The Turk and My Mother: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Most enjoyable! A true life love story
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: The pains and comforts of the past
Review: 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.