A very well-written account of the author's family in Istanbul during the early years of 1900. Read in preparation for our trip to Turkey. ( )

A tremendously beautiful and sad memoir; the author recalls his privileged Istanbul upbringing in the early 20th century. Servants, luxury, loving parents, holidays on a family estate, and visits to the Turkish Baths...all set amid beside the glittering Bosphorous.
Suddenly this was all ripped away with the onslaught of WW1....the men sent off to die, the women selling off their treasures and moving into lowly accommodation. As the family begin to starve, and his cosseted mother has to find factory work, the children are sent off to a charity school...
And things can never really be repaired thereafter....the boys forever feeling cast off; the mother suffering mental health problems from her privations. While the author made it through military school and flew for the Turkish Air Force, his later like in UK was beset by difficulties
Lovely writing. ( )

A very gripping novel about the tragic family history of a young boy, later a young man, in Istanbul and other places of Turkey. All classic themes come by, father - son, mother - son, brothers, grandparents, all grief big and small. And then the first World War starts and all changes. And again a can of themes is opened: wealth, poverty, togetherness, religion, anxiety, ....
Near the end the story gets lengthy when the author tells about his own affairs in the military, while for me the depictions of the family, and especially the authors mother, are the best parts. The authors mother is a young beautiful wife at the start of the story and she gets confronted with the worst scenario in war. The relentless search for a new attitude, one would even say a new identity, after this tragic event is without doubt very courageous.
Masculin viewpoints by the author, with his cultural background, do prevent him from being completely aware, so it seems, of this journey his mother has to go. Only in the end comes pure sympathy but then it's too late.
Could have been written a bit more dense, a bit less selfcomplaining, and then it would have had more than the current 3,5 stars. Still very well worth your time. ( )

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/irfan-orgas-portrait-of-his-turkish...

This was my letting-go-of-Turkey read. The Galeri Kayseri English Bookshop within shouting distance of the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya had evidently decided it was ideal for tourists wanting to read an Istanbul story, as there were big piles of it near the counter. They were right.

It's a memoir. Irfan Orga was born in 1908 into a wealthy family in Istanbul, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire. His mother, a great beauty who had married at 13, hardly ever went out into the world, and when she did she went veiled and chaperoned. His grandmother was the dominant personality of the household, and of the whole neighbourhood – an early chapter gives a richly comic account of five year old Irfan accompanying her on a trip to the Turkish baths. The family lived a blissfully entitled life within sight and sound of the Sea of Marmora (as he spells it) until the First World War, when Irfan's father, previously a successful businessman, was conscripted and killed. That, plus a fire that destroyed the family house and all their savings, completely overturned the family's fortunes, and what follows is a chronicle of terrible poverty and struggle. Nobody and no relationship emerges from the years of struggle unscathed, and the final scenes between Irfan and his mother

Meanwhile, Turkey itself was going through major upheaval: poverty was widespread, the Ottoman empire was defeated and in disarray, and by 1923 Kemal Atatürk had led the revolutionary forces to establish the Turkish Republic. The fez was banned and the introduced hat, seen by many as offensively Christian, led to violence in the streets. When Irfan's mother went out alone and unveiled, boys threw stones at her in the street. One day, in Ottoman Turkey, school students were beaten for arriving late at prayers; a few days later, in the secular Turkish Republic, the few who remained devout were likely to be beaten because prayers made them late for class.

The story of this family is heartbreaking, and though there is much hilarity and some high melodrama, the general trend is towards devastation and disintegration. Not that there's any nostalgia for the days of the Ottomans, but the human cost of the radical changes – political, cultural and economic – that happened in Turkey between 1914 and 1940 is made painfully real. An afterword by the author's son, Artes Orga, in 1988 makes it clear that the pain continued for the rest of his life. (He formed a liaison with a non-Turkish woman, whom he eventually married, and as this was somehow illegal he lived in exile, raising his son in a kind of cocoon of Turkishness in London. This book was a big hit, but he never really prospered or found contentment.) ( )

I found the portrait of this “modern” Turkish family reminiscent of the family portrayed in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy in that many of my preconceptions were totally inaccurate. The characters were vivid and heartbreaking. I appreciated the foreshadowing descriptions of what was coming, such as there will come a time I will eat grass because I am so hungry (paraphrased) as these helped me prepare for the awfulness that was to come. As tragedy built upon tragedy the sheer survival of the main character (the author fictionalized) became a startling miracle. The roots of modern-day Turkey are evident through the events narrated here. ( )