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Selim Özdogan
Die Tochter des Schmieds
Aufbau-Verlag GmbH, Spring 2005, 320 pp. This sad, moving novel, the author’s eighth, stands in strong contrast to his previous books, which were aimed at the youth market and came complete with lashings of drink, drugs and sex. What he has produced this time is a deeply pondered study of a modest Turkish family, focusing on Gül, a small-town blacksmith’s eldest daughter, who, on the early death of her mother and her father’s remarriage, becomes, in emotional if not practical terms, mother to her two younger sisters, and to the two children born to her stepmother as well. The time is the end of the Second World War, the primary setting Anatolia. The blacksmith Timur moves his business from the town to a nearby village, then back again. Meanwhile Gül’s domestic duties prevent her from properly pursuing her education. She fails to graduate from primary school and has to watch wistfully as her two siblings go on to boarding school and higher education. After dismissing a series of suitors Gül marries Fuat, her stepmother’s brother, a hairdresser, who shortly after their marriage has to leave for military service. As the junior female household member she is treated like a skivvy, and can only reveal her unhappiness to her friend Suzan. Fuat, on his return, spends too much time drinking and gambling. He also becomes envious of the lifestyles of the rich, which become more pronounced as prosperity in Turkey rises, and takes himself off to Germany to amass a bit of cash. Eventually Gül and her two daughters join him there, and Germany becomes their home.
There is a growing interest, in Britain and elsewhere,
in the sort of social and domestic issues dealt with in
this book. Comparisons can be drawn, for example, with
Rupa Bajwa’s The Sari Shop, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the
Sea, or the various novels of Orphan Pamuk, who has
made a significantly large English readership aware
of Turkey, both now and in the past. Quietly absorbing
throughout, The Blacksmith’s Daughter traces the
changes in Turkey as the country moves from its old
agrarian roots to the upheavals of urban migration and
modernisation, but succeeds above all as the moving
study of the character of one loyal soul.
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