Life in Turkey
Portrait of a Turkish Family. By Irfan Orga. (Gollancz. Os.)
There is always fascination in the details of everyday life in a foreign country, and to the Englishman what country could be more foreign than Turkey ? Mr. Orga describes his home in Istanbul with the zestful thoroughness of a nineteenth-century novelist. Indeed, he is something of a masculine, Muslim George Eliot. The purple passages, the rich writing, follow a twentieth-century pattern, but the characters stand out as sharply three-dimensional as the Poyser family, and their background of heavy walnut furniture, white china stoves, and silver trays of coffee becomes as familiar as the Staffordshire farmhouse.
Life flowed merrily along until Turkey entered the 1914 war. That put an end to happiness. The grandfather was dead. The young father, a sorrowful conscript, died on active service. He had sold his business, and the proceeds, in gold and notes, were kept in his wife's bedroom, since she could not be expected to understand a bank account, until the house and everything in it were destroyed by fire. After that the mother worked in a clothing factory and the children nearly starved, in the Istanbul slum where they now lived, and then in a Home for war orphans. When bread was unobtainable they ate berries, and wild radishes, and even almond blossom. After the war the two boys went to the Military School, their mother undertaking that they would serve in the army for fifteen years—as officers if they passed their examinations, and as sergeants if they failed. They passed, and all was well with the family again. Two of the children married, the indomitable old grandmother settled down with the grand- daughter-in-law, and the courageous mother's reason broke down and she died. The writer came to England. He has given us an interesting and attractive picture of his family.
BARBARA WORSLEY-GOUGH.
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