MORIS FARHI’S YOUNG TURK
by Peter Byrne
Swans, CA
Nov 5 2006
Farhi, Moris: Young Turk, Arcade Publishing, 2005, ISBN 155970764 X,
392 pages.
In UK, Saqui Books, 2004, ISBN 0-86356-861-0 (hb), ISBN 0-86356-351-1
(pb), 392 pages.
(Swans – November 6, 2006) Rifat is on the innocent side of puberty
in Istanbul at the end of the 1930s. Ataturk has been consecrated as
savior of the nation. The idea of Turkey as an ethnic monolith has
been planted but its foliage has not yet obscured the evidence of
the senses. Rifat’s neighborhood is a crazy quilt of various peoples
getting along together. The New Turkey exists not too uncomfortably
with the old, myth and magic making room for official Westernizing
Puritanism. A Turkmen, the local fount of traditional wisdom, tells
the boy, who is preparing for his Moslem circumcision ceremony,
that the penis is "the key to heaven (p. 13)." All the same, women
seem to keep the neighborhood going. Rifat’s mentor is Gul, an older
girl with powers of clairvoyance. She’s Jewish, with brothers, and
knowing in circumcision lore. Rifat’s miffed when she calls him a
Donme. He assures her that his distant forebears may have been these
17th century insincere converts, but that his parents chose the Moslem
faith freely. In a letter to Gul he outlines the not so small virtues
of the Moslem circumcision: A boy’s a man as soon as the knife draws
blood, and he doesn’t have to wait around for any bar mitzvah.
So begins Moris Farhi’s Young Turk, a novel told by a baker’s dozen
of friends and acquaintances in the Turkey of the first decades of the
republic. Each voice bears witness to the complexities and richness of
a mixed population as Turkish nationalism and world events impinge
upon it. The freshness of this historical fresco comes from its
being built on the perplexity of children awakening to the sensual
delights of life. The intertwining of death and desire, defeat and
joy lifts the story above the run-of-the mill European or American
novel. Farhi, a Turk of Jewish provenance, lives in London and writes
in English. Born in 1935, he has published four other books and is a
vice president of International PEN. His distance from Turkey seems
only to have intensified his feeling for its life.
Musa grew up in Ankara. His childhood was illuminated by trips
with his Armenian nanny to the women’s baths. He and his friend
Selim acquire fundamental knowledge of the female sphere before the
experienced mistress of the "hamas" bars the boys because their keys
to heaven have grown enough to open locks. Robbie, son of a British
official, steals passports to help his Turkish friends save members
of their Jewish family trapped in Salonica. The Greek city, thanks
to Bulgarian occupation, German pressure, and local collaboration,
began sending its huge Jewish population to Auschwitz in 1943. The
adolescents’ plan fails tragically. This is a novel about children,
not a children’s book.
Selma, a Jewish schoolgirl in Istanbul, feels the racism engendered
by WWII. She’s called a half-Turk by her nationalist teacher.
Turkey’s neutrality doesn’t exclude factions gambling on a
German victory. The Varlik law has been enacted against non-Muslim
minorities. Ataturk is dead. The concept of Turkishness as constituted
by a shared language and culture falls by the wayside.
Jews, Armenians and Greeks are forced out of business by extreme
taxation. Labor camps are set up for those who can’t pay. In March
1944, under foreign pressure and intimations that Germany may not be
a sure bet, the Varlik law was rescinded.
Bilal will perish in the quixotic attempt to bring the passports to
Salonica. He leaves some written musings about the Sephardi and their
long involvement with the Ottoman reign. He accepts an opinion that
might surprise Westerners: "Most Jews who have lived under Islam will
admit, if they are honest, that, over the centuries, Elohim and Allah
have become interchangeable — a solid journeyman who dresses now in
a turban, now in a skull cap (p. 136)." Bilal’s doom seems foretold
in the stormy marriage of his incompatible parents. He glories in his
father’s tale of personal service to a mythic Ataturk in the War of
Independence. We learn that minorities, including Armenians, served in
the army, being especially useful because more likely to be literate.
In 1947, two years after the war, Yusef, at thirteen, travels alone to
Marseilles by ship. A troubled woman takes him in charge, and he soon
covets her as a second mother, his own — a typical Farhi touch —
being uncomfortable in her maternal role. During the trip, the boy
begins to be a man while seeing the woman through the difficult task
of retrieving her husband from an insane asylum. Yusef’s sentiments
have been thoroughly selfish, while the woman hasn’t scrupled to make
use of him as a substitute for her dead son. Intense feelings have
been exchanged, but as between two sleepwalkers.
