The 1940s and ’50s were a golden age for Turkish travel writing. A growing number of Turkish visitors came to the United States, often sent by Ankara for technical training or invited by Washington for cultural exchange. These were boom years for the Turkish publishing industry, and visitors invariably wrote up their experiences for a hungry audience in books and newspaper columns, with titles like “Letters from America.”
Arriving in America, usually New York, Turkish travelers quickly began trying to make sense of what they found. Their commentary veered from trite to profound and from witty to completely unexpected. They included the most minute observations about daily life as well as broad philosophical reflections on the nature of the American character. They were amazed by the cheap price of food and reflected on the sincerity of the people they encountered. One author remarked that the cars crawling along the avenues of New York City looked from above “like a herd of turtles.” Their language, even the varied transliteration, hints at how new it all was. Were the buildings “Skyskrapers,” “Sky Cruppers,” “grattacielo,” from Italian, or simply, in Turkish, “Sky Piercers”?
Like everyone seeing a new country for the first time, the authors of these mid-century travel accounts found much to marvel at and much to criticize. They praised some American customs, like barbecues and mobile libraries. They were taken aback by others, like Americans’ love of watching football and “eating ice cream together with their food.” Some things just seemed tacky, like “wearing white suede sports shirts alongside silk ties with pictures of roosters, peacocks, and naked women on them.” The subject of racism was inescapable. Many visitors harshly condemned the ugly prejudice they observed. Others, citing their experiences in Harlem or the Ottoman army, seemed suspiciously sympathetic. Not infrequently, authors would comment critically on racism and make racist comments within the course of a single page.
Read today, a particularly striking aspect of these accounts is the many warm interactions they document with non-Muslim immigrants who had come to America from Ottoman lands. Turkish travelers during this period consistently described being greeted enthusiastically, often in Turkish, by the many formerly Ottoman Greeks, Jews, and Armenians they met.