The Turk and My Mother: A Novel

I truly lost myself in the experience of this book, but as I stand back now and try to describe it, several things stand out for me:

The author's skillful manipulation of time: The present was woven with the past and seen through various eyes, including those of an old story-teller and a naive young boy. I loved how the stories were as fresh to that young boy as they were to his grown daughter many years later.

The prose was delightful... I loved how normal things become fantastic--the acrobatics of fish being cleaned, their scales shooting like sparks. How Joseph regretted most of all being cleaner than his wife (who didn't have access to a bathtub in the old country.

The characters were real and poignant.

And (spoiler):
One of my favorite show more parts was the old grandmother in heaven, forgiving everyone. show less

The author is a woman from Iowa City who had two daughters who participated in Young Footliters productions with our daughters. I had enjoyed some of her short stories I'd read, & the jacket copy had me really looking forward to this celebration of the stories passed along the generations of an immigrant family (in this case Croatian immigrants to Milwaukee). It was OK but didn't, to my mind, live up to its promise.

Storytelling is at the heart of Stefaniak's (Self Storage and Other Stories) lovingly crafted volume of three interwoven family tales (subtitled "A Novel"), which captures the history of a Croatian-American family settled in Milwaukee after World War I. The book's Decameron-esque framework is set from the beginning as George, the first-generation American son of Josef and Agnes, is on his deathbed, surrounded by his adult children. The stories he tells about life in Milwaukee in the 1930s lead to stories-within-stories told by his grandmother Staramajka, the family matriarch, who steals the show. "My father's mother had her own style of storytelling, a style that avoided accommodating her listeners in any way.... You had to hear about show more the fence cleverly woven of branches, the dirt yard full of chickens, the four fat pigs that her son sold off when our mother was pregnant." A master of digression, Staramajka lingers over the details of village life as she tells of her daughter-in-law's secret love for a Turkish prisoner of war, her son Marko's wartime disappearance and miraculous return from Soviet Russia, and her own mysterious relationship with a blind gypsy called Istvan. She fades into the background only in the final story, in which yet another secret history is revealed, this one featuring Kata, the illegitimate daughter of a Polish woman with a traumatic past and a connection to George's family. Stefaniak's easy familiarity with the vernacular idioms of the old country and the new, and her zestful, respectful ear for different voices, create a world whose past, present and story-loving afterlife are at once magical and grounded in reality.
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