Customer Reviews

The Turk and My Mother: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I truly had a difficult time putting the book down! The author had a wonderful sense of the era and people, and the story flowed beautifully. It was such a good book, I really didn't want it to come to an end!
I look forward to more works by this author and hope she keeps on writing and writing.
Bravo!

Years ago, the radio was the centerpiece of the evening in American homes. Families gathered to listen to serials, news reports and movie gossip columnists. Many of the same families shared a valued tradition of storytelling, tales they brought over from "the old country", where generations shared births, deaths, marriages, joyful events and tragedies. These stories gave meaning and texture to their days, reminding the adults who told them and the children who listened, of their rich heritage in the world.

The Turk and My Mother awakens these memories, tales of adventure, danger and often romantic foolishness. Who would have thought a stubby little grandmother in a shapeless dress and babushka would have had romantic dreams of a man other than her husband? The children are fascinated, challenged to view their grandmother in a different light, as a girl entertaining the fancies of youth, when her husband was far away in America?

And who could guess how much was fable, how much was truth? What really happened to Uncle Marko and why did it take him 13 years to return from the war to his small Hungarian village, hoping to see his mother once more? What lies behind the story of the Polish vampire, how does removing a birthmark save a life? Can you learn to play violin from a blind musician? Would Marko ever imagine his mother, Agnes, nurtured romantic notions of a handsome Turk (who maybe wasn't really a Turk) before sailing away to find her husband Josef in America? And exactly how much did Aunt Madeline remember about the Turk who held her on his knee when she was five-years old?

Through the stories of this particular Milwaukee immigrant family, the Catholic Church weaves its constraints and conditions for acceptance, the priest a powerful figure. Sometimes alterations are called for, small changes to avoid God's judgment of all-too-human flaws. Heaven is the goal, after all.

Stefaniak writes of the rich cultural history that defines this country as the great melting pot. Our ancestors have come from all over the world, the "old countries" of Russia, Italy, Ireland, a Europe stressed by conflict and the rise to power of demagogues who changed the direction of politics. These are real people, once youthful and driven by dreams and expectation like any emerging generation. Their life experiences were defined by family long before this country created a history for itself. It is these transplanted hopes that they brought to their new country, where they bloomed again, creating a new cultural identity, whose roots are nourished by their ancestors.

The remarkable characters in this novel, from Grandmother Agnes and her mother-in-law, storyteller Staramajka, to the exiled Marko the shoemaker, bring another dimension to the family history. These stories are the framework of cultural identity, they way we envision ourselves in the past and the tales we whisper to our children before bedtime. Spoken history is a cultural treasure, a precious commitment to the continuity of ancestral folklore.

In the novel format the author has license to rewrite history, allowing relatives ample opportunity to change behavior, to forgive. Putting a human face on actions motivated by ignorance and fear, family is defined by its ability to comfort, to extend the welcome of belonging. And if reality is obscured by myth, who is to say which is true? Luan Gaines/2004.

Once every year or so I read a book so good that I won't lend it to anyone, even best friends or immediate family. Although I have read all the pages and will recommend it to all who will listen, I am never finished with such a book. I need it on the shelf nearest my desk, available whenever I want to reread a favorite passage or look up a forgotten detail as I think upon the story. The Turk and My Mother by Mary Helen Stefaniak rests on that shelf, a treasure not to be lent.

In a manner reminiscent of the stories my grandmother told of her youth, dying George Iljasic tells three interwoven tales -- of his mother and the Turk (who wasn't really a Turk), of his grandmother and the blind gypsy fiddler, and of himself and Kata, the Kaszube girl. Beautifully crafted and elegantly written, the book brims with unique, though not always likeable, characters, who love, suffer, and endure with quiet nobility.

Although engaging from the start, Stefaniak's message gently emerges in the middle tale when Staramajka (the grandmother) dies and in the grave realizes it is easy to forgive, but it is equally necessary to forget as you "sift through hours and days and years until you [find] the gray morning or the sunny afternoon or the blue evening or the darkest night when you were most truly who you are."

As the layers of past relationships unfold and George's life winds down, we share his universal regrets, make peace with what cannot be undone, and unlike George, realize we still have time to say or act upon the unfinished affairs of our hearts, although like George, we probably won't.

My book club read this book and everyone enjoyed it. Ms Stefaniak has a very lyrical writing style that is a pleasure to read. The only complaint any of us had is that the story was confusing at times and hard to piece together, thus, a 4 versus 5 star rating. As Ms Stefaniak notes in the author Q&A, she'd like for readers to come to a new understanding upon reaching the end of the book and to want to read it anew. If it weren't for our book club discussion, I probably would have done just that in order to catch the things and connections I missed, but that others in the book club did pick up. It is a good read and I recommend it.

This book makes you wish you had paid better attention to the stories your parents and grandparents told you... The stories within the story, the meshing of lives, are all so wonderfully and masterfully told by Mary Helen Stefaniak.

Stefaniak has a wonderful way of developing her characters and the story. It really feels when I read that the story is told as only the characters themselves could tell it, just as the narrator himself notes the way that his grandmother tells stories. For me this makes the book an absolute delight to read. The story is so warm, so personal. I found it to be extremely emotionally engaging. At times laugh out loud funny, at others eyes tearing up touching, at all times interesting. In short, a marvelous book.

The Turk and My Mother reminds me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in capturing places and times with humor and affection amidst hardship and disappointment, but Stefaniak's novel also has its own unique strengths. It spans a broader time and locale, capturing history, without letting the history supplant the human story of one extended family. Opening in Milwaukee, the novel reaches back to Hungary before World War I and carries us forward to the present, accounting for a century of cataclysmic change in the world and in the Iljasic family. Taking care to keep the reader well grounded and employing a keen eye for detail, the novel oscillates easily between time and place as the story of Tas Akbulut and Agnes is gently teased out from fragmented allusions to a satisfying, if poignant conclusion. The novel is a moving and delightful read with a depth that should prompt book clubs to snatch it up.

I really wasn`t into reading the book but my wife loves these kind of novels so I got it for her. I am a Turk so I thought it would be fun too. She says she enjoyed the book. When she told me that the guy was not actually a Turk, I had to tell her that naming the book so would help sell much better!!lol.
She liked the book, and it arrived as new, clean, on time. Nothing like a book as a gift..