The Turk and My Mother

by Mary Helen Stefaniak

Book Overview

Every family has its secrets. But toward the end of his life, George decides to tell his daughter the story of his mother and the Turk. This initial revelation leads to a narrative tour de force that follows a family through four generations and around the world--through love, marriage, and betrayal, through illness, death, and war. Mary Helen Stefaniak's charming and flawed characters and the warmth of her prose will stay with readers long after...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393326993
• ISBN13: 9780393326994
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 338 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.8" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

"Turk" sells..:)

I really wasn`t into reading the book but my wife loves these kind of novels so I got it for her. I am a Turk so I thought it would be fun too. She says she enjoyed the book. When she told me that the guy was not actually a Turk, I had to tell her that naming the book so would help sell much better!!lol. She liked the book, and it arrived as new, clean, on time. Nothing like a book as a gift..

A Keeper

Once every year or so I read a book so good that I won't lend it to anyone, even best friends or immediate family. Although I have read all the pages and will recommend it to all who will listen, I am never finished with such a book. I need it on the shelf nearest my desk, available whenever I want to reread a favorite passage or look up a forgotten detail as I think upon the story. The Turk and My Mother by Mary Helen Stefaniak rests on that shelf, a treasure not to be lent. In a manner reminiscent of the stories my grandmother told of her youth, dying George Iljasic tells three interwoven tales -- of his mother and the Turk (who wasn't really a Turk), of his grandmother and the blind gypsy fiddler, and of himself and Kata, the Kaszube girl. Beautifully crafted and elegantly written, the book brims with unique, though not always likeable, characters, who love, suffer, and endure with quiet nobility. Although engaging from the start, Stefaniak's message gently emerges in the middle tale when Staramajka (the grandmother) dies and in the grave realizes it is easy to forgive, but it is equally necessary to forget as you "sift through hours and days and years until you [find] the gray morning or the sunny afternoon or the blue evening or the darkest night when you were most truly who you are." As the layers of past relationships unfold and George's life winds down, we share his universal regrets, make peace with what cannot be undone, and unlike George, realize we still have time to say or act upon the unfinished affairs of our hearts, although like George, we probably won't.

An Absolute Jewel

This book makes you wish you had paid better attention to the stories your parents and grandparents told you... The stories within the story, the meshing of lives, are all so wonderfully and masterfully told by Mary Helen Stefaniak.

Most enjoyable! A true life love story

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!

The pains and comforts of the past

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 con