Over fifty years after the “Thrace Events” in Turkey (1934) a Jewish émigré describes the violence he experienced: “For a certain time in all the part where we used to live, it start(ed): anti-semitism, and they want(ed) to kill all the Jewish people to deport them at that time in (1934). Hitler time. We escaped….” Remembering the boycotts and violence against Jews in Thrace through an arguably post-Holocaust narrative of Nazi anti-Semitism, this informant’s account contrasts sharply with recent scholarship forging a link between such local violence and the Settlement Law (also 1934) that reflected wider state security interests targeting not only Turkish Jews, but also Muslim minorities such as Balkan immigrants and Kurdish tribes in the east. Effectively silent about the Turkish state’s role in the violence, the informant draws attention to a normative public and scholarly narrative about Jews as protected minority in Turkey, as well as the association of anti-Jewish violence not with Turkey, but with Nazi Germany. What is significant about such divergent stories of the state and how can they illuminate historiographies that take shape and circulate in a variety of venues as ‘public history’? Drawing upon oral interviews with older Turkish Jews in Istanbul, Izmir and Edirne, this paper will explore the effective and real silences in their testimonies for what they can tell us about wider neighborhood, national and interethnic contexts, as well as the degree to which they undergird commonplace historiographies of the nation and academy. As well, the paper will engage with ethical dimensions of the ethnographic sources under discussion, tangling with the often divergent explanatory interests of interviewer and interviewee. Building on the emergent literature on ‘reminiscence work’ among scholars of history and social welfare, in addition to age as a missing category in cultural studies, the paper will probe silence and speech from a variety of perspectives, investigating discordant narratives of public history not simply as subordinate to disciplinary theoretical discourses, but as multiple ‘usable pasts’ of informant, community, state and scholar.