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|  | | The story begins sometime in the late nineteen-thirties in a small South Anatolian village. A young girl looks at herself in a mirror, scrutinizes her sticky eyelashes, her hair plaited into a thick braid, her hands, her mouth. "The face is the palace yurt of the soul," the girl hears her mother say as she comes up behind her. The mother brushes olive oil on her daughter's lips and covers the mirror in accordance with the rules of her religion and her husband's command.
With this fairy-tale scene the German-Turkish writer Feridun Zaimoglu begins Leyla, his latest novel, a family history. It is the story - brimming with life experiences - of Zaimoglu's mother Leyla, who was born in this little village in the early thirties, moves to Istanbul as a young woman, only eventually to set out for Germany with her husband and son.
In an interview Zaimoglu says he was sitting in a café in Kiel one afternoon when he saw a group of older Turkish women, women in their late fifties, early sixties walking past a shop window. It looked as if they were on a theatrical stage, these women who belonged to the first generation of "guest workers." And he wondered what their lives were like back then, before they came to Germany with their husbands. Two thousand five hundred young Turks, so-called "foreign workers," set out for Germany in the early sixties, after the German-Turkish "Guest Worker Recruitment Agreement" was officially signed and sealed in 1961. Zaimoglu's parents were among them, coming from the Black Sea area where their son was born in 1964 in Bolu, South Anatolia.
A few years later Zaimoglu went to school in Munich. He did not fit the preconceptions [Germans] had of the children of guest workers. His ear for the new language was too good, and years later - when he was studying medicine and art in Kiel - that talent made him become a writer instead. With his first book, Kanak Sprak (1995), he showed himself to be a sensitive chronicler of the German-Turkish slang that was later coarsely parodied in German comedy. These were robust stories of the boorish life in an unfriendly new homeland. In Leyla, his family epic, Zaimoglu has now shed the idiom he himself developed in favor of a language that is almost archaic, powerful, and at the same time sensuous.
The author did research for the book where the story began: in the provincial Turkey that half a century ago was cut off from the world in a way hardly imaginable today. He listened to the tales told by his mother and other Turkish women, combed through their photo albums, and tried to imagine himself living that life. This is where Leyla grew up, the youngest of five brothers and sisters, the daughter of a minor railway official who loses his job, struggles along with ever more dubious business deals, and rules his home with a brutal hand. Her mother Emine is not able to escape the assaults of her angry spouse, and the sons and daughters constantly lower their eyes and try to duck their father's heavy hand. People are silent in the little village where anything that attracts attention would resemble a revolution against laws that have been in force for centuries.
Leyla, who shows a naïve independence, withdraws from her "foster father" Halid, whom she refers to only as "my mother's husband," never as "my father." Through the convincingly portrayed point of view of the maturing girl we learn of a world that is characterized above all by the exercise of male power in everyday life. "We live in good-smelling poverty. Jasmine, lavender, soap suds. He is the head - we are the body. Without him we are nothing. We buzz around like bluebottle flies above the toilet hole. He permits us to stay alive. He pulls off a wing and gazes at the miracle he has wrought. [….] His will be done. Humbleness and obedience. Soap suds in our eyes."
Through Leyla the reader gains an insight into the Turkey of the fifties and sixties, into a world in which strict chastity, superstition, and restrictive forms of upbringing determine childhood and youth. The family's move to Istanbul opens up new possibilities for the sons and daughters; the sons attend college and rehearse small rebellions, going their own ways, while the daughters remain shackled to the house, spending their days doing housework and needlework and waiting for the husband who will be selected for them. Nonetheless they dream of a great love. In accordance with strict custom Leyla's parents decide that she will marry Metin, "the handsome one." Leyla becomes pregnant. Metin dreams of finding work in Germany. He resettles there and promises to fetch his wife and as yet nameless child.
With Leyla, Zaimoglu has produced his most ambitious book to date. And also his best. He has found his theme in the lives and fates of his parents' generation, the lives of a generation of women existing between submission and revolt, and he deals with the implications most impressively. He lends a face and name to an entire generation of women who have been forgotten because they seemed insignificant and submissive, yet who are strong and love life.
Zaimoglu's magnificent novel is full of comical episodes; it tells of the strength of the family and of tradition, of exorcisms and prophetic dreams, of courtship and defloration, of hair coloring procedures, accidents and abortions. And yet the author does not merely scroll through a series of pictures of oriental pleasures of the senses, but he keeps in mind, at every moment, the tension-filled construction and proportion of the work as a whole.
In the end Leyla follows her husband to Germany, arriving on the train platform in Munich with her son in her arms, tired and hungry from the long journey. Courageously she reaches for her suitcase; she is ready. "I want to love this country because it wants you to yearn for it. I will pet the wolf, and perhaps he won't bite the hand that strokes the fur on his back."
Oliver Jahn
August 2006
[Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo]
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