On the 10th day of Christmas: Meet Yehuda Rebbe, the Jewish wise man

Posted on December 21, 2011 by lizcameron

Yehuda Rebbe, image thanks to the Asian Shadow Theatre Exhibition's Flikr photostream

So, today we are meeting Yehuda Rebbe, the Jewish wise man.   This is a far cry on the spectrum from ridiculous to sublime if you consider that yesterday we met Safiye Rakkase, the vainglorious dancing girl.  She ignores Yehuda Rebbe when he comes around, and he respectfully steers clear of her.

Yehuda Rebbe is a learned and pious man who just happens to be of the Jewish faith.  While the traditional use of Jewish figures in Karagöz puppetry involved significant stereotypes, my brain does not buy into this.  In fact, Yehuda Rebbe is a wandering rebbe, who seeks truth much as the wandering dervishes did.  As of late he wanders in and out of the area of my mind, and in the general vicinity around it.  He carries a great big brass key, as he has become the guardian of the fountain of youth that all the puppets living in my head have drunk from.   I am not sure who appointed him as the Holder of the Key, but he must have been deemed to have his head squarely on his shoulders to receive such an honor and responsibility, I mean, can you imagine if Karagöz himself had that job?  Whew.

But, on a more serious note,   Yehuda Rebbe loves to read, loves to observe and loves to debate.  He has gotten himself up to speed on the modern day Israel-Palestine conflict, supported the Mavi Marmaris mission the first time, and has decried the oppression experienced by Palestinians.  He feels that the entire conflict is a losing battle, though, and that the post-colonialistic influence of the UK in setting up the 1963 agreement was a bad seed planted.  He says, however, that it goes on and on, round and round way back before that.  He gets very worked up about all this.

Yehuda Rebbe is also a big fan of the resurgence of Ladino music in Turkey, and speaks Ladino with a flourish.  Ladino is a language that is also called Judeo-Spanish.  As I understand it, it is both the spoken and written Hispanic language of Jewish people of Spanish origin (I guess meaning those that did not head to Latin America). This was not a language until after the expulsion of Jewish people from Spain in 1492.  So here is what I understand – when the Jews were expelled from Spain, the development of their (Castilian) Spanish was cut off from the rest of the Spanish-speaking world.  However, they kept on speaking the language in their own communities and over time, their own grammar and volcabulary were sort of stuck back in the 1400s and 1500s…Yehuda Rebbe will tell you all you wanted to know and more on this topic…

Mostly, though he seeks to besmirch the stereotypical image of himself, which is described here by Emin Senyer, the English-language web expert on Karagoz puppetry, as far as I can see:  “the haggling Jew is a familiar character and is either seen as a money lender, a second hand dealer or a peddler. He tries out many obscene puns on Karagöz and, using his ungrammatical, broken Turkish as an excuse, he maliciously changes Karagöz’s name to give it a bad meaning and a result, Karagöz becomes angry and wants to beat him. He is a malicious and vulgar type. He wears black salvar, a loose linen robe open in the front called cubbe, and a keveza, a black hat with a blue turban. There is a sack on his back. When Karagoz pretends to go at him, or even only to suggest that he intends to do so, the Jew begins to shout and scream as though he were actually being severally hurt. When Karagöz makes the motion of tickling him, even while till at a distance, the Jew begins to laugh. While he is complaining in a loud voice he nevertheless always finds time to revile Karagöz. He is a miser and haggler. Even after he agrees on a price, he complains that it is too high and he can not pay. He is also a coward and when all the other characters in the neighborhood decide to attack the drunkard, the Jew does not join them but runs away.”

Phew, what images.  In the characters of my mind, Yehuda Rebbe never runs away, but always stays to enjoy a debate, or a little sparring.  He also will not have one bit of interaction with currency, fearing a stereotyped image, he prefers to barter.  He often barters his own melodious voice reading the sacred stories and learnings of the Torah and Talmud for what he may need.  Turns out, Karagöz puppets occasionally need meals of olive oil (to keep their inner and outer workings supple, as they are made of cow and sheep hides, after all).

I have a sense that the puppets, including Yehuda Rebbe, may have known (YEARS ahead of me) that I would end up with M. and become in need of their Karagoz puppet services (well, they think that, and, um, I guess I do too).  I say this, because I have heard stirrings of Yehuda Rebbe (and of course the others, each in their own way) for years.  I think it was Yahuda Rebbe who encouraged me to take up my college friends’ offer to join them in living in our college’s Hillel House – since a crazy lawsuit required “de-segregation” of the house and the placement of at least three non-Jewish people in that house.  Well, that was me.  I learned how to cook in a kosher kitchen, how to deal with the aftermath of an aryan attack (for real, the meat was brought to the dairy parts of the kitchen, and human feces were spread everywhere before they tried to burn our house down) and a few basic blessings in Hebrew.  For a Unitarian (lefty intellectual wing of the Protestant world), this posed no problem, and it has opened my eyes in more ways than one.

