Disquiet

January 1, 2020
Turkish writer and political activist Livaneli (Bliss, 2006, etc.) uses the story of a modern Turkish woman's relationship with an aged professor from America to delve into ugly truths about Turkey's past. The plot is a cerebral, low-wattage academic thriller. In 2001, 36-year-old Maya Duran, a divorced single mother who works at Istanbul University, is assigned to entertain 87-year-old visiting Harvard professor Max Wagner. Then government agents try to coerce Maya into keeping tabs on Max, who was born in Germany and lived in Turkey from 1939 to '42. Instead, she and her computer-nerd son, Kerem, begin researching Max to learn what secrets the agents fear he might expose. Meanwhile, she grapples with two secrets closer to home: Her paternal grandmother was an Armenian whose parents were massacred, and her maternal grandmother's family was massacred for being Crimean Turks. Sharing an intense, platonic intimacy with Maya, Max (not himself Jewish) lovingly describes his love for his Jewish wife, Nadia, and her tragic death in what Maya herself calls a "separate section of my book." Through Max's story, Livaneli recounts a little-known actual World War II tragedy. In 1941, 769 Romanian Jewish refugees traveled on an ill-equipped ship bound for Palestine. The unseaworthy Struma reached Istanbul, where it sat for 71 day before Turkey--in collusion with Britain, which did not want the refugees to reach Palestine--had the ship with its broken engine hauled out to sea, where a Russian submarine torpedoed it. One passenger survived. Livaneli's telling is heartbreakingly vivid, his despair over the potential for human and governmental cruelty deeply felt. In contrast, the fictional characters, particularly Maya, remain more strategic than emotionally engaging. Maya is too obviously mouthing the author's arguments, dropping too many philosophers' names along the way, and her narrative voice, at least in this translation, remains oddly cerebral even when she discusses her love life and her son. Yet Livaneli's passion in exposing Turkey's and the West's culpability in real massacres is eloquent enough to override his ho-hum fictional narrative. A book that is hard to get through yet hard to forget.

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December 2, 2019
A 36-year-old divorcée working at Istanbul University draws inspiration from an 87-year-old visiting professor’s recollections of WWII in this affecting novel about love, loss, and personal identity from Livaneli (Bliss). When octogenarian Max Wagner returns to Istanbul after a 59-year absence to lecture at the university where he once taught, narrator Maya Duran has the job of escorting him around the city. Maya accompanies Max on an out-of-town expedition to a beach by the Black Sea, site of the 1942 sinking of the Struma, a ship filled with Jewish refugees, including Max’s wife, Nadia. There, Max plays his composition, “Serenade for Nadia,” on the violin. Back in Istanbul, despite Maya’s brother’s warnings against dredging up the past, Maya records Max’s account of emigrating from Germany to Turkey in 1939 along with his desperate attempts to arrange for Nadia to join him. Maya also learns how her grandmothers—one Armenian, one Crimean Turk—assumed false identities to survive acts of brutal repression. Their experiences and Nadia’s inspire Maya to find the courage to declare her independence, defy her brother, and tell the world Max’s story. Livaneli smoothly switches between 2001 and 1938–1942, offering insights into Turkey’s rich cultural, political, ethnic, and religious divides. Livaneli’s worthy portrait of a man coming to terms with his tragic past and a woman coming to terms with her Turkish heritage delivers a forceful plea for openness and tolerance.

April 12, 2021
Livaneli (Serenade for Nadia) delivers a keenly wrought story of the oppressive violence the Ezidi, aka Yazidi, people face at the hands of ISIS. The story is told by a young Turkish journalist named Ibrahim working in Istanbul, whose frantic narration is interlaced with monologues from his contacts who share their life stories. When Ibrahim gets news that his childhood friend, Hussein, has been killed in Germany, he travels to their hometown of Mardin, where Hussein had spent time before leaving for Europe, to investigate. While there, he learns Hussein dedicated his life to volunteering at the local refugee camp for those from Syria fleeing ISIS (his last words were “I was a human being”). Hussein’s distraught family tells Ibrahim of a “she-devil” Ezidi woman, Meleknaz, whom Hussein had fallen in love with and who they believe was involved in his death. Ever the journalist, Ibrahim sets out to learn the truth about the Ezidi people (who are widely seen by outsiders as being Satan worshippers) and who Meleknaz really is and where she’s gone. Though the translation often feels prosaic, the story’s urgency comes through in its tight grasp on the problems of religious violence, misogyny, and the failures of compassion. The result is a memorable illumination of the Ezidi people’s rich history.

Starred review from April 15, 2021
A somber, pensive novel, by one of Turkey's greatest modern writers, that centers on current and ancient troubles at a historic crossroads. Ibrahim, a young journalist in Istanbul who works for a paper that thrives on mayhem, picks up on a disturbing item in a news-budget meeting: A Turkish pizza cook has been murdered by neo-Nazis in Germany, and his circumstances are familiar. "If this person's name was Hussein Yılmaz, and if he'd been born in Mardin and was thirty-two years old, it couldn't be anyone other than my childhood friend Hussein," Ibrahim realizes. Soon he's off to his hometown, an oasis in the red-dust desert near the Syrian border where everything has changed in the years since he's been gone. Hussein, he learns, has been effectively killed twice. First, an IS sympathizer shot him, crying "that this was what happens when you betray Allah for Satan," and left Hussein for dead. Hussein's crime? To fall in love with a Yezidi refugee woman with a blind baby, a member of a tribe rumored to worship the devil, although, Ibrahim remarks, in truth "Satan worships them." The violent clash of cultures betrays a history of tolerance and multiculturalism, and when Hussein, transported to Germany to recover, finally meets his death at the hands of skinheads, it all comes full circle; says Hussein's brother, "When I think about it, it drives me crazy, Ibrahim...I mean, Muslim jihadis and Crusader Nazis committed a joint murder." Livaneli's slender narrative contains multitudes: It plays at several points with Kurdish, Arabian, and Turkish folklore in a provincial city that, Ibrahim says, has a "broken down fairy-tale atmosphere," and at the same time it subtly critiques a present marked by civil war, the ministrations of celebrities like Angelina Jolie in the teeming refugee camps nearby, and a media insatiable for if-it-bleeds-it-leads stories of the exact sort that Ibrahim uncovers--and, we know as the story closes, he cannot help but file. A brief but intensely emotional, memorable story that spans centuries and continents.

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