there for about half an hour. This gave me an opportunity to have a closer look at the map on the wall behind his desk. The map showed the troop dispositions and deployment of the Soviet Union and its satellites down to division detail, division number and type, from Murmansk in the north, all the way down to the south along the Turkish border in Caucasia. There was similar information on the map west of the dividing line on NATO deployment... wow! The unsmiling Major returned and told me that he had other business to attend to, that this would be all for the day, and that T should come in tomorrow at the same time. I got up, saluted him, he saluted me back and I left the office. The next day I went back, but found an orderly was waiting for me at the entrance to the building who was not disposed even to let me pass the entrance. He blandly informed me that a mishap had occurred, so it seemed, with my appointment, and that my name had been switched by mistake with the name of someone else. The mistake had now been found and corrected, and I was to report to the desk of so and so for my duties. Thus my career with Turkish Army Intelligence came to an abrupt end even before it had a chance to start. It took about thirty years for me to receive an indirect apology though unmeant as such from the General Staff about my treatment. The apology

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came accidentally, under conditions I tell in the footnote. 1

My Remaining Military Service, May 1955-April 1956 My new job consisted of registering the letters which came in from the US Military Assistance Mission to Turkish Army Authorities, mostly on administrative matters; to read them, and direct them to the appropriate desk, accompanied with a brief translation of their contents. On average, I spent about two hours a day to finish all my day's work. During the remaining six hours, all I had to do was to listen to the daily tirades of a civilian who was employed by the army as an interpreter, with whom I shared the office. He was born a Turkish Cypriot. His tirades were on a single subject, namely, Almost twenty years passed since this experience and in 1974 I was hired by the Transport Coordination Agency of Turkey (Ulaçtirma Koordinasyonu tdaresi-UKI for short) as a "Yabanci Uzman" (foreign expert) to participate in the preparation of a long-term National Transport Master Plan responsible for the port development component in the Masterplan and subsequently for a more detailed Master Plan (Nazim Plan). The study took me to Ankara eight times, and to other places in Turkey during the years 1974,1975, 1980,1981. My eighth visit took place in the summer of 1981 at a time when there had just been a military coup. The atmosphere in Ankara was rather tense. Towards the last days of my stay, the General Director of UKl came to me and said that some army people responsible for long term planning wanted to meet me and hear me out on where the study was heading, tentative conclusions etc. An appointment was made. The address indicated I had been in the place before. The building was none other than the one I had been cashiered in, twenty-seven years back in such humiliating circumstances. I approached the entrance that now had a double gate protected with a row of barbed wire. The sentinel, a six-foot chap with a fierce looking face (these are normally handpicked in the Turkish army) asked me for any identity. 1 whipped out my Israeli passport and gave it to him without a word. The relations between Israel and Turkey were at their lowest ebb at the time, the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv was reduced to a third secretary, Turkish Airlines had stopped flying to Tel Aviv and there were persistent rumors that Turkey was about to pull out its embassy out of Israel altogether. The sentinel looked at my passport checked my name against the visitor list of the day and expected arrival times. He returned me my passport, walked me to another soldier who he said would escort me to the office of my appointment. He saluted me smartly and I proceeded into the building. I of course was not ushered to the hall of maps, the site of my past trauma, but to a small office where I found two officers waiting for me, the first a major and the second a captain. Both wore the pink insignias of the general staff. I had a notion that I was in a time warp with an acute déjà vu feeling. The feeling of discomfort I started to experience, already at the gate, grew by leaps and bounds. I would have sworn that the Major whom I was facing was the same major who had cashiered me in such ignominious fashion twenty seven years back and that he had not aged, not by a day, during all this time! However, I soon recognized that my feelings were entirely paranoiac and that the resemblance was really in my mind. They had nothing to do with objective reality. However, feelings are feelings, and can rationality always help? It did not take long to realize that my apprehensions were entirely misplaced. They listened carefully to what I had to say in my still native Turkish, without interrupting me at any time. They then asked a number of questions, intelligent and informed ones. The meeting lasted a little over an hour. Throughout, they were courteous, affable, and whenever addressing me, they did it by calling me "Erol Bey", a form of address reserved to fellow Turks only. They tried their level best to make me feel comfortable, and succeeded well in doing so. We shook hands and I left. I never found out why I was invited to this meeting. Once having passed through the gate, I felt the satisfaction one feels of having witnessed the turning of a full circle and a long overdue account closed. A religious person would inevitably think that for reasons best known to Himself, it was Providence who had arranged the happening.

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why Britain should return Cyprus to Turkey. From the third person, sharing the office, another officer, I had to hear the daily complaints, about how low officer salaries were in relation to the cost of living. Any one of us could have done the work of the three of us combined, as a full day's work provided that he didn't work hard doing it. Working a little harder, all of our work could have been done in less than eight hours by one person. Not to go crazy I started bringing my translation work on the public administration book to the office. This did not endear me to the other two people I was sharing the office with. At the moment of the mishappening, there was no limit to the depth of my pain and grief on how I had been treated. At the beginning, I used to kick myself about why I had opened my big mouth and told the Major that I was Jewish. Later, I realized that this was really for the best, as it would have come out anyway. By then I would have been in possession of God knows how many military secrets and when found out as a Jew, I probably would have been fed straight into the nearest meat grinder. About two months later, at the beginning of July, I was re appointed for the rest of my stint, to an infantry training-brigade based in Edremit, along the Aegean coast, as interpreter to the US training advisor, a Lieutenant Colonel Sckalicky. A few months later I found out the reason why I had in fact been banished from Ankara. On the day before, Camille Chamoun, the President of Lebanon was expected to visit Ankara; I had a sort of accident, though without being aware of it. As 1 was putting on my military uniform at home, before going to my office that day, I could not find my regulation brown army tie. Then my eyes fell on another, the one that was red in color, to my mind just a shade different than the brown tie. As I was color-blind somewhat, it looked to me as if there was not that much difference between the red and the brown tics and I put on the red tie. As I was walking to my office along the Atatiirk Boulevard, Ankara's main thoroughfare, a military limousine stopped next to me, an officer of Major rank got out of the car, and asked me why I was wearing a red tie. I gave him the reason, adding that it did not look that different in color from my army regulation brown tie. He introduced himself, as the aide-de-camp of the commander of the Military Garrison of Ankara, the General who was inside in the car. He added that the General was touring the city to make sure that everything was in order for the visit of the Lebanese President, and it was he who had observed my red tie. The major asked me for my army particulars and I gave them to him.

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It seems that the General wrote to Army Personnel that I be removed from Ankara. He could have thought that Communists had infiltrated the Ankara garrison, and that a Turkish officer not afraid to go around in the city wearing a red tie in a day pending an important state visit was a sure sign of this. I did everything, pulled all the strings I could to be reappointed to a post in Ankara, or, failing that, to one in Istanbul. I tried to enlist my father's assistance in this, but he refused to give me any. I arrived in Edremit in the beginning of September with only seven months to go to my discharge from the army. Edremit was a lovely little town located on the Aegean where the dominant colors were the blue of the sky and the sea, the olive green of olive trees that were hundreds of years old, and the red earth showing the iron oxide content of its soil. In many ways the place had an idyllic quality about it and I really would not have minded serving in Edremit, much preferring it to my former job in Ankara. However, having left Netta behind in Ankara, with all the anxieties and tensions it created, Edremit developed into a bad experience. The infantry brigade I was appointed had a complement of about 3000 new recruits, to receive their basic infantry training. A Colonel headed it, who was sixty-four years old, and due to retire in a year. He was a rather bitter individual for not having been promoted to the rank of general. If I remember it correctly, there were five battalions in the brigade each under a commanding officer of the rank of Major. The battalion commanders acted like bureaucrats, of the pencil pushing type. They did not appear to have any interest in the subject of training, which, after all, was the main activity and raison d'être of the brigade. During my whole seven-month period of service, I did not see one battalion commander visiting the field to see for himself how the training was going on. The nitty-gritty of training was in the hands of company commanders of the rank of Captain. Each one of them would take his company to the field for their training and supervise the activity. Corporals at squad level who had been in the army for a year, and had been promoted to that rank, undertook the real training. There was an intermediary rank of officers to which I belonged, the Second Lieutenants of the army reserve, who commanded platoons. These were rather ineffective. Firstly, they themselves were poorly trained. There were no training courses organized to instruct us how to train. It was as if primary school teachers who had not received a day's worth of training instruction in their lives were teaching at school.

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We were given no training manuals, and I never came across a training program prepared for the year or any other period in it. There were no staff meetings, either at brigade or battalion levels, for general orientation, where each one of us could bring his problem, acquire information on brigade policy, or what we were supposed to do next. Three months before the end of my service period, a new Brigade Commander appeared with the rank of Brigadier General, who was about ten years younger than our aged Colonel. The appointment had absolutely no impact. Nothing changed. Perhaps the new commander thought that this whole year's recruits were a dead loss, and with the new lot that would be coming in three months, he would revamp the whole brigade. I hope he did that. There was no consolation for being away from Ankara in the form of an interesting and pleasant army life. I failed to get on with the members of this new environment of mine with no one to talk to outside duty hours. I lived like a hermit, socially speaking. The only consolation was travel to Izmir over the weekends. Colonel Sckalicky had his home in Izmir. We would leave on Friday noon and come back on Monday noon. Travel time was about five hours for the 250 kilometers way. Izmir is, of course, an even nicer place, more like a city; and this was a consolation prize of a sort. However, I did not make any friends in Izmir either. Retrospectively, quite a bit of the situation was my fault. I really could have done better than I did. My only social activity in Izmir consisted of attending the small parties Colonel Sckalicky sometimes gave in his home. The only social function I attended during my seven-month stay in Edremit was the dinner party given by the brigade commander in honor of Colonel Sckalicky. I am quite confident that there were no others, other than a film show at the officers club once a week attended by brigade officers and their spouses. I had a key role to play on these occasions because the films shown were all in English, and I had to provide simultaneous translation. On these occasions too there was no socializing. The officers and their wives came, and hardly exchanged greetings with their fellow officers or their wives. They came in quietly and left quietly once the film was over.

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As to the dinner itself, the main star, was the Brigade Commander. Next to him, to his right, sat the guest of honor, Colonel Sckalicky, and the third person of importance, was yours truly. I sat opposite the Brigade Commander and acted as his translator. There were about ten more officers present; all were of the rank of major, battalion commanders, and brigade headquarter staff. The conversation consisted mostly of a monologue by the brigade commander on his combat experience as a young officer, fighting the British on the Middle Eastern front during World War One. Colonel Sckalicky politely nodded his head now and then, and at times offered a few words. The Majors did not join the "conversation", did not talk between themselves, and in fact remained as silent as fish during the whole course of the dinner. There were no waiters to serve us. The commander could of course have asked some of his soldiers of private or even corporal rank to act as waiters. But it seems he did not trust them to serve; may be they would spill the contents of the plates into the lap of Colonel Sckalicky or some other unfortunate officer. So one of the majors who had been invited had to do the job, and he served me as well. I felt so embarrassed being served by a major who was about twenty years older than me. I was lost for words, I did not even thank him, but for that matter, no one else did either. The net result was that all the senior officers of the brigade started developing a real dislike for me. I watched the process helplessly, without knowing what to do to change their perception of me a little more to my favor.

