LAST GREAT READS FOR SEPTEMBER, 2015
Orhan’s Inheritance, by Aline Ohanisian
The Armenian Diaspora in
1915 is still unacknowledged as genocide by Turkey a century after 1.5 million
Armenians were deported and driven into the Syrian Desert to die because Muslim
Turkey, at war with Christian Britain, France and Russia, believed that all
Christian Armenian residents were traitors in their midst and must be expelled
from the country.
Aline Ohanisian, whose great-grandmother survived to
imprint upon the family forever the horror and sorrow of that time, gives us a
story that deserves to be unforgettable – as a family chronicle; a love story;
and a heart piercing record of a nation thrusting off the yoke of the
Sultans, embracing democracy and the parliamentary system for the first time,
yet still turning against its own because they worship a different God.
`It
is 1990. OrhanTürkoğlu’s beloved
grandfather Kemal has died in his nineties in the remote village of Karod,
where he established the successful family rug-weaving business a lifetime
before. Orhan manages the family
business interests in Istanbul, and loves his work designing the beautiful
patterns of the kilims that are woven and dyed in Karod. He cannot imagine his life without his Dede,
this infinitely kind man who shaped his childhood and youth, nurtured his
artistic talent (for Dede had a talent of his own: he never stopped drawing), and protected him
along with his Aunty Fatma from the bitterness and aggression of Orhan’s father
Mustafa, not received into the family business because he had no aptitude for
it.
As
Orhan journeys to Karod for his Dede’s funeral and the reading of the will, it
is plain ‘that time and progress are two long-lost relatives who send an
occasional letter’; Istanbul and remote Anatolia are night and day, and always
will be. And so is Dede’s will. The predictable: Orhan inherits the family business, to his relief
and his father’s rage – and the shock of a past time of which everyone has been
ignorant: the house and grounds are
bequeathed to a Ms Seda Melkonian, an aged Armenian resident of a rest home in
California.
Who
is this woman? What was she to
Kemal? Orhan journeys to California for
answers, and her signature on documents releasing the house to his father and
Aunty Fatma – it is unthinkable that they be made homeless by a stranger living
on the other side of the world. But the
story his visit uncovers is so shocking and heartbreaking that it can’t be true
– can it?
For
Seda, who has resolutely refused to remember or acknowledge the past for most
of her life, finds in Orhan’s visit the catharsis she needs to unburden herself
of all her secrets, including those of which she is most ashamed. The world will never be the same again for
either of them.
In
beautiful prose, Ms Ohanisian recounts Seda’s life in a series of flashbacks,
from her privileged girlhood in the very same house left to her by Kemal, to
the beginnings of the horror; the ‘Knock
on the Door’, and the forced march of the multitudes into the Syrian Desert
- and eventually the place where her
days will end: the Californian rest
home. It is now Orhan’s choice to hide
or expose what he has learnt, and this won’t be easy. He understand secrets, for
he has many of his own.
Ms
Ohanisian’s stunning imagery and beautiful word-pictures show us how privileged
are we to experience this journey with her.
FIVE STARS.
The
Glassblower, by Petra Durst-Benning
Ms Durst-Benning completed
this first novel in her trilogy in 2003;
unfortunately for English readers, it was not translated from the German
until 2014 – but better late than never.
Now we can all enjoy her lovely story of the Steinmann sisters,
daughters of proud and protective widower Joost Steinmann, a respected
glassblower in the small Thuringian village of Lauscha. In 1890,
Lauscha is renowned throughout Germany as the international destination
for exquisite glassware, and Lauscha is proud of its reputation for
craftsmanship, and the artisans who reinforce the village’s good name.
Joost shelters his three daughters. Every young man who comes calling in the hope
of getting to know his pretty girls better is shown the door: men are all up to no good – only after one
thing! The girls despair of ever meeting
suitors, but they are too busy to reflect on their lack of experience, for
there is much work to be done in their father’s business – until one morning he
fails to rise from his bed. Joost has closed
his eyes for the last time, and to their horror, his sheltered, cosseted
daughters are on their own. Who will
look after them now? How will they earn
any kind of living in a patriarchal society where a woman’s duty is clear: ‘kirche, küche, kinder’. The choices are few, but if a woman does have
to earn her living she does so for slave wages in one of the few glassworks in
the village. Those uppity Steinmann
girls are no different from anyone else – they’ll have to lose their airs and
graces and subsist, just as other widows and single women do!
Ms Durst-Benning easily captures the reader in the first
chapters. Each daughter is
different: haughty, beautiful eldest
daughter Johanna, unaware of her business acumen until she is forced to employ
all her intelligence to prevent the family from starving; middle daughter Ruth, equally pretty but
convinced that the only way out of poverty is to make a good marriage – and
then does the opposite; and Marie, the
dreamy youngest girl, nascent artist and eventual self-taught glassblower,
using her late father’s equipment so that she can realise in glass the
beautiful baubles she creates on paper – all in secret, for a female working as
a glassblower is unthinkable.
Late 19th century Europe is captured
unforgettably in all its beauty, poverty, double standards and hypocrisy; Lauscha, that tiny village with the enormous
reputation is riddled with hierarchies that refuse to accept change, and the
Steinmann girls find that the way ahead is strewn with pitfalls – and I won’t
find out what happens until Book Two ‘The American Lady,’ comes into the
library. Ms Durst-Benning has given us a
real page-turner, even though Samuel Willcocks’ translation favours the modern
idiom perhaps more than it should. That
minor quibble aside, I can’t fail to give this lovely, unashamedly romantic
story FIVE STARS.
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