The Person Who Told Me, ‘Come toTurkey’


She was 50 when I met her; I was 20. When she died, I was the one who was 50. So there were 30 years between us, and there were 30 years between us. Thirty years of eventful friendship.
When we traveled together, some people assumed she was my mother. But by that time she was a widow, with no children of her own, still vigorous-looking, with her long blonde hair piled up on her head, pinned with jewels, her arthritic fingers--and thumbs—covered with bold rings, other exotic jewelry around her neck, at the poitrine (her word), and on her wrists.
She was short and compact, firm of body, not fat. But her center of gravity seemed well grounded. She had been an athlete at New York’s Barnard College of Columbia University (entering a year late, since Jewish quotas were then in effect); she could ride horseback, swim, and hike enthusiastically all her life. Her handshake was strong and warm; her smile and laugh, infectious. She could charm almost anyone instantly.
In everyone’s life there is someone more unusual than everyone else, what The Reader’s Digest used to call ‘My Most Unforgettable Character’. In my case that person would have to be Jeannette Mirsky Ginsburg (1903-87).
She was a writer, I was a college professor. When she asked in 1969, ‘What are you doing this summer?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know’, she commanded, ‘Come to Istanbul’—and I did. The rest is (my) history.
She continued: ‘I’ll be there, and some other people you know from Princeton’ (where she lived, in New Jersey, after her husband Ed Ginsburg had died). ‘I want to see the Armenian churches at Ani and Lake Van’ (on the Russian border—her father and mother had come from Vilnius, Lithuania, when it belonged to Russia)—‘we’ll take a car with my new Turkish friend, Tiko, across Turkey and back; it’ll be a great trip; Turkey is fascinating.’ It was. It is.
She had stopped in Istanbul the previous winter, returning home from Central Asia, where she was researching her biography (University of Chicago, 1977) of Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943), the explorer and archeologist who rediscovered the Silk Route, and excavated long-buried cities proving that Eurasia was not only one landmass but also a cultural and historical unity with influences going in both directions.
In İstanbul she had an introduction to a distinguished Ottoman lady of her own age, then about 66, who told her to call her ‘Tiko’. Jeannette had known her sister in New York, the writer Selma Ekrem (Unveiled; Turkey, Old and New; Turkish Fairy Tales), who worked for the Turkish Mission to the United Nations, because both of them were friends of Ann Guthrie, an executive of the world administration of the Young Women’s Christian Association.
Guthrie had been in love with Reinhold Niebuhr, America’s greatest religious and social thinker, after Jonathan Edwards, and had hopes of marrying him, until he was snapped up by a visiting student from England, Ursula Keppel-Compton, later head of the Department of Religion at Barnard, where I was a teaching assistant.
Selma’s sister Tiko was formally Mrs. Beraet Bulayır (she never used the name of her husband, Ziya Bey, from whom she was divorced by the time we knew her). Their father was Ali Ekrem, who when the Turkish Republic required people to take family names instead of the Arab and Ottoman system of nomenclature (____, son of____), chose Bulayır.
It was a variant of Bolayır, the town near Tekirdağ on the Sea of Marmara where Ali Ekrem’s father was buried under a splendid white marble mausoleum, Namık Kemal (1840-88), Turkey’s great national poet, a ‘republican’ before the Republic, and nationalist leader of the Young Ottoman movement.
On our travels around Turkey, we took Tiko for the first time to her grandfather’s tomb, and photographed her there. If strangers learned of her grandparentage, they treated her with utmost respect—some could recite verses of Namık Kemal’s they had learned at school. She was quietly proud of her ancestry but never traded on it.
Namık Kemal had died before Ali Ekrem’s son and three daughters were born, so they never knew him. None left children of their own. But their father had served the same sultanate his father had struggled to reform or transmute into a constitutional monarchy. Ali Ekrem was one of the Sultan’s secretaries, and a professor at Istanbul University. He was sometime Governor of Jerusalem and of the Greek Islands. But his positions were not diplomatic exiles, as were Namık Kemal’s, when he was posted to distant Kars or to quiet Midili (Lesbos), where he was effectively under house arrest. His death at 48 was perhaps conspired in by the Porte. Ali Ekrem’s less combative life and career are memorably evoked in Selma’s autobiography, Unveiled (she was one of the first young women in Turkey to appear so, on her travels alone by train in several Ottoman lands, long before Ataturk discouraged the practice of women’s being veiled in public).
