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Netflix ‘The Club’ connects mainland Turkey with Jewish heritage | Art and Culture News

Istanbul, Turkey – In the middle of the Netflix-era drama series, the fictional character Matilda Aseo, played by Turkish actress Gökçe Bahadir, takes her daughter to see the building she grew up in.

The series revolves around Matilda, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family who has spent the last 17 years in prison and has recently been released. But plans to emigrate to Israel are cut short after his daughter Rasel, his only surviving relative, is reunited.

“I wanted to leave immediately, without thinking, because this street, this building, reminds me of how lonely I am,” Matilda told Raseli in a scene showing characters bathing in the dim light of warm windows. of his former family home, the sound of strangers now living there pours into the street.

Released earlier this month, The Club tells the story of a mother-daughter couple in the back of a 1950s Istanbul nightclub when its employees and owners, along with the city’s non-Muslim residents, turn their lives upside down. A passionate patriot who captures the people.

One of the most watched Netflix shows in Turkey, The Club is a nostalgia for the cosmopolitan identity of Istanbul’s Pera district, and laments the decline of that heritage, which continues to linger on the facades of elegant historic buildings, in street names. , and in churches and synagogues that are still used by those who are diminishing the city’s Muslim minority.

Cosmopolitan past

Matilda belongs to a Sephardic Jewish family, descended from about 40,000 Jews, and after being expelled from Spain in 1492, Bayezid II received an invitation from the Sultan to settle in the Ottoman Empire.

On the cobbled streets surrounding the Galata Tower, Matilda and Rasel are part of a small but lively Sephardic community that speaks Ladin, a mixture of Hebrew, Spanish and Arabic that still has thousands of speakers today. Matilda Sabbath attends dinners and Purim celebrations, weddings, and synagogue services, all of which are portrayed in detail to be correct for the show’s unusual length.

Many people watching the show tweet, or ask, ‘Who are these people?’

Nesi Altaras, editor, Avlaremoz

Bahadir, who plays Matilda, was tutored twice a week by a film consultant Forti Barokas for three months, and also writes for Ladinoz for El Amaneser and Salom, two Turkish papers that continue to be partially published in an otherwise endangered language.

Only this opportunity for dialogue, which often switches indirectly between Ladino and Turkish, is enough to arouse the interest of many Turkish audiences, said Nesi Altaras, editor of Avlaremoz, an online publication focusing on the Jewish community in Turkey.

“The bar is very low already, because people know it, so a lot of people are tweeting the session, or asking,‘ Who are these people, what is this group, what language are they speaking? ’” Altaras, his. To a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul, he told Al Jazeera. “Turkish mainstream society has become unknown to Jews living in Turkey, who have lived here for hundreds of years, so I think the show is really presented as a kind of teaching moment.”

Wealth tax estate

Expressing how different the city was 70 years ago is not the most laudable aspect of The Club, however. The audience soon finds out what happened to Matilda’s family.

In 1942, the Turkish government, which at the time was run by a single party, imposed a new tax on the public to raise funds that would have been needed if the country had been damaged by World War II. Wealth Tax officials were specifically designed to deprive non-Muslims of wealth (both Jews and Armenians and Greek Christians) and it was executed incredibly well. Of the approximately 350 million Turkish lira collected when it was abolished under international pressure in 1944, at least 290 million came from non-Muslim citizens, in many cases people who had been ordered to hand over more than 200 percent of their property. 15 days. Those who could not pay the full amount – according to some estimates, were sent to labor camps, where historians say a few dozen died. In The Club, it is revealed that Matilda’s father and brother Askale were sent to such a camp in the eastern city, never to return.

Altaras ’families were also affected, not only in Istanbul, but throughout Turkey.

“A great-grandfather went to forced labor camps in Askal; the other two lost everything, ”he said. “This happened in different provinces: Adana, Tekirdag and Istanbul. My family was affected on all sides, and unfortunately this is not the only one. You can find almost identical stories of other families of Jews, Armenians, and Greeks living today. ”

You can find almost identical stories of other Jewish, Armenian, Greek families living today.