Netta Joins Me in Ankara Netta arrived in Ankara at the beginning of May 1955, as we had planned immediately following the awarding of my commission. The friends I had made received her rather well initially, just like my group had done, and even Fato§ who did not like her fell into line. However, it did not take long before they started distancing themselves from us. Netta had quickly developed a visceral dislike for Turkey, and everything Turkish and talked about it all the time, at least to me. I don't know what she said to them when I was not around. At one point, when we were in the process of changing our residence, Sevim had kindly offered Netta a room to stay in her apartment. Within two days, Netta reported to me that Sevim kept a revolver in the drawer of her bedside table! Now Netta had been offered a guest room, and of course, not

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Sevim's own bedroom. So she had made a point of entering Sevim's room when she was away, rummage in the drawer, where she found the revolver; and only God knows what other drawers and other places she rummaged, what she had found in them, and what she did with what she found. One night when we had returned to Sevim's from a restaurant, Netta threw up for no apparent reason, at the entrance of Sevim's apartment without even bothering to run to the toilet. Next day she did not appear to be sick or offer an apology. Following the incident Sevim told us that she did not want Netta to stay with her anymore. Perhaps Netta had left some tracks about her having rummaged through her belongings. The relationship I had developed with §ahap lingered a little longer. He was engaged to a Turkish girl, and as a foursome we went out together. Eventually this friendship faded away too. My appointment to Edremit threw my relationship with Netta completely out of gear. As I had mentioned earlier, I tried in all possible ways and very hard to remain in Ankara. Through taking pretty high health risks I don't want go into, I managed to postpone taking up my new post by three months. During the seven months I was in Edremit, I did my level best to wangle as much leave as I could so that I could travel to Ankara and to Netta and spend time with her. Due to poor roads, infrequent and slow trains, the journey between Edremit to Ankara took about twenty hours. Despite the difficulties, I managed to visit her once in a while. Once she flew to Izmir to spend a weekend with me, a second time she visited me in Edremit in the company of Tosun, who brought her over, and once in Istanbul. I managed to arrange a teaching job for Netta in Ankara. I had, on an occasion, run into Yusuf Mardin, a former teacher of mine in RC, who had become the managing director of Ankara College, a school that was trying to emulate the RC model. I inquired if there was an opening for a teacher of English. He interviewed Netta, and offered her a position on the spot. Most of the staff of the school was American or English. I breathed with relief; perhaps that would keep her occupied and make herself some friends among them. Initially all went well, her performance as a teacher was appreciated and she started making friends. After three months, on one my of my leaves, she told me that she had just resigned from the school. I asked her why; but she gave no real answer.

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In a previous visit to Ankara, a month before her resignation, coming back from school one afternoon, she produced out of her briefcase, some ten fountain pens including a gold Parker Fifty One I asked her where these pens had come from she said that she had "collected' them at school. She asked me if I would exchange the gold P-51 she had brought with my own silver P-51. Previously she had told me a number of times how much she liked mine, but it had not occurred to me that she wanted it for herself.

My Failed Business Attempts During this year, I made three business attempts, the first out of Istanbul and the next two out of Ankara. I succeeded in bringing to fruition only two of them and lost money on both. The third, fortunately enough, I did not bring to fruition and hence did not loose money! There is a joke about a person telling his friend how he looses money in all his business ventures. This makes the friend ask him, "How do you make a living then? And he answers, "Oh, I don't work on Sundays, and this is the day of the week I don't loose money!" My last try was the biggest of all and I had real fun with. I got the idea from a fellow military cadet who was born in Sivas, a province about 300 kilometers to the east of Ankara. The idea was to buy chickpeas from villages in the province. My friend was born in one of them called Karaozii. He said that these villages were remotely located from the city of Sivas, were equipped with poor transport infrastructure and this is why not many traders were interested to make the effort to visit them to buy their produce. As a result farmers were obliged to sell their produce at dirt-cheap prices to the first bidder. An investment of TL 10,000 was required as working capital to offer payment in cash and to cover transportation costs to Ankara where I would sell them. I estimated that, on a "conservative" basis we could sell what we could buy at about TL 30,000 (US$ 6000 of the time). Now that was a whopping profit there, at least on paper! As I did not have this kind of money in my hands, I went to father and asked him to lend me TL 10,000. Father refused me, without even bothering to ask me why I thought I could make such a lot of money on the deal. I got very annoyed with him, for it looked to me as if this was a matter of lack of imagination on his part, and an inability to appreciate the level of initiative and creativity I was exhibiting as a "trader"! In

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the end, I more or less forced him to "lend" me the money. Also in the end, it turned out that he was one hundred percent right. Instead of making four thousand dollars I ended up loosing four hundred, and most fortunately not more than that. But the experience itself was a memorable one, and enjoyable as well. I made two trips to Karaozli and spent ten days there. I was picked up at the railway station by a horse carriage and from the station we drove to the village, an hour's distance away. I slept at the home of my host, sharing the food the family ate, eating with spoons out of common plates. The village lacked pavements, running water and electricity. The houses were made of sundried bricks, consisting of a mixture of dry herbs and cow dung, the traditional material of village houses during those days. The houses had flat roofs and I was told that during the summer people slept on them. I was treated a little bit like a celebrity. A ballad singer came and sang for me folk tunes while accompanying himself with a baglama. This was both moving and enjoyable. In the morning after my arrival, I started my journey on donkey-back, into the countryside in search of chickpeas to buy. One person accompanied me on foot. The countryside looked terribly empty and desolate. Now and then we ran into a person or two with whom we exchanged greetings. The first person that greeted us put his right hand on his heart and said "Selam-i aleykum". We returned his greeting him back in the same fashion, with an "Aleykum Selam". Obviously, no one in the villages had yet heard that, the days of greeting each other in Arabic were over in the Turkish Republic that had been declared thirty years before! The whole area I traveled looked like a vast and arid plateau with a few hills scattered all about. With not a speck of pollution in the sky or clouds, we could see miles ahead of us; most of the villages were dotted along the foothills. At one point I saw three villages in a widely spread cluster pattern, with each one of them looking so different from the others, that prompted me to ask my escort for information on their ethnic identity. He told me that one was a traditional Turkish village that had existed as far back as could be remembered. The second was formerly an Armenian village that had been turned over to Turkish refugees, which had been transferred from Greece as part of the population exchange of 1923 between Greece and Turkey. The third, the cleanest and the prettiest was one that had been recently built by Turks who had come from Bulgaria. The former Armenian village had some houses built of stone, and a semblance of paved streets; but it looked as if it had known better days.

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During my second and last trip to Karaozii, soon after I had entered my railway car, my head started to ache badly. I started shivering, and developed a fever, to the point that was noticeable to my fellow passengers. As we approached Kayseri my condition worsened to the extent that all my fellow passengers were in favor of my interrupting my journey. At the Kayseri station, I got out of the train, and more or less staggered with some help to the nearest hotel. I called a physician who took my temperature: 39.7° C. He had difficulties in diagnosing what I had contracted, because, he told me, I was showing symptoms of both a sunstroke and pneumonia. Then I understood what had happened exactly. In the morning of the previous day, I was on donkey back for five hours, with my head uncovered. With the sun shining as it did, I got sunstroke. In the afternoon, towards sunset, the temperature dropped suddenly, and a cold wing started blowing on my back, while I was wearing only a light cotton shirt, with not even long sleeves, and as a result, caught pneumonia. I took the medication the doctor prescribed me, spent three days at the hotel, and on the fourth day I was well enough to take the train to Ankara.

17 MY LAST MONTHS IN ISTANBUL MAY-OCTOBER 4,1956

My Discharge from the Army At the end of April 1956 I was discharged from the army. I went straight to Ankara and began the last five months of my life in Turkey before I immigrated to Israel. After we spent a couple of weeks in Ankara, Netta and I liquidated the contents of our flat and traveled to Istanbul. I felt a great sense of relief as despite the great start I had made in living in Ankara, the experience had soured on me, and I was leaving the town with more unpleasant memories than pleasant ones. This being the summer Father had rented a house at Suadiye, for the duration of the season. I remember that I lived partly in Suadiye and partly at home the days I saw Netta. But Netta did not stay with us. Over her whole stay Netta had succeeded in antagonizing my family to such an extent, and in such unprovoked fashion that I had not dared ask my parents to offer her to stay with us. Somehow she made friends and they gave her flats to stay in temporarily. As to myself it seemed I was aimlessly thrashing around. I did not go back to work in Father's business. One day, mother said to my brother, and I, "We spent a lot of money on your education, the rest is up to you". She added in her perfect French, "Débrouillez-vous" (Get on). I was wondering about what to do next but my thought process seemed to have become paralyzed; a feeling of total helplessness had invaded me. For employment the only possibility I could think of, was to go to RC to find out if there was an opening for me to teach at the school. If someone had asked me the question, "Teaching what?" I would not have known the answer. I went to RC, and was directed to a Mr. Karamessinis, a former chemistry teacher of mine, who was looking for an assistant to supervise students conducting chemistry experiments in the lab he was responsible for. I had been one of his better students. He looked a little surprised when I told him that I was looking for a job, but nevertheless he offered me the position on the spot. I told him that I would think about it, looking as if I would answer him in the positive.

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Leaving RC for home, the absurdity of what I had done started to sink in. My God, I had studied four years in Stockholm and London, had got a degree in Economics from one of the best schools in the world on the subject, and I am ending up as an assistant to a chemistry teacher at a level a little higher than high school. I could have got the job immediately following my graduation from RC without having to study four years in Europe. My parents had really started to worry about me, and in particular about my psychiatric health, even before I completed my military service. About three months before my discharge f r o m the army, Father started doing something about my transfer to Istanbul. He was told that it was now too late since I only had three more months left to serve before my release. However, as a spin-off from his intervention I got an extra week of leave over and above the normal amount. After my discharge their worries about my psychiatric health increased. It looked as if I was cracking, not only to my parents but to other members of the family as well. They were all acting in such a solicitous fashion when we met and being considerate to the extreme. I guess they feared that I may break down any moment and they did not want it to happen in front of their eyes. At one point, they brought home an M D who was a specialist in mental diseases. My parents were too tactful to take me to his office, and also they rightly thought that I would refuse to go to visit him. Anyway, the M D came home, the excuse of the visit was that I was not sleeping well and he had come to examine me and find out if he could do anything to help. My not sleeping well was, of course, true. Not infrequently I would, wake in the middle of the night, jumping out of my bed, run out of my bedroom and scream at the top of my voice. Of course every one sleeping in the house, my parents and brother would wake up from the sound I made. The physician examined me, declared that I was suffering, f r o m a sickness with a funny Latin name, prescribed me medication, and left. Mother dutifully went to a chemist and bought a bottle of the medicine. Bedtime came and both my parents appeared in my room with mother pouring the stuff into a large spoon and handing it to me so that I would drink it. Well, I tasted the stuff; it was sweet and not particularly offensive, but instead of finishing the spoonful I threw the spoon and most of its contents in Father's face. Both my parents got into a terrible panic and ran out of my room. This was the first and last time in my life that I had acted in such a fashion to either one of my parents.

