Global sufferings, local voices: archival reactivations in Jewish theatre ephemera from Turkey

Abstract

In Turkey, the principle of silence, kayadez, has long shaped Jewish cultural life and archival practices. While the community has remained cautious about maintaining archives and making them publicly accessible, some Jewish cultural producers have created unorthodox archival projects. Theatre has been an important realm for such efforts. Jewish theatre makers have often engaged with local and global Jewish archives in their works. More importantly, some of the ephemera associated with these productions were designed as archives in themselves. The souvenir book for Anne Frank’ın Hatıra Defteri [The Diary of Anne Frank] (dir. Albert Levi, 1958) presents a generative example of such projects. Bringing together a diverse array of historical and contemporary texts and images, from an excerpt from Frank’s diary to an acrostic poem about her, the book demonstrates how Jewish theatre makers have critically engaged with the globalized European archives of the Holocaust and produced new materials as they negotiated the politics of belonging in Turkey. In the face of historical trauma and antisemitism, the archive enabled alternative articulations of history, challenging the politics of memory in the present and enabling new visions and desires for the future. Jewish theatre makers in Turkey thus subtly articulated their own silenced yet painful experience of the Holocaust while imagining a global Jewish identity at a time when their communities and spaces had been rapidly disintegrating. Over the years, the meanings of this archival project have multiplied and shifted, offering new political promises, ambivalences, and challenges.