Hava, a girl of sixteen, is an apprentice juggler. A foundling adopted
by a circus wrestler and his wife, she becomes obsessed with saving
a Caucasian trapeze artist. He has taken to drink out of guilt after
the death in a fall of his male circus partner. The wrestler guru,
whose sport has spiritual overtones in Turkey, will extract the
guilty secret that the survivor had objected to his dead partner’s
"dishonest" touch. Employing do-or-die means, the gentle-giant wrestler
gets the traumatized artist back on the trapeze. Hava will marry him,
aware that their intimacy will be shared with her bridegroom’s new
aerial collaborator.
Mustafa, fourteen, is part of his overbearing but endearing teacher’s
experiment to embody Turkey’s diversity in a college dormitory:
In effect, we twenty-four boys represented almost the full spectrum
of Turkey’s demographic cocktail: Abkhaz, Albanian, Alevi, Armenian,
Azeri, Bosnian, Circassian, Donme, Georgian, Greek Catholic, Greek
Orthodox, Jewish, Karait, Kurd, Laz, Levantine, Nusairi Arab, Pomak,
Pontos, Russian (White Russian, to give their preferred appellation),
Suryani (also known as Assyrians), Tatar, Turk and Yezidi (p. 234).
While the teacher extols the poems of the great Nazim Hikmet, a
mysterious visitor to the college neighborhood extends the teaching
of the Communist poet. This "houri" with a Studebaker, who draws on
a cigarette "like Rita Hayworth" and dresses in black "like Juliette
Greco," dispenses sex with egalitarian impartiality to the dormitory
boys, but forbids un-socialist jealousy and possessiveness. The
dormitory harmony cracks with the strain as the thirteenth boy has
his turn. Local bigots drive the visitor away despite the teacher’s
defense of her. When the dormitory is disbanded, Mustafa misses it
less than his departed initiatrix, but becomes aware that he has "…
attained the wisdom of experience and developed a heart where every
visitor could sign his or her name (p. 261)."
Atilla spends his adolescence in that peculiar dimension of
Istanbul that is melancholy. His family decimated, he finds another
in a Romanian restaurateur and his "Kabadayt," a legendary Turkish
Mafioso of the solitary drifter and Robin Hood variety. But yet another
disaster chases Atilla from the sad city. Another boy, Zeki, decides at
twelve to be a writer and becomes devoted to Nazim Hikmet. When Nazim
is released from prison in 1950, and persecution of him continues,
Zeki plays a role in his escape from Turkey. Then, not unlike Farhi,
he goes into exile himself.
Aslan mourns his friend who finally died of cancer after various
misfortunes, including service in the Korean War. The authorities
had imprisoned him for his promotion of Kurdish rights and world
government. His lover, a matchmaker, had been rendered unfit by her
profession to marry and make him happy. She passes, rather brusquely,
from daily life into legend. The two realms are never far apart for
the author.
Davut, writing a thesis in England, returns to Istanbul where he’s
harried by the authorities. Now broken by torture and prison, His
former teacher, the organizer of the multiethnic dormitory, now broken
by torture and prison, urges Davut to flee into exile. The young man’s
lover can’t bring herself to follow. The subject of his thesis is
apropos: "… how the Turks’ innate nobility tempered with the best of
Islamic teaching made them the most tolerant people in the world, while
the plethora of complexes instilled by the worst of Islamic teaching
could — and sometimes did — turn them into ogres (p. 367)." The novel
closes with a letter from the teacher to all his students. He’s dying,
but as always in Young Turk death wears the raiment of physical love
and leaves time for the teacher to utter his pluralist testament:
"True Turkishness means rejoicing in the infinite plurality of people
as we rejoice in the infinite multiplicity of nature (p. 386)."
Disjointed for a novel, Young Turk most effectively portrays
adolescence in a tumultuous epoch. The eternal drives of youth are
colored with the idealism that Ataturk brought. But the regime that
sprang from him proves narrowing and ungenerous, too often brutal.
Moris Farhi misses what he thinks of as the rough tolerance of Ottoman
Turkey and signals underlying realities that haven’t changed despite
the simplistic vision imposed by an insecure nationalism. The insistent
presence of sex among these weighty themes initially disconcerts. But
we soon understand that the surprise comes from our own limitations. If
their bodies weren’t firmly anchored physically, these children of
the storm couldn’t keep up their hopes under the assault of history
and loss.