Gifts of Language: Multilingualism and Turkish-Sephardic Culture

By Bension Varon

Bension Varon is a Sephardic Jewa descendant of Jews expelled from Spain under the threat of conversion in 1492. He was born and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, where he had two mother tongues: Turkish and Judeo-Spanish, the language of his ancestors. He became familiar with Hebrew and Greek and acquired fluency in French and English through both education and professional work, including in international organizations. Varon has lived as a multilingual most of his adult life, in harmony with his multicultural upbringing and vocation.
This book describes the historical currents that made Istanbul a uniquely multicultural city, evident in its diversity of languages and the vibrancy of its cultural and linguistic exchanges. It paints a vivid picture of the sensibility, mores, and culture of Turkeys Sephardic community, grounded in the Judeo-Spanish language. It discusses the importance of language acquisition and use to both the authors own immigrant experience and to immigrant experiences more generally. Multilingualismknowledge of three or more languagesis not rare in much of the world. Varons case is special partly because of the mixture of his languages, which combines the Eastern (Turkish, Hebrew and Greek) and the Western (Spanish, French and English). One of his languages, Judeo-Spanish, is considered severely endangered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and is, therefore, given special attention by Varon, who retains a rare knowledge of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524512545

Bension Varon

About the Author... Bension (Ben) Varon is a retired economist with varied interests as a writer, including history, genealogy, and biography. He is the author of, outside his professional field, Cultures in Counterpoint: Memoirs of a Sephardic Turkish-American, Xlibris, 2009, and The Promise of the Present and the Shadow of the Past: The Journey of Barbara Frass Varon, Xlibris, 2011. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia and can be reached at [e-mail].

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Copyright © 2016 by Bension Varon.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016910309

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5245-1256-9

                Softcover        978-1-5245-1255-2

                eBook             978-1-5245-1254-5

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Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

MAIN TEXT

1. Istanbul’s Multiculturalism Roots and Evolution

2. My Cosmopolitan Istanbul Environment and Life

3. My Parents’ Cultural and Linguistic Background

4. Mother Languages Judeo-Spanish and Turkish

5. Minor Languages Hebrew and Greek

6. Looking West: French and English

7. Putting Multilingualism to Use

POSTSCRIPT: The Future of the Past: Judeo-Spanish in the Twenty-First Century

APPENDIX I: Sample of Judeo-Spanish

APPENDIX II: Samples of Turkish-Sephardic Humor

To Güler Orgun

Preface

O ver the course of seven chapters, a postscript, and two appendices spanning multiple countries and centuries, Gifts of Language chronicles Bension Varon’s linguistic heritage and journey as a Turkish-Sephardic Jew who came to embrace French and then American culture. Like Varon’s other books on his cultural background, this one is deeply researched and scholarly, informed by his wide network of contacts—professors, librarians, editors, activists, and an international circle of devoted readers and friends. Like each of his other publications, it can be read as part of his ongoing meditation on his heritage and the sociocultural forces creating it, or as a stand-alone study, accessible to any and all readers, and useful as a scholarly reference work.

But this book, more than Varon’s other works, has its origins in family concerns.

I asked my father to write this book. My request was motivated, I explained to him, by my desire that he demystify his multilingualism—that feature of his persona and heritage that, in the eyes of me and my brother, has most defined him and intrigued us. This book accomplishes that purpose: in the chapters that follow, my father explains, with his characteristic erudition, patience, and humility, that multilingualism was normal in the world of his youth in glorious Istanbul, the bustling beacon of cosmopolitanism, and in the Sephardic Jewish subculture that had taken root there over the centuries since Spain’s expulsion of its Jews. My father’s fluency in Turkish, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), and French, and his familiarity with Hebrew and Greek, did not attenuate his Turkish patriotism, or his Europeanness, or his Jewishness, but instead enhanced all three identities. His rigorous study of English while in Turkey pushed him into modernity and towards the United States, long before he emigrated there, without diminishing his ancestral loyalties.

Even as he provided a new window for us into his upbringing, my father intuited, as he wrote this book, that my request was motivated by a second more covert goal: that he absolve me and my brother of guilt and regret for not knowing, and passing along, Ladino. The issue of guilt and regret arises from a simple fact: my brother Jeremy and I are the end of the line. For hundreds of years, my father’s forbears spoke Ladino. As my father explains in his clear-eyed and unsentimental assessment of Ladino’s future, the brave resilient religious communities that sustained the language are gone or fading, and the language cannot survive, as a spoken medium, out of context, without them. But that is no cause for guilt or regret: Ladino, my father argues, surveying the efforts across the world to preserve it as a subject for study, will live on as a written language, cherished and preserved in communities of study, and in books, like this one.

