Speaking to One Another - The International Raoul Wallenberg ...

What Was Wrong Came From AboveNecmi is a 70 year-old retired teacher with great powers of observation, a prodigious memory, and therare ability to turn a tale. Since childhood, he enjoyed listening to stories of the elderly in Divriği, theconservative Anatolian town where he grew up: “My father frequented a coffeehouse. I used to listen tothe elderly talk when I was eight or ten years old.” He is unusual in his appreciation of oral accounts as asource of local history: “All our old people died. It is a loss neither archives nor libraries can make up for.This is our biggest loss, a catastrophe.” According to Necmi, unschooled elderly women make the mostauthentic storytellers: “Those who make the truest, most objective judgments are the illiterate women.They used to say very interesting things perhaps instinctively, with a god-given gift of judgment.”Necmi depicts a geographically isolated and introverted town: “Divriği was a blind spot, a dead-endstreet in-between cities. You couldn’t go anywhere from there. It was a place of wild nature, cliffs,mountains. Istanbul was very far and unimaginable, like the moon.” Both the late encounter with mo-39