Vahe H. Apelian
Kulüp is a six episodes long Turkish television miniseries that is being aired on Netflix in English as The Club. According to the Wikipedia the mini-series was released for viewing on November 5, 2021. The first season is currently being aired. I was drawn to watch the miniseries after I stumbled upon a review about the mini-series in Al Monitor, an online journal that claims to be the pulse of the Middle East.
According to the journal, the six-episode series are “about Turkey’s ever-shrinking Jewish minority, and that the mini-series have been both accused of waking the ghosts of the country’s turbulent past with its non-Muslim minorities and praised for breaking the code of silence among the Jews often called Turkey's "model minority” on the past injustices that deprived them of their wealth, language and in some cases, life.”
Furthermore Al-Monitor claimed that “The series’ first season takes place before the infamous Sept. 6-7,1955, Istanbul riots in which Greek businesses were attacked by Turks after a newspaper fabricated a report of a bomb attack on the house where Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was born in the Greek city of Thessaloniki.”
It appears that the current six-episodes airing on the Neflix is the first season of the mini-series and that it will continue with subsequent seasons as the drama unfolds.
The current six-episodes, Al Monitor claims “revolves around Matilda Aseos, a Jewish woman in a once affluent family who has shot her Muslim Turkish lover Mumtaz for wrongly accusing her family of evading the wealth tax in 1942, when the government slapped enormous tariffs on the non-Muslim population, particularly Jews. Matilda’s family is ruined, and her father and brother are sent to Askale, a chilly northeastern border town to do forced labor, like so many other minorities.”
The mini-series indeed is about that Jewish woman who hails from Sephardic Jews who came to Turkey in 1492 and who still maintain their distinct dialect called Ladino, according to the Al-Monitor. She was pardoned and returned to her community and plays the central character of the mini-series along with her unruly grown-up daughter she had conceived from an out of wedlock relationship with a Muslim Turk. Matilda attempts to establish relationship with her daughter she never raised being incarcerated. The drama of the six-episodes long season is thus aired.
The club, with its closeted gay singer star, is where and around the operators of the club that the drama unfolds. The club portrays the “ microcosm of the ethnic variety in Istanbul”, Al Monitor claims.
Other than the human relations drama, the following caught my attention.
- The mini-series amply present the Jewish Ladino community with their songs and in their distinct dialect without any rancor.
- The drama portrays the animosity against the Greek Turks over the Cyprus issue.
- The club captures the drive for Turkification portrayed by the Greek owner of the club who has created a Muslim existence and promotes Turkification by firing his non-Turkish employees.
- The Armenian stage light director named Agop, who is a benign presence
- Greek dancing girls who are taken advantage of.
- Cheap labor from the interior of the country who ar enslaved and work for room and board.
- Matilda, the Jewish woman center character, who had killed her Turk lover, came from a wealthy family that lost all its possession and her parents and brother were exiled and she never saw them again. The historical context of those tragic events that happened is not even glanced. But when she wanted to move to Israel after her pardon, her Jewish community leader wondered why leave Turkey where her ancestors had lived there for four hundred years.
The historical context within which the drama is supposed to unfold would have eluded me had I not read the review beforehand. I am sure for the general audience the unfolding of the drama will not tell much, if anything within a historical context. However, Al Monitor claims that the mini-series broke a taboo in Turkey. It claims that that the series whisper, rather than shout, about what Turkish society have gone through in their recent history and emphatically adds that “sometimes a clear, eloquent whisper can be more effective than a shout.” Maybe it does to the Turkish audience.
As I noted earlier, it’s the review I read in the Al-Monitor that led me to watch the mini-series. I cannot discount Al-Monitors assertion that the mini-series although is not a historical documentation or anything close to it to capture what happened to Turkish minorities, in this case the Jews. But it may indeed be also indicative of a wider and a more profound mindset that is being permitted to permeate in the Turkish society as a whole and at large.
Let us be mindful that a decade ago the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan insulting Israel President Simon Peres, who was a longtime friend of Turkey, has long been swept by the history’s dustpan. One cannot discount that the sudden eminence of Turkey in the unmanned aerial combat technology– the Bayratar drones – is Israeli technology and their manning is Israli knowhow and that the Bayraktar venture is a marriage between the Turkish huge military complex and Israel.
Al Monitor noted that “The second season is expected to pick up with the riots in which clearly pre-organized Turkish mobs took to the streets, attacking and plundering homes and shops owned by non-Muslims, mainly Greeks.” One cannot discount that there may be a dramatic shift in educating the Turkish public and softening their ingrained hostile perceptions of the Jews if not fostering an amicable relation at the grass root between the Turks and Israelis.
This series ended up when Matilda’s daughter, in turn, became pregnant out of wedlock from her relationship with a Turk taxi driver lover. But her prospective Jewish groom forgave her betrayal and accepted her pregnant fiancée and both moved to Israel to raise her child in Israel.
The episode ended with both are captured looking longingly from the airplane over the Turkey as they moved to Israel to settle there. There is not a hint of animosity but a general unspoken perception of an apparent understanding of the two communities, Turkish and Jewish, that had grown with each other, as her Jewish mother remains in Turkey while her pregnant daughter by a Turk, will raise her child in Israel.
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