My father intuited, too, that I sought yet another kind of reassurance: I asked him to write this book hoping he would reassure me and my brother that even though we don’t speak his mother tongue, we, nonetheless, know him fully—that no measure of closeness has been lost in translation. That reassurance, delivered again, with grace and generosity, comes in this book’s sections on English—the language in which my father made a new life, met and courted my mother, launched his career, raised his children, and forged a post-retirement career as a historian and writer. That my father loves English comes across on every page of this book. It was and is for him, the language of dreams.

So, there is no guilt and nothing lost, only gratitude. My father’s multilingualism has translated into an uncanny ability to find the right words at the right time.

At our first dinner together after my husband and I became engaged, my father leavened our nervousness with laughter, praising Will for the way he tucked into his lamb shank, and declaring him a worthy Da-MAT!—son-in-law in Turkish—not just a description, but an honorific title.

A few years later, the single word my father said to me on the phone, before my husband took me to the hospital for the delivery by C-section of our son Ben, was in French: "Cou-rage." Courage, not simply as a noun or adjective, but an injunction: Be brave, my dear one. I held on to the word, and it still makes me smile to think of that moment.

Years later, my father found the perfect word to describe our daughter Emma, in Ladino: Savrosika, which means most delicious little one. This one word conveys Emma’s connection to his culture, and the qualities she has inherited—a combination of soulfulness and mischievousness—from his beloved late sister Regine.

My father could have found English words on each of these occasions, but none would have been quite right. I’ve realized that it is not the mastery of vocabularies and grammars that characterize my father’s linguistic journey, but a disposition towards language—a sense of joy and possibility, a sense that learning is never a chore or burden, only a gift, and that we should behold the world, in all its bewildering diversity, with wonder.

Elizabeth Regine Varon

Charlottesville, Va.

Introduction

I am what is known as a Sephardic Jew—a descendant of Jews who were expelled from Spain at the time of the Catholic Inquisition in 1492. I was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. I came to the United States in 1960, where I met my wife, a German-born fellow student at the University of Pennsylvania (hereafter Penn) in Philadelphia. After marriage and graduate school, I embarked on a career spanning more than thirty years as an economist at the World Bank in Washington, DC.

I speak four languages well, namely, Turkish, Judeo-Spanish, French, and English. I also have some knowledge of Hebrew and Modern Greek. This is not as impressive—at least not to me—as it may seem. During my long combined service at the World Bank and the United Nations, I met true polyglots who spoke twice as many languages as I do. My superior at the United Nations, a Yugoslav, spoke—in addition to Serbo-Croatian, his mother tongue, and English—French, Spanish, German, Chinese, and Russian. What distinguishes my case is that due to the circumstances of my life, I have lived truly within the four cultures that my languages represent.

In 2009, I described my life in a memoir titled Cultures in Counterpoint. The premise of the memoir, reflected in its title, was that I was (and still am) the product of multiple cultures which reside in me without any of them dominating the others, as with different voices in musical counterpoint. The intent was not to suggest that I was one-fourth of each of the cultures whose languages I knew (one-fourth Turkish, one-fourth French, etc.), but that I was fully of each, with remarkably little tension among them. If anything, each aspect of my identity enriched the others.

This book is not about people like me typologically—people who speak the languages I do and grew up in Istanbul like I did. Rather, it is about my particular linguistic journey, as shaped both by the Sephardic culture of Istanbul, and by the course of my life since leaving Turkey. Other Sephardic Jews may most easily recognize themselves in my story. It may, however, resonate with anyone who is similarly the product of multiple languages or cultures.

My linguistic story has, initially, three strong protagonists, namely, Istanbul, the city; the period, that is, the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s, which I spent in Turkey; and my family. I shall comment briefly on each.

Istanbul is one of the world’s most extraordinary cities (like Rome, Venice and Shanghai), which both made history and was shaped by it. One never runs out of terms to describe it. I once called it a city which is like a country, a world: a city that defines you, transforms you, inhabits you, and sustains you.¹ I shall argue here that Istanbul is also like a teacher or even a sculptor; it makes you in its heterogeneous image. For these reasons and others, this book may be seen as an extended tribute to Istanbul.

