All books are available at Amazon and Abe’s Books https://www.abebooks.com and are available at the Bethlehem Public Library.  

Serenade for Nadia. Zulfu Livaneli

At The Bethlehem Public Library, Bethlehem, NH, and By Zoom. Register at Bethlehemshul@gmail.com

Edward Cowan hosts the discussion. 

Turkish writer and political activist Livaneli (Bliss, 2006, etc.) uses the story of a modern Turkish woman’s relationship with an aged professor from America to delve into ugly truths about Turkey’s past.

The plot is a cerebral thriller. In 2001, 36-year-old Maya Duran, a divorced single mother who works at Istanbul University, is assigned to entertain 87-year-old visiting Harvard professor Max Wagner. Then government agents try to coerce Maya into keeping tabs on Max, who was born in Germany and lived in Turkey from 1939 to '42. Instead, she and her computer-nerd son, Kerem, begin researching Max to learn what secrets the agents fear he might expose.

Sharing an intense, platonic intimacy with Maya, Max (not himself Jewish) lovingly describes his love for his Jewish wife, Nadia, and her tragic death.  Through Max’s story, Livaneli recounts a little-known actual World War II tragedy. In 1941, 769 Romanian Jewish refugees traveled on an ill-equipped ship bound for Palestine.

The unseaworthy Struma reached Istanbul, where it sat for 71 day before Turkey—in collusion with Britain, which did not want the refugees to reach Palestine—had the ship with its broken engine hauled out to sea, where a Russian submarine torpedoed it. One passenger survived.  (review from Kirkus)

This Year’s Theme:

Mizrahi Jews are also called Oriental Jews, members or descendants of the approximately 1.5 million Jews who lived in North Africa and the Middle East up until the mid-20th century and whose ancestors did not previously reside in Europe.

These immigrants were collectively labeled ʿEdot Ha-Mizraḥ (Hebrew: “Ethnic Groups of the East”) in Israel upon their mass migration into the country after 1948. They were distinguished from the two other major groups of Jews—the Ashkenazim (a tradition rooted in the Rhineland) and the Sephardim (a tradition rooted in Spain). 

The latter two groups are most familiar to us in the US, but Mizrahi or Oriental Jews are more of a mystery.  Three of our four books have as their main characters Mizrahi Jews; while the fourth is set Turkey and whose characters are a German born man and a Turkish woman. 

All four books open us to an unfamiliar culture and rich history, far different than the ones we know best.