The end of the war brought new tensions, but the Orga brothers were able to enrol in the Military College, which paved the way for Irfan to set sail for England in 1941, where he spent the rest of his life. Orga’s descriptions of the last years of the war are heartbreaking as his family slips into abject poverty along with most of the population and disintegrates in many respects. In one way, her own unobtrusive way, she was the forerunner of Kemal Ataturk - for she emancipated herself years before her time.” (p. “She was an odd contradiction, one moment spineless and the next bounding with immense vitality. A truly remarkable aspect of the book is the immense empathy Irfan displays with his mother, at his young age, even as her growing mental imbalance and desperate survival tactics cut him to the core. She helped her neighbours and achieved their respect and gratitude so that they helped her in turn. She got a job sewing and did needle work for sale. For the first time, she went out in public alone to secure food for her children and inquire about the fate of her husband. However, with the new house, his mother gained a new lease on life. They moved into the upper floor in a house he owned, but Irfan’s mother was never really the same: “Ever since the fire she had been unapproachable, far away from us, and several times I had caught her remote eye fixed on Mehmet or myself, as though she asked herself what we had to do with her.” (p. The family lost everything and were forced to rely on the charity of the grandmother and her rich husband. Especially vivid are Irfan’s memories of “that night, when the enemy spies set fire to the wooden houses of Istanbul, when they burnt like matchwood under a summer sky! The street was daylight for all the houses on both sides were a lurid, blazing mass”. After her son was called up for the army, she shocked everyone by remarrying an elderly, very rich man whose grudging help was to shield the family from dire poverty for a time. The family somehow adapted except for the autocratic grandmother who could simply not fathom the need for reducing the lifestyle to which she was accustomed. “I think she sewed her heart into that bag too for after my father had gone we who were left saw nothing of her heart.” (p. His mother prepared a shoulder bag for her husband. His uncle was conscripted and the same was expected for his father. Food was hoarded, and the French school closed. Irfan’s father sold his business, moved his family into a smaller house, let go two of their servants. This was the fall of 1914 and pleasant childhood memories are soon replaced by the privations of Istanbul’s civilian population during the war. As he recalls, “It was the fashion to ape our elders and to speak French in public, a rather grand and adult thing to do.” (p. He then attended the French school, where the students were mainly turkish. There is also his circumcision and his first day at school-a district school from which his parents quickly withdrew him when they found he had been beaten. Orga records charming childhood memories -visiting the coffee house and the mosque with his grandfather, before he died, and the bathhouse with his impervious grandmother. After Irfan’s father went missing in action, a dramatic change hit the family’s fortunes, most obviously affecting the role of his mother. Yet, all this was to change, battered by the forces of history - the ravages of World War I and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. His mother was veiled and seldom left the house. Orga’s family was wealthy, their life cushioned by devoted household servants. Still can I feel the content of childhood’s awakening in the low, sunny room filled with the reflected white light from the sea.” (p. “Looking back, it seems to me that the whole of early childhood is linked with the sound of the sea and with the voices of my parents and grandparents as they sat eating breakfast on the terrace overlooking the gardens. Irfan Orga’s memoir of growing up in Istanbul is written with such elegance that, at times, it approaches poetry.
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