Aegean Pearls: My Life in Izmir

A few weeks ago I went through my monthly book binge. The school secretary, a Turk named Ipek, had asked me if I was teaching any Turkish writers in my literature classes. I have spent the years since my first visit to Turkey reading Turkish writers, most notably Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk. But I remain ignorant of the breadth of Turkish literature.  Ipek set me aright. She wrote down ten authors I needed to check out. I immediately went home, hoping to find them translated into English. It took some work--so did finding English titles in a Turkish bookstore. Finally someone mentioned a store with English books on Konak Pier, and I went the next Sunday to check it out. The English titles they had were mostly classics--Frankenstein, Kafka, stuff like that. I found two books by Turkish writers: a history of the Ottomans and Orhan Kemal's My Father's House . Kemal had been one of the writers on Ipek's list. The book begins as a novel--another man telling his story to the writ...

I've traveled to enough places by now to find one important aspect most places have in common: at one time, they had a Golden Age. I have been to many sites in many places, and in each place I heard, "we were the center of things," or something to that extent. Last summer, driving through North Dakota, west of Fargo, one of the remotest places I've ever been, I found that I was near the geographic center of North America. A map on a roadside marker showed how trade goods had criss-crossed the contenent in aboriginal times, with "The Peace Garden State" right in the middle. I have been in the Republic of Georgia, viewing an amazing castle complex, and I have heard of that country's "Golden Age" of building and proselytizing orthodox Christianity . Everywhere was the center of somewhere. I have read enough, too, to have learned one other important thing. Most places have had at least one epic story written about them, too. Georgia was the place w...