Echoes of a Lost Soundscape: Memory, Language, and the Making of Modern Istanbul in Who Are You, Jak Samanon?

At the turn of the twentieth century, Istanbul was a strikingly polyphonic city. It was also the center of monolingual cultural policies of a modernizing Ottoman Empire. The polyglot Sephardi communities of the city, eager to be model citizens of the empire, participated in this project. In Kimsin Jak Samanon? (Who are you, Jak Samanon?), cultural historian and novelist Liz Behmoaras offers a textured narrative of Jewish commitment to the language reforms that eventually shaped modern Turkey through her grandmother Adel Samanon’s childhood memories. Behmoaras also traces the life of Jak Samanon (1870–1917), Adel’s father, an Ottoman civil servant, language patriot, and ardent supporter of imperial citizenship. The retelling of a father-daughter story through memories of language, music, and noise, evokes an urban space that has been lost with the ascendance of the monolingual state. This essay introduces Behmoaras’s intergenerational narrative as a comprehensive vision of the everyday world of Ottoman Sephardim to explore the entangled legacies of imperial multiculturalism and republican nation building, attuned equally to historical ruptures and the echoes of everyday sonic encounters. By positioning memory writing as a mode of analysis that blends fiction and history, it aims to offer a new perspective on Ottoman Jewish life and the affective legacy of civic participation.