Tag #127307 - Interview #97610 (Jak Rutli)

During school years there were girls in Kuledibi who we were friends with, they attended the Austrian girls’ highschool. There was a friend named Lora,  we would go on the balcony in their house, we would dance, and chat.  There was Caroline Markus.   She was our friend, we were together because we were from the same street.  There even was a girl, she was Chaldean, she was a pretty girl, I don’t remember her name.  One day she came to my home, rang the doorbell, my father answered.  I was not home, my father said “come in, my daughter”.  The girl said: “I love Jak a lot, but he does not love me”.  Look at the girl’s chutzpah.  My father answered “is that so, my child, I will speak to him”.  In the evening my father related this to me.  I was about 14-15 years old then, a child, as you can imagine.  My father took this event very calmly, he was a very modern man.  They even laughed about it at home with my older brother.  My father had even said “pretty girl” about her to me.  Whenever he saw a girl next to me in the street, he would remove his hat and greet her.

We would go out on Saturdays and holidays.  There was a colony of Eastern European Jews on the side of Uskudar [a district on the Anatolian side of Istanbul].  There were houses resembling a small village, you could eat and stay at houses like Polonezkoy [a village on the Anatolian side of Istanbul founded by the Polish and which therefore had the name “village of the Poles”], there even was a rabbi, but there was no synagogue there.  We stayed there for 15 days.  Sometimes we would only go for the weekends, Saturday and Sunday, and we would return.  There were always Ashkenazim there, we would go there mostly with Ashkenazim.  My older brothers would go more often.
The schools were separate.  We were separated from girls.  We could not go into their school.