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My Final Break with Netta I continued to see Netta, and together we floated like a boat without a rudder, in a state of total aimlessness. It seems nothing I had done had worked, and no wonder. Our whole relationship seemed to have been based on false premises and assumptions, and now all the chicken had come home to roost. Presumably, she was in as bad a state as I was, though because of my predicament, I probably did not notice it as much as I ought to have done. It seems her way out was to undermine me even more and increase there by the size of our predicament. As far as she was concerned, from the moment we woke up everything I did was wrong and all my personal qualities were inadequate. We kept on quarrelling no less, with the difference that each time we made up I began to be sorry that we had. My final break with Netta occurred some time in August, on my initiative and in the following circumstances. It was a Saturday and I wanted to do some sailing. Not having a boat of my own, I went to Ibo and asked him if he would lend me his. He was very nice about it and lent it to me without even asking me how long I would want to have it. We traveled to Moda where ibo's sailing boat was we got into it and we were on our way. I had not a plan in my head as to where is it that I wanted to sail, but somehow, and on an impulse, I decided to make for the Princes Islands. From Moda they were about ten miles away. It does not sound like too large a distance, but ibo's dinghy was about four meters long and about one and a little over one meter wide across its bows. For the kind of crossing I was about to undertake, what I did was not just irresponsible, it was purely suicidical. ibo himself, who was a quasi-professional sailor, would not have undertaken the sailing. The smallest mishap in my handling of the boat, a change in the weather could have caused the boat to capsize and this would have been our end. With the wind dropping we could have been becalmed in the middle of the sea at night with no one to see us. We were too far out from the coast or sea-lanes, and too small to be observed from the distance to be rescued. Perhaps what I had in my subconscious was a death wish, the wish that Netta and I drown together. I can't think of any other moment in my life in which I took a bigger physical risk to my existence. The sailing lasted twenty-eight whole hours including a sleepover at Biiyukada, one of the islands. In the end, everything went well, and this was truly miraculous under the circumstances. As I had

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mentioned previously, Netta always looked up to me when we were at sea, as she herself felt very uncomfortable in it not even being a swimmer. So suddenly everything took a great turn, and we had a great night. However this feeling did not last long. On the next day coming back, as I was fixing the boat to make it ready for the return journey she suddenly did something to unsettle my balance and in the process of regaining it I nearly capsized the boat. Well perhaps, she did not mean to do it, not being too knowledgeable about boats. But it seems I was more on edge than I thought, and the big risk I had taken. I probably overreacted to what she had done. I told her off in rather severe terms. She reacted in a most abusive fashion, extending her attack to subjects that had nothing to do with the situation on hand. I told her, "Netta, this is it, I don't want to have anything to do with you any more, and all I want this moment is that we return safely, and once we do that I don't want to see you again". She reacted to what I said in even worse and possibly abusive terms, and we did not exchange a single word for the next eight hours until I delivered her to her apartment. On the way back, I felt all the way, as if I was about to drown, or fall off a precipice no matter what I did. The next day in the morning I had to briefly visit her again, for some prosaic reason I can't remember and the vibes between us were equally bad. I told my parents that my relation with Netta had come to an end. Two days later she phoned and surprise of all surprises, she was all sweet reasonableness. She was literally cooing. She told me how sorry she was and wanted to make up for what happened. This "new Netta" kept at it for a month or more, phoning me daily, I ended up seeing her now and then, but at the end of every meeting I reiterated to her that I had not changed my mind about our relationship. Sometime during the second half of September 1956, with her trying to win me back ending unsuccessfully, and following my recommendation to do so Netta agreed to go back to England. Upon Mother's prompting, father agreed to buy her a one-way air ticket, and to make sure that she does leave the country, accompanied her to the airport until she was safely passed the immigration crossing.

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I was now a total wreck. My relations with my family and my father, in particular were at their lowest ebb. I don't remember any time in my life when my self-esteem was lower. The great love of my life, into which I had invested so much of myself, incurred so much unpleasantness, and made so many sacrifices to maintain had now completely fallen apart. A year before I had met Netta, I had read 'Manon Lescaut" by l'Abbé Prévost. The book is an eighteenth-century French classic. It is the story of Gabriel Chevalier, a young Frenchman who falls in love with Manon, who leads him to his perdition. The style in which the story is told, and the language of the book are beautiful, in their simplicity, and soft chattiness. These elements disguise the story for what it really is namely a full-blooded horror story. After I finished the story, I had a good laugh, and said to myself that this will never happen to me. But this is exactly what had happened to me with Netta.

I Leave Turkey for Israel A few days before Netta's departure I had gone to Biiytikada and met there Fiko Baruh with whom I had become friends at LSE, as I had explained earlier on. I casually inquired if I had a chance in the labor market of Israel. He replied he thought that I did, but added that testing the hypothesis by remote control was no good, and if I wanted to be taken seriously I would have to appear there in person. During the last week of September I told father that I wanted to go to Israel, spend sometime there, and would he buy me a one-way ticket? In those days there was no difference between a one-way ticket and a return ticket except very exceptionally, with the last costing exactly twice as much as the first. Being an economically minded person, Father did not think much about why I had not asked him for a return ticket. He said, "sure". October 3, 1956 was packing day, as I was to depart next noon. It was in an afternoon, Father had come home earlier than usual, and I did the packing under his watchful eyes and those of Mother. I packed all my clothes to my last handkerchief, and the remaining space left in the second suitcase I filled with the books I loved most, and with various mementos and other paraphernalia. Both were rather large suitcases.

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The next day, on October 4 t h , about ten in the morning, I left home for the Ye§ilkoy airport accompanied by Father, and Aykut, my uncle. I boarded the El A1 plane, a DC-4, and about four thirty in the afternoon we landed at Lud airport, as it was then known. The flight took about four and a half hours. By six o'clock in the evening, I had reached Orhan's apartment, dropped my large suitcases on the floor of his living room, and announced: "Here am I". He replied: "Welcome". Orhan was generally expecting me but not in a specific day, as I had written to him about my intention to come to Israel, but had not given him a specific date. We quickly sat down for dinner. They had a small three-room apartment; with their two young children they had not much room to spare. A bed was made for me on the couch in the living room. I slept ever so soundly as I had not done for a long time. This was my first night in Israel as a new immigrant. Two days later, I took a taxi to Jerusalem, where I was to spend the next five years of my life.

18 EPILOGUE

This is a limited epilogue covering two persons that played a central role during the last three years of my story in providing me the final push towards immigration to Israel. I confine myself only to those aspects of my dealings with them that immediately follow from the contents of previous chapters.

Father Fights to Get Me Out of Israel He did so almost continuously. A few months after my arrival in Israel, when it finally dawned on Father that I might not intend to return to Istanbul, he started bombarding me with letters to tempt me to come back, by offering me all sorts of incentives. When this did not work, my parents decided to visit Israel for the first time in their lives in late autumn 1957, a year after my immigration. The purpose of their trip, in Mother's words was to take me back home. The first thing Father told me during their visit was that during my last day in Istanbul, when he saw the quantity of belongings I was packing, he became a little uncertain about the length of time I intended to visit Israel for, but he thought that he might be mistaken and said nothing. My own theory is that he didn't worry because he thought that I would return in a couple of months at most, with my tail between my legs, just as I had returned from Ankara two years earlier after I had run out of money at the end of the second week I spent there. He claimed that I had played a trick on him in not declaring my intention not to come back (bana oyun oynadin) from Israel. But he said this in good humor and with a smile. He accorded me a monthly allowance of 75 Israeli Pounds, (about US$ 300 our times), which I continued to receive for about a year.

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At the time of their visit I had already been in Israel for a whole year. I was working at the State Comptroller's office as one of the two assistants of the economic advisor of the State Comptroller. I had finished my trial period of six months and my appointment had become permanent. My job was to evaluate the economic performance of State enterprises. I had a monthly salary of about US$ 150, about US$ 750 of our times; this was not much to write home about. But I was having the time of my life with my job. In any case in those days the standards of living were low all around. Income distribution in Israel was much more even in those days, so I did not feel much deprived with the salary I was making. Socially I was doing very well, adding new friends to those I already knew from my overseas days, and my relations with members of the fair sex were blossoming. After all, what more could a bachelor who is 26 years old want from life. Last, but not least, the Jewish monkey on my back had now disappeared completely, and forever. So my answer to my parents' pleas about returning to Istanbul was a straight "no". They left very disappointed. I still remember the expression they wore on their faces, especially my mother's as they were boarding the plane. After they returned, father kept by correspondence his bombardment about my return. With no results, in the spring of 1958 father invited me to come to Istanbul for a "visit". I said to myself "why not?" I was glad to be in Istanbul again, thoroughly enjoyed myself, seeing the family and members of the group who were in town, Ilham, ibo and Tosun. I spent two weeks in Istanbul, and just as I was glad to visit the city I was born in, I was equally glad to return to Israel. By October 1958, I had a new job, this time at the Ministry of Finance, one of the two prestigious places a young economist could work in those days outside academia. I came to work at one of the then top-drawer departments of the Ministry, namely the Department for Foreign Exchange. My job consisted of participating in the economic evaluation of Israeli projects that were candidates for presentation to international financial agencies, and once approved, to prepare loan applications for them covering their economic justification and financial aspects.

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In February 1958,1 had met Yael, my wife to be. A few months later we decided to get married, and we did so at the end of October. This did not stop Father from writing me a letter one month before the date of the marriage (the invitations were already issued) telling me that if I cancelled my marriage and returned to Istanbul, "Seni btiyiik i§ bekliyor" (Big business is waiting for you). Whether my future bride would be a little upset about this kind of abrupt cancellation did not concern him in any way. Just for the fun of it, I wrote him back telling him that it would not be "nice" to Yael if I cancelled the marriage in this unseemingly abrupt fashion, but how about our getting married and then coming back to Istanbul and join your business. To that he said no, throwing at me once again his old argument that, he cannot pull two carriages at the same time, just like a horse can't either. Well, we got married all right, and had our first and second daughters. From that date onwards, my parents visited us about twice a year. In each visit seeing the modest conditions in which we lived, the first subject they raised was about what, in their eyes, was my foolish decision not to join Hayim as a partner in the drug import business. Father added that he knew it was going to be a roaring success, and in fact, within a few years, Hayim did become a millionaire. I asked father, "If you knew that the agency was going to become such a roaring success, why did you not keep it for yourself?" He answered that he was really not interested and he had set it up only for my good. This kind of haranguing went on for a good five years. I changed my work place again to become the Chief of the Economic and Planning Division of the newly established Israeli Port Authority. In 1962,1 got a most startlingly surprising letter from father telling me that he was about to take a decision to close down his business and that the only thing that would stop him from doing so would be my agreement to come to Istanbul and join him as a partner. In his letter he did not mention as a condition that I would have to divorce Yael first! I could therefore presume that this time around, he was prepared to play the part of a horse, simultaneously pulling two carriages, with the second one now containing two babies as well! Well, as can be guessed, his proposal did not get very far on my side. Prior to my joining the Port Authority, at the Ministry of Finance, I had ended up acting as the person responsible for the preparation of an application to the World Bank for a loan to finance the construction of the second deep water port of Israel on the Mediterranean coastline at Ashdod.