When I met Tiko in that August of 1969, Jeannette was staying with her for a month or more. It was a modest double flat in the modern Şişli neighborhood of Istanbul, but it was crammed with odd and interesting survivals from Tiko’s exotic childhood in Ottoman domains. She was still exchanging annual visits, for instance, with her Egyptian aunts and cousins, members of King Faruk’s family. They later entertained me at their old home on Zamalek Island in Cairo.
Tiko as a young woman had gone to New York with her cousin Hümeyra hanım, the last Sultan’s granddaughter, to be hostesses at the Turkish pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair, where television among other marvels was introduced to the public. The fairgrounds now house the U.S. Open Tennis facilities and the remnants of the 1966 World’s Fair, marking the 300th anniversary of England’s transmogrifying the New Amsterdam of the Dutch into New York.
When the Second World War broke out, Tiko and Hümeyra (who later made the elegant Hotel Kismet at Kuşadası, companion to her other Kismet Hotel, in downtown İzmir), stayed on in New York, living together in Jackson Heights, Tiko’s Selma abla already working in Manhattan. Tiko went regularly to Princeton to teach Turkish lessons to servicemen. Hümeyra met and married a Turkish engineering student at Princeton, Halil Özbaş, of Aydın near Kuşadası. But Tiko could not have met Jeannette and Ed there then, because they had left Princeton and New York to live in South Carolina, at Clinton, where Ed managed a factory making army uniforms (cheap, non-union female labor; contracts going to constituencies of Southern senators, then still in ascendancy in the Congress due to their seniority as solid-South Democrats).
My then roommate at Davidson College in North Carolina came from nearby Laurens, S.C., and met Jeannette in a restaurant there—she often picked up bright and troubled young people, sweeping them into her global orbit. He took me to meet the Mirsky-Ginsburgs, who had brought with them New York Jewish intellectual culture to provincial South Carolina, where I had grown up at Spartanburg.
‘What are you interested in?’ she demanded, as she grasped my hand and pulled me into a Noah’s Ark of wall-to-wall books, paintings and hangings, American Indian pots and artifacts, Chinese, Persian, East Indian, Central Asian, Central American pre-Columbian, and Inuit (Eskimo) objects and objets, two enormous gorgeous black Boxers, and several houseguests, such as Jeannette Rankin, the only member of Congress to vote against both the First World War and the Second, Montana returning her to office just in time for Pearl Harbor, but not, of course, ever again.
As an old lady, though, she was taken up by the feminists to lead the Women Against the War in Vietnam march in Washington. The two Jeannettes shared a knack for come-backs. Rankin never married, but Mirsky made an early marriage, commiting her husband, when she went off to do field work in Guatemala, to the care of her best woman friend. The arrangement worked only too well: they were a couple, when Jeannette got back; whereupon she hied herself off to Reno, Nevada, for the six-weeks-residency divorce (difficult or impossible then in many states). Later, with her Ginsburg, she struck gold. And her books, like Rankin’s pacifism, kept coming back into vogue, and print (Google J.M. and see).
‘Systematic theology,’ I sputtered to Jeannette Mirsky, at that first meeting, dismaying her, she later admitted, as much as I was caught off balance: I didn’t know people could be ‘interested’ in things. I thought one did one’s duty, obeyed what one’s parents and forebears considered right and true—one’s own likings and inclinations, not a consideration. The Mirsky-Ginsburg household and way of life thus became one of the means by which I began to forge an autonomous and ecumenical point of view and life.
By the time we converged on Istanbul 15 years later, in 1969, I trusted Jeannette to introduce me to fascinating and significant people, places, and events. The summer before, she had asked me, newly divorced, ‘What are you doing this summer?’, and that time the result was our first car trip together, again with two friends, a Texan painter and his Tarascan Indian princess wife, Robert and Rosa Ellis, visiting the Grand Canyon, Taos, Zuni, Santo Domingo, and other pueblos, Santa Fe, Brice and Zion Canyons, Hovenweep, Canyon de Chell, Gallop, Colorado national parks, and bigamous two-door-front houses on the Utah-Arizona border, whence schismatic (‘Big Love’) Mormons could cross when the police cracked down.
At Santa Fe we stayed with Mrs.Walter Driscoll, Chairwoman of the Santa Fe Opera, whose guest house that season was home to the composer, Hans Werner Henze. Another guest, her cousin, was a botanist and heiress of the Weyerhaeuser lumber fortune. Jeannette thought every expedition should include a botanist, a geologist, and an auto mechanic (so why a perennial philosophy student?). I fell for the way she traveled. In those days we simply pulled off the highway and slept under the stars and cooked on a sterno stove (now, too dangerous).
