ISTANBUL — A young Turkish man arrives in 1920s Berlin. Ignoring his business of soap manufacturing, he spends his days learning German and his nights reading books — especially the Russians, and especially Turgenev. He explores the city’s parks, its wide streets, its museums and art galleries. He is looking, as he put it, for something, “to sweep me off my feet.”
He finds it one evening at a gallery, where he stands transfixed in front of a painting of a young woman dressed in a fur coat. Day after day he returns to stare at the painting. One evening, drunk and out on the town, he sees the woman in the flesh. Her name is Maria, and the life of the young man, Raif, is transformed.
“All my life, I’d kept my heart closed,” Raif said. “I had never known love. But now, all at once, the doors had flown open.”
That is the basis of “Madonna in a Fur Coat,” a once-forgotten Turkish novel written nearly 75 years ago that has improbably become a best seller, outselling, these days, even Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel laureate.
Published in 1943 and written by Sabahattin Ali, a leftist intellectual jailed for his political writings (much like his contemporaries under today’s government), the book’s newfound success has become a rare point of common cultural experience for a deeply polarized country.
“It is read, loved and wept over by men and women of all ages, but most of all by young adults,” Maureen Freely, who translated the book for the first time into English last year (with Alexander Dawe), wrote in The Guardian. “And no one seems able to explain quite why.”
If he were alive today, Mr. Ali would be shocked to see “Madonna” had become a best seller, his daughter, Filiz Ali, 79, said in a recent interview at her Istanbul apartment. (The book has sold nearly a million copies over the last three years, according to the publisher, YKY, and was recently published in English as a Penguin Classic.)
“My father didn’t really give so much importance to this book,” she said. “And his friends told him, ‘Sabahattin, you shouldn’t have written such a romantic book. It doesn’t look good on your reputation.’”
An erudite man of letters during the early years of the Turkish republic, and a devoted Communist, Mr. Ali wrote novels, stories, poems and articles that repeatedly got him thrown into jail. The parallels between what he endured as a dissident intellectual and the ordeals faced by modern Turkish writers arrested for speaking out against the current Islamist government help explain Mr. Ali’s newfound popularity among the Turkish public.
“The same things are repeating, much worse,” said Ms. Ali, referring to the current arrests of journalists speaking out against the current Islamist government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Ali was murdered under suspicious circumstances in 1948, at age 41, at a lonely outpost near the Bulgarian border as he tried to flee to Europe.
The death of Mr. Ali remains, almost 70 years later, as mysterious as his newfound popularity. A smuggler who was “helping” Mr. Ali cross the border admitted to his murder and did a short stint in prison. But it is widely suspected, his daughter said, that he was actually killed by state security agents after he was interrogated. She believes that somewhere deep in government archives the truth could be found.
With the success of “Madonna,” Mr. Ali is now the rare literary figure who is embraced with equal ardor by teenage girls and intellectuals.
Sabri Gurses, a Turkish poet and novelist, said he was moved when he learned that Mr. Ali was carrying a German translation of Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, “Eugene Onegin,” when he was killed. Nowadays, he said, when he sees young people carrying “Madonna” on the streets of Istanbul he imagines many of them feel for Mr. Ali what the Russian poet, Mikhail Lermontov, famously wrote about Pushkin: “He rose against the world’s opinion, and as a hero, lone he fell.”
The sudden success of “Madonna” — attributed to word of mouth, an interest by some Turkish teachers and social media — has become an opportunity for Ms. Ali, late in her life, to help reacquaint Turkish readers with her father. She has spoken at schools and conferences to promote the book, and says she often meets young readers, including boys, who come to her with tears in her eyes.
“They want a love like this,” she said.
“Madonna,” she said, is part autobiographical, as Mr. Ali spent time as a young man in Berlin in the 1920s. A letter to a friend that surfaced later revealed he had a friendship there with a woman, Maria Pruder, which inspired the novel. In the book, Maria was half Jewish, a revelation that foreshadows what was to come in Germany. Ms. Ali said her family has never tried to track down the real Maria or her family.
“Maybe she died in one of the death camps,” she said.
In a country so deeply polarized between secularists and Islamists, between urban elites and the rural poor, “Madonna” and the legacy of Mr. Ali have become something to unite over, at least for those who love books.
Sevengul Sonmez, an editor and literary historian, said that Turkish readers who love “Romeo and Juliet” are “now reading Maria and Raif, as the modern impossible love story.”
“We needed a classic as well,” she said. “I think that readers have needed, for a long time, a book they could love unanimously. ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat’ finally emerged as the common ground.”
If one can glean insights into a society from the books its citizens read, then one thing the popularity of “Madonna” may underscore about Turkey is the eagerness, among the country’s youth, to break free of the traditional gender roles and machismo pushed by Turkey’s leader, Mr. Erdogan.
In the book, gender stereotypes are upended: Raif comes off as vulnerable and emotional, while Maria exudes independence and a lack of sentimentality for matters of the heart.
Kaya Genc, a young Turkish novelist and writer, quoted Susan Sontag, the critic, when asked about “Madonna’s” resonance: “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”
“This applies perfectly to Sabahattin Ali’s ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat,’” he said.
Back in her apartment, Ms. Ali recalled memories of her father, calling him a man with a quick wit who loved music and was devoted to his family, who did everything with her and her mother, and who in his younger years was a hopeless romantic.
“He fell in love all the time when he was young,” she said.
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