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Above me were the senior members of the various layers of the state bureaucracy who were officially "responsible" for delivering the application to the World Bank, and the carrying out of the subsequent loan negotiations. These persons, of course, got all the publicity for getting the first loan Israel ever got from the organization. But doing all the donkeywork for the preparation of the application was my responsibility. I was 30 years old at the time. The World Bank sent a number of missions to Israel to appraise the project, and one way other it was I who ended up explaining its economic and financial justifications. Mission members were impressed with my work to the point that towards the end of their last visit, Bill Geolot, a mission member, invited me to have dinner with him on a Friday night at his hotel, and as we were having our desert, said to me, "Erol the Bank is looking for guys like you to recruit. Why don't you apply to the Bank for work?" The thought of working for the World Bank had never crossed my mind. Frankly, without such a direct appeal from his part, I would never have applied. I did not think I was good enough. In the end at the beginning of 1965 I got a position in the Bank as a Transport Economist. At the time of my acceptance, I was the second Israeli who had been admitted to work in the Bank. I accepted the job for three reasons. The first was that it sounded like an interesting job. The second was, that as a family, we were experiencing financial difficulties in meeting ends meet. Being a young bachelor in Jerusalem was not the same thing as being married with two young kids. The Bank had awarded me an annual starting salary of US$ 12,000 net of taxes that was about three times higher than my Israeli salary, even though it had improved quite a bit since I had joined the Port Authority. Lastly, I have to give the third reason, namely that I had now been living in Israel for nine whole years, the longest stint I had spent in any country after I had left Istanbul to study in Stockholm and London. In all frankness, I was getting a little restless. My parents were delighted with my appointment. After all, I was out of Israel, and even if I was not returning to Istanbul, I was at least relocating to Washington DC! A t the end of my first year, I was appointed as the Transport economist of the Nairobi Office of the World Bank that covered the countries of the eastern half of Africa. I was put in charge of identifying transport infrastructure projects that the Bank might be interested in financing, covering their economic and financial aspects. My annual salary was adjusted

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to US$ 16,000 net of taxes. In purchasing power terms, my new salary was even bigger because the cost of living in Nairobi was much lower than in Washington DC. We lived in a house with a land area of six thousand square meters, all gardens and trees with a brook flowing across it. We paid a monthly rent of about US$ 250 for our new home. We had three servants that together cost us about US$ 100 a month. Their food they took care of themselves. Their living quarters were located outside our home, but on our grounds. After a year in Nairobi we invited my parents. This time around it was my turn to be on the offensive. I asked them the question: "Do you still think that I should have interrupted my studies to become an importer of drugs?" They laughed away my question, but at some point I had father admit that my present job was better than being a drug agent. I then told Father, that I could never have joined the World Bank if I had become a drug agent. He answered, "Well, it was a good offer then". The moral was: fathers are always right about what is good for their sons at any given moment! In the autumn of 1968 we returned to Washington DC. The two years in Nairobi had been the best years of our lives. Now we had to readjust to Washington DC life again! It quickly became clear to us that no matter how hard we tried, we were sooner or later going to loose our children to American culture. The six-day war had been fought about a year before, and like all other Israelis in the Bank we felt we had no business to stay in America. In fact out of the nine Israelis working at the time in the Bank, seven, including, myself returned to Israel. Later, their numbers in the Bank went up again to about twenty. A few months before we returned, I had passed by Istanbul on my way to Bombay on a port project mission, and told my parents of our decision to return to Israel. Their reaction was hysterical. They maintained that I had gone completely crazy and should be hospitalized. Father recruited all my Haker uncles and his cousins to influence me to change my decision. Barzilay, who was my oldest uncle and the most intellectually inclined one among them, gave me a book to read written by Alber Memmi, a Tunisian Jew. The name of the book was "Portrait of a Jew". 1 He told me that this book would help me sort out for myself what being Jewish is all about, and help me take the right decision for myself about whether I should return to Israel. His intention, though without actually telling me so, was that I would drop the idea of returning as Father was beseeching me to do. ' Memmi.

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Well, I read the book with some interest. Its thrust was mostly ideological and his main thesis was, Jews can expect problems anywhere in the world they live, including Israel. Thus, when taking a decision on where he would like to live, every Jew should sort out for himself the kind of problems he is prepared to live with and the kinds he is not willing to accept. Here is an example from the book that states his thesis in succinct fashion: "Could I be descended from a Berber tribe when the Berbers themselves failed to recognize me as one of their own? I was Jewish, not a Muslim, a townsman, not a highlander... and even if I had borne the painter's name, the Italians would not have acknowledged me. No, I am African, no European. In the long run, I would always be forced to return to Alexandre Mordehai Benillouche, a native in a colonial country, a Jew in an anti-Semitic universe, an African in a world dominated by Europeans." I told my uncle that I had passed the point in my life where my decision on where I want to live depended on what particular ideology I happen to be believing in at a given moment. There was no country in the world for me where I had a bigger family, more friends, and more enemies than I had in Israel. For me Israel had become home and whatever roots I managed to strike in this world were there. My uncle said nothing but I think he saw my point. Father did not, and kept badgering me by phone. Just about a month before our return, on a mission in Grcece, father phoned me early one morning in Athens (I don't know how he found that I was in Greece and the name of the hotel I was staying in). This time around, I did not speak to him. After hearing his first sentence, I just hung-up. This was at the end of 1969. In the end my parents told me their conclusion that I had come under the influence of my Sabra wife and lacked the guts to stand up to her. Mother added that as a man I was a washout! Father lived another twenty-five years, but never again tried to move me out of Israel or remind me of the great opportunity in my life to become an importer of drugs or other business opportunities he had tried to create for me, in Istanbul. He died in 1994 when he was ninety years old. Mother had died eight years earlier, in 1986.

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Netta Does the Same Unbelievable as it may sound, Netta and my parents saw eye-to-eye concerning my future as a businessman living in Istanbul. That turned out to be a major mistake on her part in how to handle me. Instead of seeing my parents as her antagonists, she should have treated them as her allies. Upon an impulse, I wrote a letter to her telling of my arrival to Israel. She answered, "What about getting rich, how can you become rich in Israel?" I wrote back telling her that this was, now, not one of my higher priorities in life. Following this letter she changed her tack, telling me how much she loved Istanbul and Turkey and how she could think of doing nothing better than living there all her life married to me. Well, this was a one hundred degree turn-about. More importantly, she wrote me a long letter apologizing for her behavior towards me during her two years of stay in Ankara and in Istanbul, how she had been so mean towards me, had undermined me for no reason, and all her other sins. She wrote that she would do every thing in the world to make up. She finished by saying that she regretted to having extracted a promise from me that 1 was going to devote my life to making a lot of money fast. Now she was prepared to marry me even though this would not be of high priority in my agenda. We corresponded for a while. She was now all love and care. Now, hers were tender letters. In the end, after having received a few of them, I broke down and wrote her back telling that that if she really meant what she wrote, she should come to Israel, as I was not prepared to leave Israel for any reason, and therefore this was the only place in the world where our former relationship could be rehabilitated. To this statement of mine she never responded. Strangely enough, or not so strangely perhaps, I had a sense of relief that she did not. But then she took another tack, telling me that now she is again very sorry that she insisted on a business future for me, and instead, encouraged me to do a Ph. D., of course, not in Israel. I was not impressed. In the end of the spring of 1958,1 visited Istanbul and sent her a postcard. She wrote back to our Istanbul address a letter which beat all the others I had received from her in its tenderness, vowing that, she would be prepared to live with me, even in Kayseri, with me teaching English in a high school.

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Well Kayseri is a middle sized town located in central Anatolia, probably with a charm of its own. I would have no objections to Kayseri as a place to build my future, but if I wanted to live in Turkey I could think of at least ten other places I would prefer to Kayseri. As for becoming a teacher in a high school, I had nothing to say. I did not answer that letter of hers. About four months later, I was a married person. As a post-script on Netta, I heard from Arlette the best girl friend she had made in Israel, and later, heard from Tosun that Netta had gotten married in the early sixties. Her husband came from a rich family that owned real estate in London. She had visited Istanbul with her husband, looked up Tosun who told mc that her husband was a very nice person, was treating Netta like he was her sugar daddy, and Netta was lapping it up. After I joined the World Bank, on my first mission to Finland, I stopped over in London for a day, as I was allowed to do, by Bank regulations, at its expense. Revisiting London was a very moving experience for me from the moment it appeared on my plane window in an early morning hour of a clear day. This was my first visit to London after I had left it eleven years ago. After checking in at my hotel, I traveled straight to Houghton street where LSE is located, walked up and down King's Way, and other streets in the vicinity, looking for my lost past. I, of course, did not meet anyone I could recognize and even some of the old shops around the area, bookstores, pubs and coffee houses (the most favorite one among them we used to call Smoky Joes', or Dirty Dick depending on our mood) was not there anymore, or their ownership had changed. I felt as if I was a ghost, doing what amounted to haunting old places I once lived in. I then walked to all sorts of additional places, to the vegetable market nearby at Covent Garden where the Royal Ballet was also located, to the Strand, to Piccadilly Circus and more. I must have walked like that for a good few hours. In the end, I just could not stop myself, and decided that I was going to find Netta. Not knowing her married name I could not look her up, but I did manage to get the phone number of her parents. I phoned them but the phone did not answer. What else could I do? I looked up Basil, whose phone number I could find. He told me that he had not seen her for many years, had heard that she had married, but otherwise knew nothing about her, including her whereabouts. Well, this was all I could do during this occasion.

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In a next opportunity, a few months before transferring to Nairobi, I went on a mission to Ethiopia and Kenya, and again stopped over in London. This time around, I did reach her parents. Netta's mother gave me her phone number but added that she was out of town on a cruise. I offered to visit her parents. Her mother sounded as if she was glad to accept, and I went to see them. At some point Netta's father asked me why it was that we did not get married. I tried to explain, but not in much detail, and it sounded as if they accepted my explanation. At some point, her mother told me that Netta's husband was physically abusing her, that she had left him and had started divorce proceedings. She added that she had undertaken some business ventures involving the restoration of eighteenth century Georgian houses. The business had not gone well. She had fallen out with her contractor, refused to pay him all that she owed him, and as a result she had her life threatened. It was time for me to go. Ann, Netta's mother went out of her way to extend me hospitality. After I started my job in Nairobi, I had no opportunity to pass by London, all my travel being restricted to the countries under the responsibility of the Permanent Mission of East Africa. However, in October 1967,1 was invited to Washington, and as I could get the Bank to pay for Yael's trip as well we traveled together. Fate had it that it is on this occasion that I finally succeeded in seeing Netta, eleven years after our separation. I invited her to have lunch with me, and she accepted. I told this to Yael who did not look as if she was enchanted with the idea, but she did not throw a fit, either. The restaurant I chose was one I knew from old times, along Piccadilly, on the second floor of a building. I came first; Netta came in a few minutes later. Netta was wearing an overcoat made of leopard skin, pretty expensive looking. She had always talked about wanting to buy one for herself, and it seemed that finally she had succeeded in doing so. The coat covered her from her neck down, half way to her heels, with long sleeves up to her wrists. For a few fleeting seconds I thought that a leopardess was advancing towards my table, and that in all probability intended to have me for her lunch. Fortunately the illusion did not last long. We ordered lunch. I spoke about Yael and our three daughters. She did not sound as if she was interested, and we soon shifted to talking about her.

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The first thing she told me was that she did not know that her husband was such a rich person at the time she agreed to marry him. She told me that her divorce proceedings were completed and as alimony she had received a block of flats in the West End, which she could comfortably live on their rent income. She asked me whether I would like to see where she lived now. I begged to be excused, telling her that Yael was waiting for me at the hotel, and that we had made plans for the afternoon. We parted, I returned to the hotel to Yael. 1 don't know what happened to Netta ever since.