I marked the way she made instant friends with all we met, the way she shopped (always insisting on a little gift to go with her purchases: Papa had been king of the wholesale dress business in New York’s garment district, introducing standardized sizes; Jeannette believed in buying wholesale; he was a vegetarian; but not to be outdone, when a chop was left on the platter—guaranteed to be the case by Jeannette’s mother Frida—‘I’ll just keep this from going to waste…’). Everywhere Jeannette found unusual and artful things. If they seemed a little expensive, she’d say, ‘Let’s buy this together’—then discover just the place for it in HER house (or her FRIENDS’ houses!), every bit of wall space and surface of which was adorned with her eclectic findings—and relished by me on my innumerable stays as a house-guest there.
With Tiko and her driver friend, Halil Bey, and his vintage Chevrolet, Furyçük, Jeannette and I made the three-thousand-kilometer adventure across Anatolia and back to İstanbul, rarely sleeping more than one night in a town, in Muş sharing a room of seven beds with three traveling Turkish men; they were as amused by the amused ladies as I was. Muş--and Bingöl--were brown and barren as the Moon, then. Van was rough: guns were fired at dinner in our restaurant, when the police hustled a wild-eyed young man into custody.
The visit to the ruined tenth-century Armenian church on the only island, Aktamar, in the vast milky-blue Lake Van, enchanted, with its unusual exterior carvings of animals and Biblical scenes such as the Garden of Eden, the Nativity, Jonah and the whale, David and the giant Goliath. The Turkish government has recently carefully restored it. The Urartian ruins on the hilltop citadel brought a new world into ken for me, as did the Hittite ruins at various venues. And Phrygian, and Gordion….
At Kars, with its partly Russian, partly Ottoman, buildings, we had to ask for military permission and escort to Ani, the deserted city of Armenian churches, Soviet soldiers staring from the border nearby at the Turkish soldiers staring back across the gorge. The latter descended on us with alacrity when Jeannette began to snap photographs of the ruins with her little camera. They seemed not to understand her protestations of pacific intent and the prerogatives of historical-geographers.
We had gone up from Ankara via Tokat (Tiko wanted to visit prison inmates there and buy their bead-work) and Amasya, Strabo’s home—we toasted the first great geographer--and bought an excellent Caucasian sumac horse-blanket, finely woven and embroidered, with animals and designs of many colors; then on to the Black Sea (‘Thalassos! Thalassos!’) and down by Artvin to Erzurum. So we returned by a more southerly route, that took us through Siirt, Sivas, Kayseri, and Konya, with their noble Selçuk buildings, incomparable Cappadocia, and thence down to the Mediterranean. I had explored the Aegean and Western Mediterranean regions the first week I was in Turkey before joining up with Jeannette, so I had a fairly wide impression of Anatolia in my first month in the country.
We repeated the trans-Turkey trip in 1970, working-in places we had by-passed or omitted in 1969, everywhere learning Turkish words and phrases—and foods, and drinks (rakı, ayran, tulip-glass tea as often as possible—large, please, hot, weak, no sugar…). Jeannette was fond of saying, ‘There are three great cuisines in the world: Chinese, French, and Turkish.’ She pontificated freely, but from informed experience. She had seen Nijinsky dance, in Paris, when she was 13. Countess Tolstoy in a black cape
had been pointed out to her as someone to remember later. Her father the dress maven had invited artists and musicians and intellectuals to their New York dinner table, to inspire Jeannette and her sister and two brothers with high culture (they all returned the investment). They were proud of their Jewish heritage (Vilnius had been a cultivated center) but were not religiously observant; they were assimilationists in the tradition of Moses Mendelssohn. And positivists: Ed Ginsburg was named for Edward (Looking Backward) Bellamy.
A favorite locution of Jeannette’s was, ‘He’s one of the GREAT violinists (Henryk Seyrig, perhaps, whom she knew, the brother of the ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ actress Delphine Seyrig). Or, ‘Honey, crenshaw is one of the GREAT melons.’ Or ‘But Girshman is one of the GREAT authorities on Iran’, and at her dinner table in Princeton. She harvested people, the way we picked up keepsakes and memories of Turkish life, like bathing at the smooth black-stone beach (like Nice’s, once upon a time) at Hopa, on the Black Sea coast near Georgia, pushing the stalled Chevrolet into Kastamonu late after dark, appealing to the Karayoları highway workers to repair a sunken road at Artvin so we could pass, buying an exquisite evening wrap made of pearly Karabatak feathers at Samsun (it would go to Lee Itzkowitz, wife of Dr. Norman Itzkowitz, professor of Turkish language and Ottoman history at Princeton, and co-author of the only psycho-biography of Turkey’s founder-general-statesman, The Immortal Atatürk).