I am sure, now that I write this, that Yehuda Rebbe was behind this, silently whispering in my ear all the way through the application process, interview and move-in day. Like Mercan Bey, the spice trader from the Arabian penninsula, Yehuda Rebbe is responsible for always encouraging me to open not only my eyes, ears and mind – but also my heart to people who do things differently than me.  Yehuda Rebbe is telling me that his special mission in my head is to focus especially on conducting damage control when M.’s heartfelt but truly ignorant in the dictionary-sense-of-the-word questions about religion rub people in the family the wrong way.  As I write this, Hacivad Bey has chosen to show himself now, as has Yehuda Rebbe.  We often see them together, talking into the wee hours of the night, much like Shams of Tabriz and the Mevlana himself.  They are standing here on top of the laptop screen, looking at one another, and silently, they quote in unison something that means a lot to them – from Rumi:

“Since the object of praise is one,
from this point of view,
all religions are but one religion.
Know that all praise belongs to the Light of God
and is only lent to created forms and beings.
Should people praise anyone but the One
who alone deserves to be praised?
But they go astray in useless fantasy.
The Light of God in relation to phenomena
is like light shining upon a wall—
the wall is but a focus for these splendors.”

Finishing these words, the two puppets nod their heads in agreement and bow with respect to one another – only to be interrupted by the modern-thinking Celebi.   Throwing himself in between, Celebi screams about religion being the opiate of the masses, and generally wreaks enough havoc for all the Karagöz puppets to run up onto the laptop wh430t21[035t0\1243@#$%F3P….WHEW!  They all started jumping on the keys there, sorry.  OK, we are in the middle of a full-blown argument on religion and spirituality now, I will have to get back to you another time – no    space                  to                                   type!

Related articles
Posted in Introducing the Karagöz puppets, On writing about my life with the Karagöz puppets | Tagged , , , , , | 13 Comments

On the 9th day of Christmas: Meet Safiye Rakkase, the vainglorious dancing girl

Posted on December 20, 2011 by lizcameron

Safiye, showing as much skin as possible - she loves Lady Gaga and Madonna (thanks to the Asian Shadow Theatre Exhibition's Flikr photostream for this image)

Safiye Rakkase (Sah-fee-yeh rah-kah-seh), that’s who you are meeting today.  As stated, she may be a hot mamma – but she is one vainglorious hot mamma.  She is the ringleader of the chorus of dancing ladies, often referred to in the Ottoman court as dancing girls, or çengi …according to the website www dot turkishculture dot org “during the time of the Ottoman Empire dancing was form of entertainment enjoyed both at court and amongst ordinary people. Unfortunately these dance traditions have not survived to the present day, and our information about them is restricted mainly to Ottoman miniatures and drawings and paintings by Europeans who visited Turkey in past centuries. When exploring the history of Ottoman dance it is important not to confuse such authentic documents with the works of European Orientalist painters, who depicted not what they had seen but what they imagined. Such fruits of fantasy include female slaves dancing naked in harems. Ottoman miniatures on the other hand, reflect the true nature of this dancing, as do pictures by eye witnesses, many of them not professional artists, whose job was to collect written and visual information about the Ottoman Empire for the monarchs of Europe. Ottoman dances had their origins in theatre, the performers enacting a subject by means of pantomime in the form of dance, using body language to convey their meaning. These dances were of three types. The first was performed by dancers known as çengi, who originally included both men and women, but in later times came to be women only. The word çengi is derived from çeng, a type of harp played upon the knees and no longer used today. The çengi dancers held a type of castanet known as çarpara in their hands, and sometimes also handkerchiefs. Their costumes were highly ornate, concealing every part of the body apart from the face and hands. Some çengis whirled china plates on the tips of their fingers while they danced, and were then known as kâsebaz or ‘dish jugglers’.”

Now, unlike the description above, Safiye Rakkase does not cover all but her face and hands…apparently her outfit morphed over time to include more of a modern-day belly dancing outfit.  She was never much for spinning china on the tips of her fingers, either, but she can do it in a pinch.  Safiye Rakkase, often referred to as just Safiye for short, is overly obsessed with her looks and tends to spend way too much time primping and preening when she goes out.  She is the puppet in my head who supports my Turkish family in encouraging me to dye my silver hair back to brown – though I don’t mind the silver, nor does M., not that I would ever act on it if he did.  M. gets upset, for example, when I succumb to the pressure of having every single family member consistently chant through the day “in Turkey, we dye our hair,” this is a true story.  In any case – Safiye Rakkase loves it when they do this – and plants seeds of doubt across my cerebellum on a regular basis.

English: Safiye Ali (1891-1952), first female ...