PART VI CONCLUDING CHAPTERS AND ANNEXES

19 WHAT I LEARNED ON WHO A JEW IS AND HIS OPTIONS AS ONE

The Jewish Stereotype This is a personal story about what I learned about Jews, mostly in an autobiographical context during the formative years of my life. The learning was from what I experienced, and only a little of it from what I read. Being born a native of Turkey, my experience came from interacting with Turks. Surprisingly, I learned little about Jews from Jews, even though I was born one. Why this has been so I have described in my story. I learned that the image of a Jew is mostly a stereotype, with the characteristics of the stereotype being mostly negative ones. The only stereotyped characteristic with a positive implication attributed to Jews was that they were intelligent. Sometimes there was a preference to substitute the word clever, which is less complimentary. Jews were also stereotyped as hard working, though to a much lesser extent. However, for a dyed-in-the wool anti-Semite even being intelligent is not a positive attribute. For a young Turkish lady with academic background I recently met in Israel when I mentioned her Jews being considered intelligent, she reacted, "Ah, yes, but they are intelligent only on how to make money!" All the other characteristics of the Jewish stereotype that I picked up during those years were negative ones. The first thing I ever learned about Jews was that they are "dirty". The expression of "Pis Yahudi" was one I frequently heard. I then learned about their being noisy, even when engaged in religious worship they make a lot of noise, to the point that in Turkish, a noisy place is characterized as a "Yahudi Havrasi", i.e. a Jewish Synagogue. The third lesson was that all or most Jews are rich persons; and the fourth was that despite their being rich they don't eat well because of their stinginess. The most common expression I heard in this respect was "Kirk Yahudi bir torigin ba$im yer" (forty Jews eat the head of a single bonito fish).

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Jews were stigmatized as cowards who lack stamina to face situations requiring long hardship and the exhibition of bravery. Korkak Yahudi is the most common expression I heard in this respect. Jews are clannish, secretive; the only people in the world they really care about are other Jews. Therefore, Jews are not trustworthy persons. They are treacherous. This is the reason why they could not become officers in the Turkish army until 1947. However, even past this year a Jewish officer could not be entrusted with militarily sensitive assignments. Before 1947, a Jew could not be used, even as cannon fodder, because to be used as such he needed to be trained in the use of arms and be given arms. And once this was done God only knows against whom he would turn their arms to. Jews are exploiters of honest people that work hard to make a living. Jews overcharge whatever they may be selling; they are black marketers, and experts at making illicit profits at the expense of their non-Jewish fellow citizens. During World War Two they were referred to as " i s t i f c i s " , that is "hoarders". Instead of selling whatever it was they were trading in, they would hoard the merchandise, create an artificial shortage, and wait until its price skyrocketed, and then sell it at exorbitant prices and become rich. Equally, the goods they sell are often defective, that is not only are they cheating you by overcharging, but also in the quality of the product they are selling you. This way, the word " J e w " represented a bundle of negative characteristics. With so many negative attributes, the word "Jew" became an expletive, like four letter words are. Thus instead of calling some one a thief, and a crook who is dirty and stingy, all you had to do was to exclaim in short hand, "You Jew!" and the rest would be understood. In English, "To Jew someone", means to cheat him. An interesting event in this context I personally witnessed in York I described in a previous chapter. French, too, does not fall much behind in the use of the word Jew in a pejorative sense, in the form of a verb ie "enjuiver". At face value, the verb means "to Judaize" which is a neutral word. However, the word has an implicit pejorative meaning to pollute with Jews, or two make impure with Jews. In years much later to those of my present story, I heard the use of the word personally, when as the head of my consulting firm I was trying to come to an agreement of cooperation with a French consultant. My request was turned down, with the reason shown by an intermediary who was Jewish himself, namely that the French consultant feared that with his agreement to cooperate with an Israeli consultant, his company would become "enjuivee". This was still a time when the Arab Boycott against Israel was riding high. Perhaps things are a little better now.

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In cartoons I came across in Turkish publications, Salamon meant a Jewish male and Rebecca a Jewish woman, though these names are private names, the implication being that as all Jews are the same, Salamon and Rebecca will do just fine. A male Jew was addressed as a " M o s y o " , and a female as "Madam". A Muslim friend of a Jewish woman would address her as "Madamcigim", when she wanted to show special affection towards her. A real Turk would address a fellow Turk as "Bey" or Efendi", and a female he would address a "Hanim". When Jews had to be given roles considered to be not normally compatible with their status, they would have to put on some special piece of clothing, which would distinguish them from their Turkish peers. A case in point I had mentioned in earlier chapter was when Orhan, the youngest brother of my father, who was being trained as an officcr because he was a mcdical student, and in his military service he would serve as a physician, as physicians automatically became officers. While in training, just in case some one should mistake him for a real Turk he was issued white gym shoes instead of regulation military boots. As can be expected, Turks or members of other nations did not think about Jews all the time, and in fact had many other things to think or worry about other than Jews. It is just when they did for one reason or another it was mostly in stereotypic terms. Grandma Salinas was the one who kept me as a Jew and made me personally hurt, each time I heard an anti-Jewish remark even when it was not personally directed at me.

The Jew Who is the Exception Then there is the Jew for whom the stereotyped attribute is waived. Hearing an anti-Semite protest, when an occasion calls for it, that some of his best friends are Jews is a common occurrence. In fact this remark has become an aphorism that is often used on occasions between Jew and Jew, and gentile and gentile. The worst anti-Semite in the world may have one particular Jew whom he is prepared to treat not as a stereotype but as a human being. Even a Nazi could have his special Jew though very rarely so. The best example I can think of concerns Herman Goering, the number two person in the Nazi hierarchy, second only to Hitler.

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Field Marshall Erhard Milch was a close friend of Hermann Goering from World War One when both of them were fighter pilots serving in the same air force unit. Goering had appointed him as the General Director of the Luftwaffe Ministry. 1 Milch's mother was German but his father was Jewish. When the Gestapo found this out, Himmler wanted Milch to be summarily removed from this august position. When the matter was brought to the attention of Goering, his reply was, "Ich bestimme wer ein Jude ist und wer nicht"! (I am the one who commands who is a Jew and who is not). Milch kept his job right up until the last day of the Third Reich. Himmler had to give up the idea of having Milch removed from his job, but not without inventing a cock-and-bull story about his having been fathered by an Arian outside the bonds of marriage. A second case of personal knowledge is a woman (her name Eva) who as a young maiden in her early twenties spent the whole war in Berlin. Both her parents were Jewish but she was not even hiding. She was employed as a secretary at the office of Adolph Eichmann! At the end of the war she immigrated to the United States, got married to a Jewish person, (his name Ray) who worked at the Department of Defense. They live in Bethesda near Washington DC. They are moderately religious and active members of their Synagogue. They are close friends of an uncle of Yael, my wife and that is how I got to know them when we ourselves lived in Washington DC. I tried hard to make her talk on what she did at the office of Adolph Eichman but with no results. Perhaps these two cases are extreme examples, but many non-Jews who could not be considered as conscious racists, practiced the principal in many countries of the world, for example, in west European countries, grant exceptions to Jews who seemed to them to be sufficiently deserving to be treated as equals, provided that they did not flag their Jewish identities. Provided a Jew met this last condition they were prepared to tolerate him, rather like a cripple of a sort, as if he had only one good eye, a stunted left arm, or suffered some other form of infirmity. Towards such persons one is expected to show empathy; Jews couldn't help being Jews, as after all, they were born that way, and there is no reason why one should not makes friends with them, of course, as already said, with the conditionality that they keep their Jewishness in low profile.

^Schirer, pp. 648,665,965.

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It seems the anti-Semitism I mostly experienced in Turkey in the years of my life I write about was of this West European variety. I can think of no better example than the way my group treated me with this respect. The thinking went like this: "Erol is a Jew all right, but he can't help that because he was born that way. Nevertheless, his being a Jew, notwithstanding he has a Turkish name and speaks Turkish like any one of us, so why not make friends with him". Also, I had passed the test of not flagging my Jewish identity or bringing up Jewish subjects in conversation. In fact I had kept mum about them all, and even denied my being Jewish. Once my status as an exception deserving equality was confirmed, I was treated as if I was not a Jew. The best example in this respect I had experienced myself, I already told in my RC Third Form Year, when Nur was preparing the page for the photos of our class.

The Past Compared to the Present About fifty years have gone by since the years I have described. The level of anti-Semitism that exists in Turkey today is lower than what it was during the years of my experience. I cannot judge by how much as since I made my home in Israel, I have spent only about eight months in Turkey overall, spread over those many years. The one sure sign I have observed pointing that things have changed is how Jews are now addressed in Turkey. They are not addressed anymore as Mosyo and Modern but as Bey and Hanim. Many Jews identify themselves now as Yahudi without being self conscious about it, and so do Turks identify them like that, but without implying any thing that is stereotyped. In this sense the good old Ottoman days are back again. To day, you can call a Jew a Yahudi, just as you would call an Englishman an ingiliz, and a German an Alman. You don't need to call a Jew a Musevi, anymore with reference to his religion only, in order to be polite to him. Has anti-Semitism gone away completely? Or, will it go away completely? My answer is no, as long as Turkey continues to remain a uninational state. In this sense Turkey is not any different than the run-of-themill west European country. Some residual anti-Semitism still remains. No matter how the average Turk will think of Jews even if it is in the most positive terms imaginable, he will not think of them as being a real Turk in a national sense, like he is. Compared to a Swiss who can be German, French, Romanesque or Italian, with no member of each ethnic group being a better Swiss than members of another, there is still some distance to cover.

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In present day Turkey, there is still someway to go in this respect. The best example I can think of in this respect is from later years of my life. I had an opportunity to work as a transport economist and planner for UKi (the Institute for Transport Coordination, Ula§tirma Koordinayonu idaresi) located in Ankara, during the 70's and 80's. I was employed as a Yabanci Uzman (Foreign Expert) under a loan made to Turkey by the World Bank. I got on well with UKI staff, both professionally, and personally, and why not. In their eyes I was a foreigner, though born in Turkey, who could speak native Turkish and in addition, was knowledgeable in Turkish ways. One day, as I was having lunch with Orer Bey, the General Director, and his deputy, Necati Aydemir, when we started attacking our deserts, Orer Bey said that he had a delicate question to ask me, and that if I declined to answer it he would not be offended. He looked as if he was agonizing a little about how he should be going about asking me his question. I answered him, "Of course Orer Bey, please go ahead I will do my best to answer your question". He said "Erol Bey, now that a Jewish state exists I just don't understand why all the Jews still remaining in Turkey don't do what you did and immigrate to Israel and become Israelis?" Now Orer Bey was no anti-Semite, and he expressed admiration for Israel on more than one occasion. To my mind, what he was saying was, no matter how well we treat Jews in Turkey, giving them full and equal rights as we do now, we can never give them what they can get in a country that is truly theirs. I answered Orer by saying that the question he raised was a matter of individual choice. It does not permit generalization at a level he would like. As to myself, my choosing to become an Israeli was a matter of a confluence of certain circumstances I had no power to influence (Kismet). I was aware that in the answer I gave him I was dodging his question, though, hopefully, elegantly. I don't know if Orer Bey bought my answer, but he was too polite to press the issue.

Status Options for a Jew Living in Turkey At the present day, the status options of Jews living in Turkey are the same as those available for the other two non-Muslim minorities in Turkey. In sheer number terms, the size of the problem has much diminished.