On that second trip, when we again reached Kars, we put Jeannette on the train to Tbilisi and on to Soviet Russia, where she wanted to investigate her roots, and sample the Third Rome of the czars and the Peoples Republics of the commissars. She had pre-arranged the excursion with the Intourist agency, and it went its preordained way, Jeannette struggling with her officious guides and minders, who must have been sorely tried as well by her determination and didactic force. She was not a professional teacher, but she, like many New Yorkers, knew what was best, and was not shy of saying so.
Her avidity for life and experience also insured that she had to be at the active center of whatever was going on. She didn’t drive but was a consummate backseat driver. Other strong-willed personalities might find her insufferable; but she was fun, and unfailingly interesting and generous, worth putting up with some overflowingness.
By the end of her weeks in the Soviet Union she was exhausted, and she was sick, with some kind of flu. She was to fly from Moscow to waiting Finnish friends in Helsinki (from Porvoo). When she had entered the U.S.S.R. she declared only ‘personal effects’, not knowing she should have itemized each piece of jewelry—her prize cache of personal adornments, not greatly expensive but unique, priceless, like a fine star-sapphire ring from Sri Lanka her husband Ed had brought her, or a rare carved jade monkey-head-god pendant from Guatemala her friend Gillett Griffin of Princeton’s pre-Columbian program had found for her, or a seashell carved frog with turquoise eyes from Tewa pueblo, home of her Princeton professor-friend Alfonso Ortiz…. She loved wearing these and many others, partly for the conversation pieces they also were.
No matter, to the Soviet airport customs crew. They confiscated the lot, and coldly handed her a receipt. She was too tired and ill to argue long, and she wanted not to disappoint herself and her welcome in Finland. So she left the beloved jewelry, and only when she was finally back home in the United States did she begin to write various officials, trying to get back her lost possessions. Months passed. Two years. One day the postman appeared with a wooden chest about the size of a breadbox, covered with strange writing and stamps. Every item of her missed jewels was carefully packed and returned to her: no thievery, just rote following of regulations.
Jeannette never again ventured to Russia, not living to see Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. But she went back several summers to Tiko’s in Istanbul, and once I rescued her from there when Selma abla arrived from New York, now retired and visiting Turkey annually after decades abroad. When SHE came, Tiko had no time or mind for late-comer friends like the American, who also required full-time attention. I took Jeannette to Side, where by now I had friends and interest—which she quickly took over for her own as well.
We had been recommended by literary acquaintances in Istanbul, Yaşar Kemal and his translator wife, and the classical mythologist Azra Erhat, to the Pamphylia Pansiyon of Mizou and Suat (Şakir) Kabaağaç, whose brother Cevat at Bodrum was the writer Halicarnassus Fisherman, Erhat’s longtime companion. There we met, among others, Yasemin Tanbay of Istanbul, Ankara, and Side (her diplomat father had been a pupil of Ali Ekrem), who became a lifelong friend of ours both in Turkey and America. The like-minded and human-hearted speak an international language and link a network of spirits around the world.
And Tiko spent weeks every year with Jeannette in Princeton, as well as months with Selma, retired then to Manomet, Massachusetts, in a saltbox house on the shores of Cape Cod. Jeannette was never a specialist in Turkish studies, like her friends Fanny Davis, author of The Palace of Topkapı, or Raphaela Lewis, author of Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey, and her husband Geoffrey Lewis, eminent Turkish language and history professor at St. Antony’s College, Oxford (the Lewis family spent a sabbatical year at Princeton). But she maintained a special involvement with all things Turkish, and fully understood and supported my repeated comings to Turkey, as few of my American relatives and associates did.
Jeannette may have joked:

‘Hic haec hoc,
evet and yok—
two of the languages
I don’t spoke’

(she invented the low-ku, as opposed to the Japanese hai-ku), but Turkey spoke to her, and she spoke of it to all and sundry, as when she told me to ‘come to Turkey’ and I came, and the rest is…this footnote to Turkish history.

--Frank White, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Philosophy,
The City University of New York; he lives in retirement
in Alanya and New York; e-address: fwhitetr@yahoo.com