The 1930s was a decade when Turkey was reinventing itself, and when, toward its end, the master magician, Atatürk, passed away. The 1940s were dominated by the war. Although Turkey managed to stay out of the war, it was not entirely spared the suffering and internal conflict resulting from war. Turkey was also the victim of self-inflicted wounds such as the imposition of a discriminatory wealth tax in 1942. In the 1950s, Turkey had its first democratically elected government, and entered modernity. (In the 1930s, Turkey had been living still in the 19th century; it entered the 20th century beginning in the 1950s.) Closer to the subject at hand, the 1950s also saw the transition of the global lingua franca decisively from French to English.

My family was amazing and difficult to categorize. Its religious character was set by my father, an observant Jew and a descendant of a line of rabbis. Its cultural character was shaped to a large extent by its strong women, who had minimal formal education. The elders among them had spent their youths in Çanakkale (Dardanelles) on the eve of and during the First World War. While the preservation of tradition was important, my family as a whole welcomed change, forward movement, and the new, associated with the young. The family decision makers demonstrated this with their sending me to Robert College, an American school in Istanbul; their approval of my move to the United States; and their blessing, literally, of my interfaith marriage. After struggling with how to describe them, I have settled on conservative progressives, as I shall elaborate later.

My cultural and linguistic identity owes a great deal to the past. This is why the first three chapters of this book concern the past. The narrative does not turn to my languages until Chapter IV. The approach runs from the general to the specific, from the old to the new.

Chapter I traces Istanbul’s multiculturalism through history—from the city’s days as a small Greek colony, known as Byzantium, to the metropolis of more than twelve million people it is today. It shows that my native city has been multicultural through most of its existence, but it concludes that it has been more a mixing bowl than a melting pot.

Chapter II is devoted to my Istanbul—the city I grew up in and remember,. What was the city like physically and demographically? What were its main educational, social, and commercial institutions? What was life like? The chapter builds the case for the notion that it was impossible not to grow up multiculturally in the Istanbul I knew and interacted with during my time.

The next chapter (III) turns to my parents’ cultural and linguistic background.

The scene shifts from Istanbul to Çanakkale from which they originally hailed. I describe my parents’ lives there, what they left behind, and what they metaphorically took with them when they moved to Istanbul. The chapter contains a bold attempt to define Sephardic culture rooted in my personal experience and observations. The chapter tries to show that although my parents’ multiculturalism was in some respects quite limited, my multiculturalism owes a great deal to them.

The next three chapters are devoted to my language skills, how I acquired them and how I rate them. Chapter IV deals with my twin mother tongues, namely, Judeo-Spanish and Turkish, dwelling on how growing up with two languages was possible, and how I mastered both. Chapter V discusses how I acquired my minor knowledge of Hebrew and Modern Greek, two utterly unrelated languages. Chapter VI focuses on my knowledge of what I call the Western pillars, namely, French and English, including what drove me to them and to invest as much as I did in them. Learning each of the six languages I know to varying degrees was a separate, distinct adventure, largely due to the substantial differences among them. The incentive to learn each language also differed, as did the means of teaching them or the tools for mastering them.

Chapter VII, the last chapter, begins by looking at my multilingualism in a global context, comparing my experience with it to that of the multitude of others, and in the light of recent scientific studies of this phenomenon. It then examines the effects of my knowledge of foreign languages from three perspectives: the impact on my professional life and production, how it shaped my personal life and output, and how it affected my family life and selected decisions. The chapter concludes with some reflections on my experience and the lessons I draw from it.

The seven chapters I introduced above cover my linguistic and geographical journey from Istanbul to America or from a mixture of Judeo-Spanish and Turkish to English. But I was involved simultaneously in another kind of journey, a historical one that is still ongoing, namely, from the Spanish my ancestors spoke half a millennium ago to the Judeo-Spanish, also called Ladino, they passed on to me. That language, which is considered severely endangered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is the focus of the postscript added at the end. The theme that ties the postscript to the central subject of this book, multilingualism, is that Judeo-Spanish is in many ways the product of a multilingual people. Nearly all speakers of it know at least one more language. The postscript takes stock of where Judeo-Spanish stands today, the ongoing efforts to preserve it, and the possibility of reviving it.

The book also has two appendices. Appendix I contains a sample of the historic Judeo-Spanish language, extracted from an unpublished monograph I wrote on my family’s history. Appendix II has a sample of Turco-Sephardic humor representative of multiculturalism and multilingualism. Some of the humor presupposes exposure to multiple languages and cultural traditions.

*    *    *

In writing this book, I have benefitted greatly from the knowledge and experience of numerous scholars and lovers of the Sephardic culture and the Judeo-Spanish language. One who stands out among these is Güler Orgun—a Turkish-born Sephardi like me and a friend of many decades who shares my cultural and linguistic background. She has been for years my main connection to the country I