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According to the 1893 census 28% of the population of the Ottoman Empire was non-Muslim. In 1923, at the inauguration of the Republic, the proportion had declined to about 4%. In both these benchmark years, Jews represented about 1 % of the population. During our day, the non-Muslim population of Turkey had declined to less than one per thousand, of which a substantial majority is now Jewish However, no matter what the numbers are, the question of individual choice still arises and it is in the context of this choice that I would like to address the issue. Based on the experience of my own life and for the years in question, there seem to be three options. I don't believe that by and large, these options have been essentially modified over time to our present day. The first choice is to remain with the situation as it is, namely accepting that one belongs to a minority group which will not be accepted and fully identified with the majority, and will not acquire the status of a real Turk in a national sense. To live in peace with such a situation, one has to continue maintaining a low profile, adopt Turkish names and speak native Turkish. All or most of the members of the present day Jewish community can pass the last two tests, and in particular, the language proficiency test. The best that a Jew can hope for in this respect is that Turks will treat him as a tolerated or even welcome foreign guest who is a permanent resident in his country though still a foreigner. The second option is to assimilate into Turkish society as a full de facto member, though without being recognized as a full Turk like I tried to have been. I refer to this option as the option of being the "favorite Jew" of some one, of a group or an institution, as the Jew who is an exception. This is the equivalent of an assimilated English Jew who would call himself an "Englishman of the Mosaic Faith" To be successful in Turkey, under the second option, in maintaining the status of a "special Jew", having an extra layer of skin is desirable so that one is protected from the effects of hearing anti-Semitic remarks now and then, and at times being treated as a stereotype Jew. As to what I mean by this, I heard a story from the days of the Ottoman Empire. The event reputedly took place in 1908, the year in which the only democratically held election was ever held in the Ottoman Empire. Freedom of the press was absolute during this year. At one point, one of the newspapers came out with the following heading: "95% of Members of the Ottoman Parliament are Asses".

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Many of the MP's were outraged by this headline and wanted to punish the newspaperman, all except one M P who remained unperturbed. When his colleagues asked him as to why he does not share their outrage, his answer to them was, "Oh, I belong to the five percent!" This is the kind of attitude a Jew in this category should adopt when he hears anti-Semitic remarks about Jews, namely that he is in the 5% category. The third and surest way for a Jew to become a real Turk is to espouse the Muslim religion in its Sunni denomination. The Ottoman Empire was multi ethnic with no racist or even nationalistic overtones. However, to be an Ottoman with the rights of a first class subject, one had to pass the gate of Islam. Once one did this there was no limit to how far up a particular person could reach. The best example of this case is Sokollu Mehmet Pasha born as a Serb, named Sokolovich. He reached the rank of Sadrazam (equivalent to prime minister), but in fact was the de facto ruler of the Ottoman Empire at its zenith, during the last years of the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent, the whole reign of Selim II and some of the years of the reign of Murat III. Even after the switch from the multi ethnic Ottoman Empire, where the only differentiation of its citizens was based on religion, in the "secular" Turkish Republic, during the years of my youth, a real Turk still had to be a Muslim, just like in Ottoman days. As explained in Annex 2, despite the fact that the Turkish Republic established in 1923 wanted to become a uninational secular state it was still taken for granted that all real Turks were Muslims. The outstanding illustration that supports this conclusion is the Gagavuz Turks (See Annex 2). An additional example, though a somewhat different one is offered by the case of the Donmes (See Annex 1). Why their assimilation into the main stream of Turkishood took no less than three hundred years was because for many generations, they still practiced secretly Jewish rites, as they were required to do by their prophet Shabtai Tsvi. In conclusion, my atheistic father instinctively got it right when he decided to espouse Islam, despite his atheism in that he saw Islam as the gate to Turkishood. His failure was in thinking that all he had to do to be considered a real Turk was to superficially change his religion, and deny his Jewish origins. If he had tried to change his social milieu, acquire more Turkish friends and make a bit more effort to help his children to assimilate, perhaps by arranging lessons for them on how to be good Muslims it might have worked. After this kind of half-hearted phony life I was made to live for thirteen whole years, and the most formative ones at that, Father understood that he had failed and hence his decision to go back from being a nominal Muslim to being a Jew!

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I cannot be considered as blameless in this matter, no matter how young I was, or whether I knew if I was coming or going in all major matters of my life. Hypothetically, I could have followed the example of Melahat. She was about my age, and with no support from her parents, who were much like mine, she succeeded through her own efforts to cross the line between Jew and Turk by becoming a true Muslim, much to the horror of her parents which she ignored. I could have tried to do the same.

ANNEX 1 THE DONMES

The "Donmes" (in Turkish: Turncoats) are the descendants of the followers of Shabtai Tsvi who too converted to the Muslim faith as an act of support to his conversion. Shabtai Tsvi was the last of the Jewish false prophets, and the most colorful among them. Initially the Ottoman Rulers observed his shenanigans and peripatetics with benign indifference mixed with mild amusement. However by the first years of the 1660's he had succeeded in creating around himself some 80,000 followers among the Jews of the Spanish exile that had made the Ottoman Empire their home, not counting his followers in European countries. 1 Eventually, he started being referred to by his Jewish supporters as their "King" with heavy hints that he was destined to take over the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Added to this, Tsvi was having a destabilizing affect on Ottoman Jews who began to neglect their normal work. Since the Messiah was about to be crowned what was the point in working? As Jews at the time played an important role in the economy of the Empire, its economic life started to show signs of strain. Travelers in Turkey in the 17 th century all noted the fact that trade, and foreign trade in particular, was almost exclusively in the hand of Jews. Jewish talk about the coming of the Messianic Kingdom alarmed the Turkish authorities as heralding the disruption of normal life and the cessation of business activity in the Jewish Community. 3 Unexpected large movements of Jews from city to city depending on where Tsvi had "temporarily set up his residence" created price inflation in key cities, like Selanik, Istanbul, Edirne, and Izmir.

'Mechoiilan, p. 66, Megas, p. 185. ^What follows is an anecdote I heard from Mother in 1941, when I was eleven year old. Mother had a Donme friend from whom she had heard the story of Shabtai Tsvi. According to her friend a few days before his arrest, Tsvi had sent to the Ottoman Palace a delegation of his emissaries who informed the Sultan that God had ordered him to take over from the Sultan the ruling of the Ottoman Empire, that he would shortly come over to Istanbul for an orderly transfer of power and asked the Sultan to make the appropriate preparations for this purpose. With this kind of disposition, Ottoman authorities did not think any more that Tsvi was just being funny anymore. They immediately ordered his arrest and charged him with sedition. It seems that for a reason unknown God had not communicated this order of his to the Sultan. 3 Sholem, p. 449.

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His case became important enough to be handled personally by Kopriilii Fazil Ahmet Pasa, the Sadrazam (Grand Vizier). Ahmet Pasa was the de facto ruler of the Empire at that time; Sultan Mehmet the Fourth (Avci Mehmet), who was the formal ruler, spent more time hunting than running the affairs of the Empire. At some point the authorities of the Empire decided that enough was enough, and on September 15 1966 in Edirne, they put Shabtai Tsvi on trial for sedition. Tsvi was given the choice of either facing execution preceded by extensive torture, or becoming a Muslim. He chose to become a Muslim. Once he did that, he was treated by the Ottoman state with exceptional and rather incomprehensive leniency. He was given the name of Mehmet Vani Efendi; the title of "Kapiciba§i" (The chief Gate Keeper of the Palace of the Sultan) and awarded a handsome, salary to boot. 1 In many Christian countries of his time, for example in Spain, he would have been burnt at the stake after first having his bones broken. If he had accepted conversion to the Christian religion, his reward would have been the commuting of his sentence to death by burning at the stake, to death by garroting. "... Until 1672, Tsvi lived in Andrianople (Edirne), and sometimes in Constantinople (Istanbul). He succeeded in being allowed to lead a double life, performing the duties of a Muslim, but also performing and observing large parts of Jewish ritual." During this time he was jailed again a number of times, exiled, and in between, again forgiven. But by 1673, the Authorities finally lost their patience with him and expelled him, according to one source, to Kastoryano in Albania. According to a second source he was expelled to Dulsigno (Turkish name Ulgiin, Serbian name at present Ulcinj), at the extreme southern end of the Adriatic coastline of Yugoslavia, this time with finality. 4 He died in 1676 or 1677. The location of his grave is not known because neither Ottoman authorities nor the Jewish establishment were interested in making its' location known to prevent it's becoming a destination for pilgrimage. Many Jews converted to the Muslim faith immediately following Tsvi's conversion in 1666. The largest estimate of their number was 3000 persons. Most of them were located in Salonika, Izmir, Edirne and Istanbul. 5 Cholera, p. 681. Judaica, p. 1238. 3 Judaica, p. 1238. "teholem, p. 883. %lmaliah, p. 16. 2

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This means that only a small number of Shabtai Tsvi's followers were actually prepared to go the whole way in following the path Tsvi took and converting to the Muslim religion. Those that did convert became known as "Donmes" in Turkish and "Sazanikos" (Baby carps!) in Ladino. 1 Following the example of Shabtai Tsvi, they, too, followed the practice of acting like Muslims, outwardly, but secretly observing Jewish ritual as set by the eighteen rules, which Tsvi established for his followers to observe. According to rule number eleven, Donmes were not allowed to marry anyone except other Donmes. The result was large-scale inbreeding. Eventually, the Jewish establishment stamped out these original Donme communities by using carrot and stick methods directed at their Rabbis and economic pressure on Donme notables engaged in trade. The only Donme community that survived to the present time is the second one established in Salonika. Surprisingly, the community came into being in 1683, seven years after the death of Shabtai Tsvi. The background to the conversion lay with his second wife, Yohevet, who was the daughter of Rabbi Filozof, a prominent Salonika Rabbi and one of his biggest supporters. Tsvi had asked Rabbi Philozof for the hand of his daughter and they got married. The marriage eventually led to the "mass conversion to Islam" that took place in 1683 involving 300 families (about 1500 persons.) How and why this "mass conversion" occurred is too complicated a story to tell in this short Annex. Within three years of its creation, this new and second Donme sect of Salonika split into three Zumres (sub sects). They were called the "tzmirlis", the "Yakublus" and the "Konyozos". 4 They can be distinguished by how much they followed Jewish ritual, of course in secrecy. Soon after the split, the subsects were not on speaking terms with each other. The one among them that was furthest removed from Jewish religion was the "Yakublus". In mid-19 t h century, the respective populations of the three subs-sects were estimated as 2500, 4000, and 3500, respectively, or a total of 10,000. In 1841, the Muslim population of Salonika, Turks and Donmes together, totaled 25,000. 5 The Donmes could neither assimilate through intermarriage, nor shed their identities as part time underground Jews because of their obligation to observe the eighteen rules established by Shabtai Tsvi, which controlled their lives. 'Elmaliah, p. 20. Govsa, p. 71. 'iSarnai, p. 91. ^ l m a l i a h , p. 2, Govsa, pp. 73-79. ^Vakalopoulos. 2

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At some point the Ottoman establishment, started getting tired of the now Muslim now Jewish prevarications of the Donmes. In 1859, during the reign of Sultan Abdiilmecid, Hiiseyin Hiisnii Pa§a, the Governor of Salonika Province (Vilayet) initiated an investigation in order to determine whether the Donmes were real Muslims. All the three sub-sects were investigated. The investigating entity came to two conclusions. The first one was that Donmes were not real Muslims. The second one was that they were a harmless lot and should be left alone. 1 Beginning with the years of the mid-19 th century, the Donmes began to abandon Ladino, the language of their Jewish ancestors and started adopting Turkish as their mother tongue; also they dropped, altogether, their secret Hebrew names. By the beginning of the 20 t h century, their number in Salonika had grown to between 11,000-13,000 representing about half of the Muslim population of the city. As to how many Donmes were expatriated from Greece to Turkey following the signature of the Lausanne treaty, according one source, the estimate is 20,000. This number appears to be very high because after the Balkan Wars of 1912/13 and the transfer of Salonika to Greek sovereignty, Donmes had already started immigrating to Turkey, mostly to Istanbul and some to izmir. Others immigrated overseas, and in particular to the United States. Thus, the number of Donmes that were actually repatriated to Turkey in 1924 was a lot less than 20,000, more likely between

