Reflection of Tatar Emigrants’ Life in Turkey in the Letters of Rabia Arat in 1933-1935

The author examines the correspondence of Rabia Arat, a representative of the Tatar emigration in Turkey with her husband, Rashit Rakhmati Arat, a Turkologist and professor at Istanbul University. The letters contain autobiographical material, as well as a story about the problems of the Tatar female doctor during a period of emigration. Based on comparative-historical, system-structural and biographical methods, the author reconstructs the events from the life of the family of Tatar Muslims from Russia in the first years of political emigration. Rabia Arat’s emotionally colored feelings, particularly associated with the difficulties of perceiving the realities of emigrants’ everyday life, allow us to create a picture of the personal and social life of the educated Muslim woman in Germany and Turkey in the 1920-1930s. Women, who on the one hand, sought to fulfill their career ambitions, and on the other hand, who wanted to preserve the traditions of Tatar-Muslim education and to support their family well-being inside the ethno-confessional norms of attitude of then women’s role and place in society of the period.