In the Jewish Women’s Archive, I found uncommon women – many of whom led me to women outside of the archive. Sometimes, women I found outside of the archive led me to remember just how many women we will never know.
This was the year of Kulup. The year my mom and I watched Matilda and Rasel Aseo onscreen, astonished at Kulup’s inclusion of what we felt was representation of our narratives – my mom’s, as a Jewish woman who married a Balkan Muslim man, and me, as their child. Learning about Jews on the margins of Ottoman life, even those who were/are LGBTQ, I began to breathe sighs of relief. Much of my writing the past few years has been about finding belonging, even as I feel that I will never fit perfectly into ‘one identity’ – Jewish, Ashkenazi, Sefaradi, Balkan, Muslim, etc. I am not the only one who has, and will continue to, not be identified as one thing easily. Interfaith Jews, queer Jews – we’ve always been here, and we’ll always be here. The women of the archive are a testament to that. Especially Roza Eskinazi.
I learned about Roza through a Romaniote Jewish friend, Adi Liraz, and through her article in the Jewish Women’s Archive, where I worked as a fellow this year. She was born Sarah Skinazi into a Sefaradi Jewish family in Istanbul. Roza, like many Sefaradi Jews, had the last name Skinazi (from Ashkenazi), a testament to her multicultural origins. When an Ashkenazi Jew immigrated to the Ottoman Empire, they sometimes settled into a Sefaradi community. More specifically, they became “the Ashkenazi.” Haim who? Haim the Ashkenazi.
Today, we conceptualize this as ethnicity, and therefore blood-tied and permanent. But Roza, during her lifetime, just like her ancestors, moved with grace through the tumultuous Balkans – a Balkans that has still not recovered from its trauma. I hear Roza’s voice and her music that repeats choruses alternating Greek and Turkish to reach every ear in her audience. She sang about love, sadness, sex, celebration, and even heroin.
I hear the voice of a woman who converted to Christianity to marry a Greek man in a beautiful love marriage, all while keeping her name. Someone who even sang openly about doing drugs. The archive blesses us with a precedent for a woman who cared very little about optics. Her music drowns out the ‘Are you Jewish or Albanian?’ I have so struggled with.
This year, I learned about what I am – a woman with a Jewish, Islamic, and specifically Balkan American perspective, who finds herself feeling most spiritually fulfilled when I am singing melodies from Rhodes and Istanbul with my community, or cheekily singing along to Roza’s Eminem. She was a free woman in every sense. Free from borders, respectability, social constraints.
Roza taught me to reject frameworks that demand a blood price. For the first time, instead of trying to pick out a consistent narrative in Balkan intergenerational trauma, I began to see our histories for the frantic, sad, senseless violence they often are. I started rejecting and reconceptualizing the ‘tit for tat’ and ‘competing authenticies’ frameworks that dominate Balkan politics and many of my own interactions with other diasporic Balkan people. Above a clamor of competing voices, I began to hear Roza’s, and then my own.
“What could any of us have done to deserve conquest, genocide or war?
How could you possibly try to draw lines on land?
Why can’t we be everything that we are?
When is it okay to let go? When do we say we’re sorry?”
The cultural codes of my families and our wider cultures prevent me from fully speaking out about harm and discrimination for multiple reasons. For one, speaking out about harmful behavior of any kind makes it seem as if I hate either one of my families or want them to face consequences that I don’t. Publishing Precious Sound in New Voices Magazine was scary for me. “Comings-out” are scary. I fit into multiple spaces because I fully slot into none. I no longer care for being spiritually, religiously, and politically inconvenient and intelligible. Many of the women in the Jewish Women’s Archive aren’t.
I reject the context and I reject the framework. I relinquish the burden of evidence. I demand a new society and culture, and I will be part of making it, even though it hurts. I implore everyone to look to history for some of the answers to the questions you face today – of ethnic hegemony, naturalization, erasure, misappropriation, and ethnocentrism. You will find them.
When people reach out to me and stay in my life because they’ve read writing with my name on it, because they relate to it and it helps them or they like it, it gives me new breath. Even as I change, I always live as an older version of myself in the minds of people who don’t see who I am now. But I am allowed to change. I have begun to try holdING on to my best and happiest memories in the hopes of outshining the ones in which I experienced the most pain. So, thank you to the interfaith children of Muslim and Jewish parents who reached out to me this past year. Thank you to a certain hazzan in Seattle who sent me a CD of his music to learn. Thank you to the Sephardic-Mizrahi Q Network. Thank you to the tender feminists who are breaking walls and sewing dresses. Thank you to the women of the archive, and the women who run it, who may soon be in it. Thank you to the undefinables. Thank you to the children of Hindu and Jewish parents. Thank you to the Muslims and Jews finding love with one another now. Thank you to the Esther Victoria Abrahams, the Salima Pashas, the Leila Murads, and the Rozas of the world. And, thank you, God.
What I learned during my time in this fellowship, from my own experiences and from my interviewees, is that someone will always be trying to do something in your name. They may hurt for you and they may even hurt you while saying it’s for your own good, and they have your best interests at heart.
They will often claim to be protecting you while controlling the very context in which you live and write and breathe, and pretending they don’t have the power to change that. Worse than that, you will fall for it, because your most primal lived trauma is being used to manipulate you. So, here I am, healing from it. Over the course of this fellowship, I have interviewed everyone from Mizrahi feminists breaking walls in Israel-Palestine, to the director of a film about Albanians’ internal conflict surrounding the moral codes of an older world and the horrible new challenges of our current one. Time, based on the Jewish calendar or not, is like the edge of a lake. We walk around and reach the same places again and again, each time washed new by a small wave.
The writing in New Voices, which leans antinationalist, feminist, and unashamed, is not as easily found in other parts of the Jewish media sphere, which lean toward neutrality or outright nationalism – or quiet anxiety about having enough funds to get through the next year. Increasingly, Jewish media takes place not only in online newspapers now, but in an ever-emerging network of online periodicals, social media accounts, and Facebook groups. Speaking up on any of it and existing means that we:
- Make ourselves known – and make ourselves, subsequently, vulnerable
- Disrupt an easy narrative
We can. Let’s do it. Together.
Featured Photo of Roza Eskinazi courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
