13 Yaşında Bir Çocuğun İstanbul Seyahatnamesi

Judy Acheson, Judy in Constantinople, Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, MCMXXX [1930]. x, [3], 200 s, başlık s önünde 1 renkli resim, metin içinde 15 küçük, 8 tam sayfa resim, kapak içlerinde birer çift sayfa harita, arka kapak içinde kitapçı etiketi, 20 x 14 cm, bez cildinde. İstanbul’a turist olarak gelen Judy Acheson (1916-2000) gördüklerini 13 yaşındaki bir kız çocuğunun gözüyle anlatıyor. Yazarın Young America looks at Russia (1932) başlıklı bir kitabı daha vardır. Kitap tanıtımı: Juvenile authors often come to public and scholarly attention because of their capacities to turn their quotidian experiences into something extraordinary. For twentieth-century teenage travel writer Julia (Judy) Acheson, however, life was something extraordinary: for several years she accompanied her father, head of the Near East Relief, across Turkey and the Soviet Union, and she wrote about her experiences in two books for Frederick Stokes: Judy in Constantinople (1930), and Young America Looks at Russia (1932). Despite the remarkable historical and material events to which young Judy bore witness, including the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, the rise of the socialist Soviet Union, and the reorganization of the former Ottoman Empire, her books are steady and even pleasant, recommended by reviewers for their educational merit rather than their excitement or literary qualities. This twenty-minute, co-authored paper tests three ways of understanding the equanimity of juvenile travel writing in the 1920s and 30s, of which Acheson’s work is a particularly illustrative example. The first approach is to conclude that the writers of juvenile travel narratives, including Acheson, were largely unskilled storytellers who had little literary interest or talent. Yet this analysis is an unhelpful endpoint, and it overlooks the consistent demand for and popularity of these books. The second approach is to consider the diplomatic and strategic purpose of this level, factual style of narrative. In the immediate post-World War I and interwar period, were child writers like Judy complicit in a foreign policy grounded in rationalism? Were Americans interested in presenting themselves as steady, reasonable forces of good in a world of chaos, and was this ideology expected of children, too? Did educational experts strive to mirror this philosophy by presenting the world as a place first to be learned about, and only then to be experienced in the form of adventure and artistry? Comparing Acheson’s work to G.P. Putnam’s “Boys Books by Boys” series and the larger fad for American juvenile travel writing in this period suggests an attempt to understand the world as a space that—whether ludic or educational—could be moulded to American purposes and be made safe for American innocence. The third approach is to consider what this equanimity says about children and child writers more generally. Though child writers who would go on to become well-known adult authors often apprenticed and played by adapting scenes from their lives into the kind of clever narratives and evocative descriptions that they appreciated, less literary child writers moulded their lives into the educational styles that they knew best, and were likely apt to conform to the expectations of their parents and publishers. As specialists in learning—that is, experiencing new things every day—child travel writers often turned their extraordinary lives and material experiences into the quotidian work of learning. Our presentation concludes that while this process may have flattened their narratives, their sturdy books found eager buyers in school librarians and other education experts, creating artifacts of American culture and internationalism that would shape a generation and continue to serve scholars today.