I wonder what Safiye Rakkase would think of Safiye Ali, the first Turkish doctor to treat the troops during the Balkan Wars - Image via Wikipedia

Safiye Rakkase scoffs at my feminist upbringing – and encourages me to use my “feminine whiles” to get what I need in life. She is clearly the voice in my head that actually, much to my shame now, wore a miniskirt to court one day at the request of the head lawyer on the team I worked for while in a public defender office.  That head lawyer was also a woman, who also wore a miniskirt that day, as she knew the criminal court judge in question liked to look at ladies’ legs.  That was total Safiye Rakkase territory. And yes, we got what we needed for our client that day.  Who knows if it was related.

These days, I let Safiye Rakkase worry about what I wear – but not much else.  She is still a major bit of noise in my head, as if those insane, negative body image magazines have set up a permanent loudspeaker in my head, much as everyday North Koreans have to put up with Kim Jong Il‘s propaganda broadcasts 24 hours per day – in their apartments!

I try to love Safiye Rakkase for who she is, but I do hope she will see the light one day.  As for her? Well, she still let’s me cut loose on the dance floor on occasion, it’s all her moves, not mine.

Related articles
Posted in Introducing the Karagöz puppets, On writing about my life with the Karagöz puppets | Tagged , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

On the 8th day of Christmas: Meet Mercan, the spice trader from Arabia

Posted on December 19, 2011 by lizcameron

Meet Mercan, itinerant trader from the Arabian Peninsula - here he is sneaking up to me to let me know of a new spice in the market - he is my major spice and zest for life supplier (image thanks to the Asian Shadow Theatre Exhibition's Flikr photostream)

So, we move from yesterday’s introduction to Zenne, the former dancing girl now in love with her fragrant herbal garden, to an introduction to Mercan Bey (pronounced mehr-jahn bey), a spice trader from the Arabian peninsula. Now, I only became aware of the presence of the Karagoz shadow puppets in my mind in 2004, when M. and I got into a relationship, and I started to experience confusion in our cross-cultural relationship. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that Mercan Bey has been with me for a lot longer than that. As a tradesman well-versed in spice, he peddles everything from tumeric to cassia cinnamon and cayenne pepper. I have loved spice since I was small – and embraced every chance I had to lean more – there was always a tiny voice in my head, encouraging me to do so.

I can remember climbing up on the salmon-colored wooden chair painted by my mother in order to step onto the harvest golden-colored linoleum counter so that I could gingerly step over to open the spice cabinet, twirling the triple-decker lazy susan around to see what treasures lay there. I had my share of sour moments, such as when I tried the alluringly-titled “cream of tartar” or got too much nutmeg up my nose or had the bitter taste of too-old marjoram under my tongue for the rest of the day…but I had many wonderful discoveries as well – cinammon, ginger, clove, thyme, basil, oregano and many more…

All my life, I think Mercan Bey has been tracking me. It first started with the first snack I cooked for my parents, aptly named “Italian toast,” which was essentially buttered bread sprinkled with “Italian seasonings” which was a blend of green herbs – marjoram, thyme, oregano and basil. It continued on with the trick my friend’s Swedish mother taught me when I had trouble sleeping, namely, to grind up a bit of cardamom and add it to warm milk. Later in my life, it was the lady who hired me to work in her herb and spice shop, and taught me to make spice necklaces by soaking allspice, star anise, cardamom and cinnamon until it was soft enough to pierce. The romanticism of this was seductive to an imaginative, old-fashioned yet difference-seeking “tween.”

And yet later, it was my Bohemian neighbor, who taught me about how a tiny bit of cayenne adds a whole lot to the standard white sauce my Grandma taught me to cook out of flour and butter. My mother, an adventurous on and off vegetarian was especially adventurous, and put a lot of coriander into her infamous tofu-nomeat-balls, get it? This spice exploration went on for years and years, through the introduction of ajwan by a boyfriend referred to by my father as “the old Indian,” asafoetida as the mystery ingredient used in much southern food, as revealed by a friend of a friend from New Orleans and finally to pul biber (the sweet to hot, non-bitter red pepper) and island-grown kekik (thyme) introduced to me by my own beloved M. once in Turkey for the first time. It is my belief that all of this spice exploration is at the silent hand of Mercan Bey, who loves nothing more than to show up with a new spice for me to sample.

An image of the stereotypically myopic American care of this link at the School Library Journal

Mercan Bey is the rarely-present puppet (due to his ramblings along the spice route in Anatolia) who encourages me to seek broader horizons, explore the unknown, to embrace the experience of difference and learn as much about the world as possible. While he is rarely physically present, he is ever-present in my mind as I seek to do my best to break out of the myopic ectoplasm of my American upbringing to look beyond. I love Mercan Bey and am grateful to him for his part in opening my eyes to the rest of the world.

Related articles
Posted in On writing about my life with the Karagöz puppets, Turkish Food!, Visits from the Karagöz puppets | Tagged , , , , , , | 25 Comments