Princeton University Press, November 2012(Hardcover) 2014(Paperback)
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Kamil Pasha Turkey, and the thoughts and fiction of Jenny White
I am an author and scholar, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, specializing in contemporary Turkish culture, politics and society. I have published three scholarly books on contemporary Turkey and three novels in the Kamil Pasha series: The Sultan’s Seal, The Abyssinian Proof , and The Winter Thief. For more information about my books and some background history, check out my website: www.jennywhite.net
This blog began as a species of fieldnotes — a record of what I thought was important — as I spent the year 2008 in Turkey on a research grant. I was looking into political issues, nationalism and Islam in particular as these were developing in Turkey. I’m back in Boston now, but continuing my mission to keep track of — and track down — interesting and important events and insights about contemporary Turkey. I try to be balanced (never an easy task in an ideologically divided country like Turkey) and, when the occasion presents itself, to look at the light side of things as well. I give my own reflections as someone who has been coming to – and often living in — Turkey since the mid-1970s.
Istanbul is a city where the past is right there beneath your nose as you walk about the streets. My main fictional character, Kamil Pasha, was a prosecutor/magistrate in the nineteenth century secular Ottoman court of Beyoglu, the foreigners’ section of Istanbul. He went to school in Istanbul, grew up there, worked and loved there (and in my mind and that of my readers still does).
Old Turkey and new, my impressions and thoughts.
Sample Posting
Posted on April 11th, 2011 by Jenny White
"The unlikely love story of a Jewish-Greek couple that met and married in Istanbul over fifty years ago. (Click here for the full article.) An excerpt:
Fortuna was a teenager when she noticed Yani, five years her elder, a fishmonger working in the Grand Bazaar in the heart of old Istanbul. She was Jewish. He was Greek. They met on the boat that crosses the Bosporus. When she told her family about Yani, her mother locked her out of the house. These were observant Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had been forced to leave Spain in 1492. They were active in their synagogue, determined in those first years after the terrible cataclysm of World War II to assert their cultural and religious inheritance…
Fortuna, 17 and love-struck, knew only the village where the handsome Greek man lived, nothing more, not even his last name. She went to Gengelkoy, asked for “Yani” and was soon directed to the house where she could find him. She knocked on the door.
“I came,” she told the Greek, uncertain whether he would accept her.
Fortuna’s family, meanwhile, went to the police, and Yani was briefly incarcerated. The judge told him matter-of-factly that if the couple married, it would be OK for them to be together (despite the objections of her parents) and he could be freed from jail. They had a municipal wedding…
Sixty years ago, Istanbul’s population included a significant Greek community, 100,000 or more, and a similar number of Jews. Kuzguncuk was mostly Jewish and Greek, with two synagogues and one Greek Orthodox Church. Synagogues and churches dotted Beyoglu and other areas, too." ... MORE