6000-10,000. The issue of whether Donmes are Turks or not came to a head, when the Lausanne Peace Treaty was negotiated between Greece and Turkey. One of the articles of the Treaty established the principal of a population exchange, with Turks in Greece were to be transferred to the Turkish Republic, and Greeks living in Turkey to be transferred to Greece. The Jews in both countries were to remain in situ. The two negotiating parties agreed to a limited number of exceptions, and they are described in Annex 2. The population of Thessalonica was not one of them. Neither side had a clear definition as to who was a Turk and who was a Greek for the purpose of establishing who would be transferred from one country to the other. The Donmes caused a disagreement between Greeks and Turks about whether they were Turks or Jews for purposes of the population ^Elmaliah, p. 23. Megas, p. 185. 3 Zorlu, p. 15. 2

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exchange. Turks maintained that though appearing to be Muslims, and therefore Turks, they were really Jews, and so they would not accept their repatriation to Turkey. Greece, on the other side maintained that they should be transferred to Turkey because they were neither Greeks, nor Jews. In the end a compromise was reached to the effect that both sides agreed to turn to the Chief Rabbi of Istanbul for a ruling on whether the Donmes were Jews or not. As could be expected, the Chief Rabbi decreed that the Donmes were not Jews. As a result the Turks agreed to repatriate them to Turkey together with all the other Turks, or rather Muslims, who were repatriated. By the 1950's the last of the Donmes had probably shed entirely their allegiance to the secret practices of their residual Jewish religion. In fact, like trends in some other parts of Turkish society, they were shedding their allegiance to the Muslim religion as well. The trend towards secularization made assimilation into the Turkish main stream easier through intermarriage. This process has much accelerated over the past twenty-five years. In most likelihood, and in less than a generation, the Donmes will disappear as a community whose members can be identified. They will be relegated to a footnote, a curiosity in the history of mankind. It thus took more than three hundred years for Donmes to become acceptable as bona fide Muslims and therefore Turks. The inordinate length of time was not due to their origin being Jewish. Ottomans had nothing against Jews, and in fact they got on with them rather well. What the Ottoman establishment had against Donmes was their dragging their feet for too long in dropping completely their Jewish religious practices. The Turkish Republic adopted the same attitude that prevailed towards them during Ottoman rule. This attitude follows from the principle that even in the new secular Republic of Turkey if you are not a real Muslim you still can't be a real Turk.

ANNEX 2 THE ROLE RELIGION PLAYED IN DEFINING WHO IS A TURK

During Ottoman Times "This was an empire under the rule of... religious Islam, but it was still to be a cosmopolitan empire, embodying among its population all races and creeds living together in order and harmony. Such was the system devised and established throughout Muslim dominions to cover the status of religious minorities. They were raayas, or literally flocks organized into Millets, selfgoverning communities preserving their own usages under a religious head responsible to the central power for the good behavior of its people. " The subjects of the Empire were divided into two categories by their religion. The first was the Muslims who were first class subjects, and the second non-Muslims who were second-class subjects. The rulers of the Ottoman Empire maintained a monolithic view of those of its Muslim subjects. Once a Muslim, it did not matter if one was a Turk, Arab, or Kurd, or one of the smaller Muslim ethnic groups such as Circassians, Albanians, Tartars, Bosnians, or Laz. It did not matter either which language one spoke as one's mother tongue. As to ethnic groups of non-Muslim origin they were identified not only by their religion but on the basis of their ethnic identities as well. In 1893, they comprised three large ones, Bulgarians, Greeks and Armenians, with nationalistic and separatist ambitions and small ones like Jews, Gypsies and the mono-physicists of southeastern Anatolia And northern Mesopotamia. Among them, Jews had a special status in the Ottoman world, a de facto, if not a de jure one. This was because the Muslim religion is not ideologically anti-Jewish in a religious sense like the Christian religious is (The Jews killed Jesus track). In addition, Jews lacked national ambitions and wanted nothing more than being good Ottomans. Despite their being non Muslims, Jews were perceived as good subjects by Ottoman authorities, and were collcctively recognized by them as "En Sadik Millet" (Most Loyal nation), compared of course to all the other millets of the Empire who were non-Muslims. 1 Kinross, pp. 112-113. ^Rodrigue.

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Population data of the 1893 census is a good base on which the population spectrum of the Ottoman Empire can be observed. 1 During that year, the Empire had a population of eighteen million comprising thirteen million Muslims and five million non-Muslims. Muslim Turks were to be found in the category of Muslim subjects, but it is not possible to identify their number for reasons explained.

The Case of Gagavuz Turks It is an intriguing one. How the Ottoman State, and later, how the Turkish Republic handled them highlights the importance of being a Muslim in defining who is a Turk and who is not. The Gagavuz Turks are a unique ethnic group among all the large and diverse Turkic people that stretch from Turkey in the west, all the way across Central Asia towards the east. Their Turkish origin is generally not disputed, they speak a Turkish dialect as their mother tongue, and their family names are Turkish names, but religion-wise they are Orthodox Christians. This last attribute of theirs makes them unique among the Turkic groups in the world all of whom are Muslims (For more detailed information on them see Supplement A to this Annex). During Ottoman times the Gagavuz could not be classified in the same category as Turks were, bccausc Turks were classified in the Muslim category. However, it seems there was also reluctance on the part of Ottoman authorities to identify them as a separate ethnic group like all other nonMuslim ethnic groups. Rather than face the issue of their Turkishood, Ottoman authorities did not give them a Millet identity and preferred to show them either as Bulgarians or Greeks depending on where they lived. As a result the Gagavuz got the worst of both worlds, that is that they could not have first subject rights because they were not Muslims, but at the same time they could not get the rights of a Millet either, like Christians and Jews did, because they were Turks. The only Ottoman or Turkish source I came across in which the Gagavuz are clearly and simply identified as "Turkish Christians" is in a book written by Aram Andonyan, a non-Muslim Ottoman subject, and member of the Armenian Millet.

'Karpat, pp. 237-273.

^Andonyan p. 77.

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The Ottoman attitude to the Gagavuz created an ethnic identity vacuum that all the Christian nations of the Balkans, and in particular the Greeks, the Bulgarians were only too happy to fill. In the wave of conflicting claims over who had a majority in the different Vilayets of the Ottoman provinces in the Balkans as a basis for territorial claims on a uni-nationalistic basis, both the Bulgarians and the Greeks were delighted with the indifference Ottoman authorities showed towards the ethnic identity of the Gagavuz. The result was that Greeks maintained, that the Gagavuz were Turkish speaking Greeks; Bulgarians, claimed that they were Turkish speaking Bulgarians, and Rumanians said they were Turkish speaking Rumanians. Over the Province of Dobruca, in present day Bulgaria, where the Gagavuz have an absolute majority, Rumanian nationalists fought it out with Bulgarian nationalists on whether the Gagavuz were Turkish speaking Bulgarians or Turkish speaking Rumanians. Over a period of fifty years, between the late 19 th century and World War Two, the Province changed hands between the two countries three times. The same thing happened in Western Thrace between Greece and Bulgaria. Over the same period Western Thrace also changed hands four times between Bulgaria and Greece. There was no one around to blow the whistle on these contending nationalist claims and tell them, that the Gagavuz are neither Greek, nor Rumanian, nor Bulgarian but plain Turkish, and if they are Christians, so what?

During the Transition Period Between Empire And Republic, The subject of "Who is a Turk" became an issue when the Lausanne Treaty was negotiated. As already mentioned in Annex 1, the Turkish Republic adopted the principle that all Muslims living in Greece were to be considered as Turks and all Christian Greeks living in Turkey would be transferred to Greece. Exceptions were made for Muslims living in western Thrace, and for Orthodox Greeks living in Istanbul and in the islands of Imroz and Tenedos (now Bozcaada), but these were geographic exceptions, not ideological ones. The authorities of the future Republic of Turkey accepted the Ottoman model of defining who a Turk is by religion. As a result Turkey agreed to the transfer of Gagavuz Turks that had lived in Eastern Thrace (Kirklareli, Edirne, and Liileburgaz) over centuries, to Greece as "Greeks who spoke Turkish as their mother tongue". There is no precise information on the numbers involved, but according to best estimates they are in the range of a high four-

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digit figure. In addition, the Turkish delegation agreed to accept into Turkey Bulgarian Pomaks, and Gypsies from Greece, on the grounds that they were Muslims. The Karamanides (Karamanlis) of Central Anatolia, who were also Turkish in their origin, and Turkish speaking, but Greek Orthodox suffered the same fate. "In 1923, under the population exchange between Greece and Turkey many Gagavuz and other Turks who were members of the Christian Greek 2 Orthodox minority" were sent off to Greece."

During the Turkish Republic Years of My Story Given the declared intention of Turkey to become a uni-national and secular state, to define before the law who a Turk is, should have been the easiest thing in the world. The definition would have been, anyone who is a Turkish citizen under Turkish law is Turkish, just like anyone who is a French citizen under French law is French, and an Italian citizen is Italian. It looked as if such an approach was initially accepted, as according to the draft Turkish constitution that was prepared, article 88 stated, "The Turkish State considers all its population as Turkish without regard to religion and race". Nevertheless, second thoughts about article 88 started to appear in the eyes of legislators. It was maintained that the draft article 88 was too simplistic and required some fine-tuning. Ahmet Hamdi Bozok, an M P commented, "How are we going to justify the firing of Armenian, Greek and Jewish employees of public bodies under article 88?" 4 A large amount of soul searching and mental agonizing followed, which Rifat Bali comprehensively describes in a book he wrote. 5 In a talk he gave at the Ankara School for Male Teachers in 1923, Hamdullah Suphi Tannover defined a Turk as "A person who speaks Turkish, is a Muslim, and is a Turkophile or a lover of Turkishood. Between fellow Turks, there is a unity of language, of religion, and of wishes". 6 According to Ziya Gokalp, a prominent ideologist of the early years of the Turkish iAkgoniil, p. 32. ^Ozfatura, 3 Bali 1, p. 102. 4 Bali 1. 5 Bali 1, p. 103. 6 Bali 1, p. 102.

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Republic, "Turkishood is a cultural norm combined with a moral norm of Islam". 1 The task that stood in front of the legislators thus became: How to preserve the idea that Turkey was a uninational and secular state in which all its citizens are Turkish while at the same time give the State authorities enough freedom to enable, as the need may arise, to differentiate between citizen and citizen depending on their religious or ethnic origins. The final wording of article 88 in the Constitution that was adopted in 1924 was: "The Turkish State considers all its population as Turkish without regard to religion and race in the context of their citizenship". By comparison with the original draft article 88 its final draft would provoke the exclamation "Vive la petite différence"! Failing to find an original definition of who is a Turk in a uni-national and secular context, the new Republic had to fall back on a slightly modified version of the six hundred year old Ottoman model, ie that to claim Turkishood one has to be a Muslim, and if he is not one than he is not a real Turk. However, the original Ottoman version of the model was a lot more progressive than its new version formulated by the Turkish republic. For one thing, during Ottoman times, non-Muslim ethnic groups had pretty extensive minority rights to manage their own affairs. In the New Turkish Republic they had none. In the multi-cultural set-up of Ottoman times, members of minorities could rise to high degrees of eminence in both the cultural and public sector. Some of the eminent composers of Turkish music were Armenians and Jews. In the public service Noradunkyan Efendi could rise to the post of Minister of foreign affairs. There were many Jews and Armenians and some Greeks in the Civil Service, often in high posts. In the new Turkish Republic, they would not even be accepted as starters in a low grade. In the field of medicine Jews rose to eminence. In the field of finance it was Armenians and Jews. In the economy, it was Greeks and Armenians. The differentiation made between Turkish citizens by their religion was extensive during the years of my story. With the onset of the Republic, nonMuslims members of the civil service dating from Ottoman times were summarily fired. This practice was followed in all economic entities that were nationalized and became state enterprises. Army service, which minority members could avoid, during Ottoman days, following the payment of the cizye tax, could not now be avoided. But the "military service" that members of minorities were now obligated to perform was in the form of forced hard labor.