Nesi Altaras, editor, Avlaremoz

Altaras says his great-grandfather, who spent eight months in a labor camp, was by no means wealthy. “She worked as a mechanized scissor support, cutting dresses with pre-made fabric. So he was not someone who would make a lot of money, not a wealthy industry, but a person who worked with his hands and had a craft. ”

When the Wealth Tax was announced on November 11, 1942, the streets of Pera became a garden sale overnight, as non-Muslim families desperately tried to raise money to pay taxes. “Everything, including my grandfather’s toys, was sold at auction,” Altar said. “Colored pencils, a wooden toy horse, a sofa, carpets: all the household things were sold, and yet they were so far from paying the debt that the government had, where my great-grandfather had to go. the camp ”.

The show’s producers used the nightclub to gather characters affected by the Wealth Tax, as well as increase pressure to exclude non-Muslims and conservative Muslim citizens who were suddenly struggling with life in a fast-paced and unforgivable urbanization of Istanbul.

“We wanted to deal with the idea of ​​living with differences, creating fictional characters and deciding to tell the process of people who have been discriminated against in society for various reasons, coming together under the roof of a club and having a family. ”Said producer Zeynep Günay Tan in an interview with Istanbul magazine Bant Mag.

In their interactions, the characters and the audience slowly learn about the multicultural fabric of the city.

Haci, a fictional Muslim town who went to Istanbul with the intention of working as a musician at the club, told his manager on a Friday afternoon that he could not take a break to go to Friday prayer. The same director tells Matilda that she has to work too and that she has to miss the Sabbath dinner that night. Later, Matilda walks down a street in her Jewish neighborhood accompanied by Haci, and the women pause as they listen to a Ladino song. Haci wonders who they are. “They are Sephardic Jews who emigrated here a few centuries ago, just like me,” says Matilda.

“Like us,” Haci replied.

The club is full of such moments, showing organic interactions and opportunities for mutual understanding that would have been inevitable for the residents of Peru in the turbulent 1950s.

Consciousness, but little effort in justice

But that awareness did not prevent future violence. Rumors of tensions between Greek Christians in Turkey and Muslim Turks in Cyprus, for example, spread in organized pogroms against non-Muslims in 1955, mostly Muslim mafias that destroyed thousands of minority homes, businesses and places of worship.

The Jewish community in Istanbul continued to target the far right for the past two decades: in 2003, for example, a series of car bombs struck the synagogues of Istanbul, including the city’s Neve Shalom synagogue in Galata, which served the city’s Ladino Jewish community. .

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan referred to what he called the “fascist mentality” of the one-party era before 1950 from time to time to the Republican People’s Opposition Party, the opposition that ruled at the time, and how it treated minorities. “They were ethnically cleansed because they had a different ethnic cultural identity,” Erdogan said in 2009. “It’s time to ask ourselves why this happened and what we’ve learned from all this.”

But neither Erdogan nor other Turkish leaders have taken specific steps to address the Wealth Tax, the 1955 pogrom or other attacks on minorities. The Democratic Party, which won the country’s first free and fair election in 1950, campaigned for a commitment to pay Wealth Tax payments, but never kept its word.

Activists talking about the forced migrations and mass deaths of Armenians in 1915, such as the events some have called genocide, are still on trial in Turkey for criminalizing “insulting” the Turkish state, or the country’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In 2007, far-right extremists in Istanbul shot Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, director of the Armenian-language newspaper Agos.

Every year on November 11, due to the imposition of the Wealth Tax, Garo Paylan, a member of parliament for the Peoples Democratic Party, himself an Armenian Christian from the eastern city of Diyarbakir, also presents a bill calling for a parliamentary investigation into the tax and why no one. was compensated.

“Every year his interrogation request is not even voted on; it doesn’t even fit into a committee, ”Altaras said. “That would be the first step [to resolving the Wealth Tax issue] for we still do not know the whole list of all those who paid the tax, all those sent to a forced labor camp, all those whose lives were ruined, or just how much was lost. ‘




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