Netflix ‘The Club’ connects Turkey to a major Jewish heritage | Articles and Culture Stories
Istanbul, Turkey – At the center of the Netflix Kalabu drama, comedian Matilda Aseo, actress and actress Gökçe Bahadir, takes her formerly different daughter to see the house where she grew up.
The story revolves around Matilda, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family who spent 17 years in prison and was recently released. But his idea of moving to Israel was shortened when he was reunited with his daughter Rasel, his only surviving relative.
“I wanted to leave right away, without thinking, because this street, this house, reminds me of how I am,” Matilda tells Rasel of the scene showing the characters bathing in the evening with the light of a flashing light from a window. At her parents ‘house, the noise of strangers’ noises echoes through the streets.
Released earlier this month, The Club tells the story of a mother and daughter behind a nightclub in the 1950s in Istanbul that struggles to prove whether workers and owners, as well as non-Muslims in the city, are making a living. their regular. it is the nationalism that has gripped the world.
One of Netflix’s most iconic exhibitions in Turkey, The Club is part of Istanbul’s Pera international charity, with some lamenting the lack of legacy, which continues in the form of old houses, street names. , and in churches and synagogues which are still used by the minority non-Muslims in the city.
The past of the cosmopolitan
Matilda comes from the Sephardic Jewish family, descendants of about 40,000 Jews who, after being expelled from Spain in 1492, were invited to settle in the Ottoman Empire by Sultan Bayezid II.
In the stone streets surrounding Galata Tower, Matilda and Rasel are depicted as part of a small but fun Sephardic group that speaks Ladino, a mixture of Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic that still holds thousands of people today. Matilda attends Sabbath feasts and Purim festivals, weddings, and synagogue services, all of the details that made the show go so far as to organize.
Many people watch the game via tweet, or ask, ‘Who are these people?’
Bahadir, who plays Matilda, was trained twice a week for three months by Forti Barokas, a film consultant who also writes in Ladino at El Amaneser and Salom, two Turkish newspapers that continue to publish a bit in the endangered language.
Choosing the only dialogue, which often changes between Ladino and Turkey, is enough to attract the attention of many Turkish observers, said Nesi Altaras, editor of Avlaremoz, an online publication about the Jewish Jewish community.
“Bar is already low, what people know, so many people who watch a tweet, or ask, ‘Who are these people, what group is this, what language do they speak?'” Altaras, who also belongs to. to the Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul, told Al Jazeera. “Most of the Turkish people have been strangers to the Jews living in Turkey, who have lived here for hundreds of years, so I think the show seems to be a learned time.”
Income tax income
Just to show how different the city was 70 years ago is not the most commendable thing at The Club. The viewer soon learns what happened to Matilda’s family.
In 1942, the Turkish government, then a two-state solution, introduced a new tax on the people, claiming that it would provide much-needed income in the aftermath of World War II. The Wealth Tax was specially designed by the authorities to fight off wealth away from non-Muslims – Jews and Armenian and Greek Christians – and was brutally executed. Of the approximately 350 million Turkish lira raised during the time it was lifted under the auspices of the global crisis in 1944, at least 290 million came from non-Muslims, often people who were ordered to give more than 200 percent of their total assets. 15 days. People who could not afford to pay the full amount – according to estimates by thousands of people – were sent to concentration camps where historians say 12 people have died. In The Club, it is revealed that Matilda’s father and brother were sent to such camps east of Askale, never to return.
The Altaras family, not only in Istanbul but throughout Turkey, were also affected.
“One of my grandmothers went to the concentration camp at Askale; the other two lost everything, ”he said. “This happened in different states – Adana, Tekirdag, and Istanbul. My family was affected on all sides, and unfortunately, this was no exception. You can find almost the same stories from other Jewish, Armenian, Greek families living today.”
You can find almost the same stories from other Jewish families, Armenians, Greeks living today.
Altaras says his grandfather, who spent eight months in a concentration camp, was not rich at all. “She worked at sewing machines on machines, sewing dresses from scratch. So he was not a man who could make a lot of money, not in a factory by any means, but a man who worked with his hands and had a talent. ”
When the Property Taxes were announced on November 11, 1942, the streets of Pera were transformed into a nightclub for business as non-Muslim families struggled to raise their taxes. “Everything, including my grandfather’s toys, was sold on the market,” Altara said. “Color pencils, a wooden horse, a sofa, carpets – every household item was sold and was about to repay the debt the government had decided, that my grandparents should go to camp.”
Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online.
“We wanted to address the idea of coexistence and diversity, in creating fictional characters we decided to define the stigma of social stigma, to come together under a canopy and be a family,” said producer Zeynep Günay Tan in an article by Istanbul by Bant Mag.
Through their interactions, characters, and viewers, they gradually learn about the city’s multi-colored fabric.
Haci, a Muslim fiction village who moved to Istanbul hoping to work as a band member, was told Friday afternoon by his manager that he would not rest to attend Friday prayers. He watches as the same manager tells Matilda that he too should work and miss the Sabbath dinner that night. Later, Matilda walks down the street in their Jewish community with Haci, and stops while women are heard singing in Ladino. Haci asks who they are. “It was the Sephardic Jews who moved here hundreds of years ago, just like me,” Matilda tells him.
“Like us,” replied Haci.
The club has such experiences that highlight the natural interactions and understanding opportunities that would not have been possible for the residents of Pera during the tumultuous 1950s.
Awareness, but a little effort on justice
But that awareness did not stop future violence. For example, rumors of tensions between Greek Christians and Turks in Turkey in Cyprus escalated into the H5N1 genocide in 1955 when thousands of Muslim groups destroyed thousands of homes, businesses, and places of worship.
The Jewish sect in Istanbul continues to be under the control of right-wing extremists over the past two decades: for example, in 2003, several car bombs hit the synagogues in Istanbul, including the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Galata, which served the Ladino Jewish community. .
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sometimes cites what he calls “party ideology” of the one-party era before 1950 in criticizing the opposition Republican People’s Party, which was ruling at the time, and how it treated a minority. “They were racist because they had a different ethnic background,” Erdogan said in 2009. “The time has come for us to ask ourselves why this happened and what we have learned from all of this.”
But Erdogan or other Turkish leaders did nothing to address the Economic Taxes, 1955 pogrom, or other minority attacks. The Democrats, who won the country’s first free and fair election in 1950, campaigned for a tax return, but did not keep that promise.
Freedom fighters who talk about the forced migration and death of Armenians in 1915, incidents that some called genocide, for example, are being prosecuted in Turkey under laws against “insulting” Turkey, or the country’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In 2007, terrorists in Istanbul assassinated Turkish and Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, editor of the Armenian newspaper Agos.
On November 11 each year, to mark the launch of the Taxes, the Peoples’ Democratic Party lawmaker Garo Paylan, who is also an Armenian Christian in the eastern city of Diyarbakir, also filed a petition inviting councilors to investigate the tax and why no one is there. . was paid for it.
“His annual candidacy is not voted on at all; it has not been included in the committee, ”Altaras said. “This could be the first step [to resolving the Wealth Tax issue] for we do not yet know the full number of those who paid the tribute, everyone who was sent to the concentration camps, whoever lost his life, or the amount lost. ”