^Aktar, p. 95. Bali 1, p. 104.

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In taxation, equality was preserved, except in the case of one large exception, namely the capital tax. Differentiation between tax payers is observed all over the world, for example as when people with high incomes pay a higher proportion of their income as tax. However, to the best of my knowledge, I know of no case where tax differentiation was applied by religious affiliation!

SUPPLEMENT A THE GAGAVUZ TURKS

There is not enough information on Gagavuz Turks to describe their history to the full. The information that is available can be classified into three sorts. The first are Turkish sources that can be considered to be relatively reliable because Turks were not interested in flagging the Gagavuz as Turks like themselves. The least reliable sources are Bulgarian and Greek because these have a vested interest in proving that Gagavuz are not Turks. Lastly there are sources that are neither Bulgarian, Greek, nor Turkish and these should be considered as the most reliable "The origin and early history of the Gagavuz are somewhat obscure. As in the East, it is not linguistic or ethnological features that are considered but religion alone... They were officially... identified with the Bulgars, and in [Ottoman] statistics classcd with them... In popular language... they are correctly called Provoslavniye Turki} There is a wide degree of consensus on their origin as being Turkish. This is implicit in the name itself with Gagavuz being considered to be a distorted rendition of Gok Oguz. It is also possible that the name is a distorted version of "Keykavus"-, the reference is to the Seljuk Sultan, Izzedin Keykavus the Second, who according to some researchers moved from Anatolia to Dobroudja, and the north Bulgarian black Sea coast in the 13 th century following the pressure exerted by the Mongol „2 invasion. The Gagavuz Turks are an ethnic group that belongs to the family of Turkic Altaic peoples. There are various theories as to which one of them they belong. The first theory is that like Ottoman Turks they are of Oguz origin. Their language belongs to the Southwest "Oguz" family of the Turkish languages. In fact it represents a purer form of Turkish than its Ottoman counterpart that was heavily infiltrated with Arabic and Iranian words. According to other theories, the Gagavuz may also be the heirs of Kumans, Karakalpaks or Pecenek family of Turks. 'Encyclopedia of Islam, p. 127, Chukova, p. 5, TurkDunyasi Internet Station. -'Chukova, p. 5. 2

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The Gagavuz have the same geographic origin as the Seljuk Turks, namely central Asia. There are two theories on how they moved west into the Balkan countries. The first is by way of what at present is known as southern Ukraine, where in an interim period of their dispersion they lived as nomads. 1 The second theory is that as referred to earlier on, they essentially followed the same route as the Seljuks did, that is, they first came into Anatolia via Iran and Azerbaijan but preceded them in their arrival to Anatolia. 2 At the time of the arrival of the Gagavuz, Anatolia was ruled by Byzantium, and one can therefore presume that they accepted Christianity as a condition to their being allowed to settle there. In 1071, Alpaslan, the Seljuk, invaded Byzantium and defeated the Byzantine army in the battle of Malazgirt. During the course of the battle, the Gagavuz changed sides and joined Alpaslan who then conquered Anatolia following his victory. According to this theory some or most of the Gagavuz did not arrive in the Balkan countries via the Ukraine, but rather, got there via Anatolia. There is no way to establish which one of the two theories is the correct one. It is possible that both are correct to one extent or another. Whether they came from the north via the Ukraine, or the east via Anatolia, the Gagavuz settled in the provinces of the Ottoman Empire that eventually became the present day sovereign countries of the Ukraine, Rumania, Moldova, Bulgaria and Greece, and partly in Eastern Thrace, which remained within the boundaries of the Turkish Republic of our day. The sixteenth century found them settling in rural areas around Kirklareli, Liileburgaz, Tirnova, in Eastern and Northern Thrace, also known as Eastern Rumeli, (in Stara Zagora, Yambol, Elhovo, Burgaz, and Haskovo) that was annexed to the Kingdom of Bulgaria in 1885. The Gagavuz also settled in the Vilayet of Edirne inside its pre-1912 borders, and in particular in the western counties of Serez and Dedeaga«?. In southwestern Ukraine they settled in the Ismail and Zaporoje provinces.

^Encyclopedia of Islam, p. 127. 6 z f a t u r a , p. 1. a.. Ozfatura, p. 1. 2

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The Gagavuz appeared to be scattered over large areas, and in only in a few of them had enough representation to reach critical mass as a cohesive ethnic group. The principal areas where they achieved this were Dobruca, and Southern Moldavia in Rumania. The estimate of the Gagavuz of our day living in various Balkan countries are about two millions, though by far the greatest majority among them are in advanced stages of cultural assimilation and in most cases cannot even be effortlessly identified as Gagavuz in the population statistics of the countries they live in. According to the [Bulgarian] census of 1992, only 1468 persons declared themselves Gagavouzes. 1

^Chukova, pp. 2-3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DONMES Barnai, Yaakov, Shabtaut, Heibetim Hevratiim, (Shabtaism, Social Aspects), The Zalman Shazar Center for Israeli History,- Barnai Elmaliah, Avraham Ketotav veseridei tenuato hamehihit beyameinu Ele (His Sect, and the Remains of his Movements in our Times), Jerusalem, 1937, Elmaliah Encyclopedia Judaica, Jerusalem, 1971, - Judaica Govsa, Ibrahim Alaettin, Sabatay Sevi, Semih Liitfi Kitabevi, Istanbul, - Govsa Labes, Yehuda Mehkarei Shabtaut (Researches on Shabtaism), Hotsaat Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 1991,- Labes Megas, Yanis, Images of the Community of Salonika, 1897-1917, Kapon Editions, Athens, 1993, - Megas Sholem, Gershom, Sabbatai Sevi, The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, Bollinngen Series, Princeton University Press 1973, - Sholem Vakalopulos, Apostolos Memoirs of Old Thessalonica, Aristotle University of Thessalonica, Thessalonica, 1985, - Vakalopulos Zorlu, Ilgaz, Evet, Ben Selanikliyim, Turkiye Sabetayciligi, (Yes, I am from Salonica, the Donmes of Turkey), beige Uluslar arasi Yayincilik, Istanbul 1998, - Zorlu

GAGAVUZ TURKS Andonyan, Aram, Balkan Savaglari, (Original in Armenian), Sander Yayinlari, Istanbul, 1975. -Andonyan Chukova, Dr. Roumiana, Bulgarian Gagaouzes, Ethnic and social Enigma, Chukova Turk Diinyasi ve Ttirkoloji Sitesi, Kocabay Bilgi Hizmetleri,- Kocabay Encyclopedia of Islam, pp. 127-128, E.J. Braill Ltd., 1924,- Encyclopedia of Islam Necati Ozfatura, "Gagavuz Tiirkleri Ilgi Bekliyor" Turkiye Gazetesi, 24 Eyliil 1998, (Gagavuz Turks are waiting to be Noticed), - Ozfatura Turk Ansiklopedisi (Turkish Encyclopedia), Volume XVII pp. 110-111, Milli Egitim Basimevi, Ankara 1969, -Ttirk Ansiklopedisi,

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OTHERS Books Aktar, Ayhan Varhk Vergisi ve TUrkle§tirme Politikalari (The Capital Tax and the Politics of Turkification), ileti^im Yaymlari, Istanbul, 2000, - Aktar 1 Bali, Rifat, Cumhuriyet Yillarinda Turk Yahudileri, Bir Ttirkle§me Seriiveni, 19231945 (an Adventure in Turkification, 1923-1945), ileti§im Yayinlari, Istanbul, 1999. -Bali 1 Bali, Rifat, Cumhuriyet Yillarinda Turk Yahudileri, Aliya: Bir Toplu Gogun Oykusti, 1946-1949, (Turkish Jews in the Years of the Republic, Aliya: the story of a mass immigration), ileti§im Yayinlari, Istanbul, 2003. -Bali 2 Henderson, Hubert, Supply and Demand, The Cambridge Economic Handbooks, Nisbey&Co. Ltd. Reprinted (Revised) Edition, May 1932, - Henderson Haker, Erol, Once Upon a Time Jews Lived in Kirklareli, The Story of the Adato Family, 1800-1934, The Isis Press, Istanbul, 2003 - Haker Herzl, Theodore, Mivhar Kitvei Herzl, (Selected Publications of Herzl), Translated by Rabbi Binyamin, Asher Barash, Avraham Kimhi and others, in Twelve Volumes, The Publishing house of Mitspeh, Tel Aviv, 1934, -Herzl Kara^am, Nazif, Kirklareli, Efsaneden Gergege (From Legend to Reality), Belediye Yayinlari, Kirklareli, 1995. -Kara^am Kinross, Lord, The Ottoman Centuries, Morrow Quill Paperbacks, New York, 1977. -Kinross Memmi, Alber, Portrait of a Jew, translated from French by Elizabeth Abbot, Eyre and Spottiswood, London, 1963 Meshoulan, Henry (Editor), Les Juifs d'Espagne Histoire d'une Diaspora 14921992, (The Jews of Spain, the History of an Exile, 1492-1992), Liana Levi, Paris, 1992, - M e s h o u l a n Okte F., Varlik Vergisi Faciasi (The Tragedy of the Capital Tax), Nebioglu Yayinevi, Istanbul, 1951,- Okte Popper, K. R. The Open Society and its Enemies, Third Edition (Revised), Routledge and Kegan and Paul Ltd, London, 1957, - Popper Reitlinger, Gerald, The final solution, Shepard Book Ltd. London, 1961, Reitlinger Sabine, George, A History of Political Theory, Third Edition, (Revised and Enlarged), George G Harrap&Co. Ltd, London, 1952, - Sabine Shirer, William, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Fawcet and Publications, Inc., Greenich, Connecticut, 1959,- Shirer

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Articles Aktar, Ayhan "Trakya Yahudi Olaylarim 'Dogru' Yorumlamak" (The right way to Comment on the Events in Thrace), Tarih ve Toplum, Kasim 1996, Sayi 155 pp. 45-56, -Aktar 2 Karabatak, Halil, "1934 Trakya Olaylari ve Yahudiler" (The 1934 Events of Thrace and Jews), Tarih ve Toplum, §ubat 1996, Sayi 146, pp. 68-150. -Karabatak Karpat, Kemal, "Ottoman Population Records and the Census of 1881/82-1893", International Journal of Middle East Studies, 9, (1978), pp. 237-27, -Karpat Aron Rodrigue, "The Mass Destruction of Armenians and Jews in the 20 th Century" in Historical Perspective, Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J Shaller eds, Chronos Verlag, 2002, pp. 303-316, - Rodrigue Miscellaneous Bali, Rifat, "Honor Roll Call list of Turkish Jews Who Fell in Combat in Israel's Wars", 08.08.2001 - Bali 3