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    Portrait of a Turkish Family
    Unavailable
    Portrait of a Turkish Family
    Unavailable
    Portrait of a Turkish Family
    Ebook445 pages10 hours

    Portrait of a Turkish Family

    By Irfan Orga

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Irfan Orga was born into a prosperous family in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. His mother was a beauty, married at thirteen, who lived in the seclusion of a harem, as befitted a Turkish woman of her class. His grandmother was an eccentric autocrat, determined at all costs to maintain her traditional habits. But the First World War changed everything. Death and financial disaster reigned, the Sultan was overthrown and Turkey became a republic. The family was forced to adapt to an unimaginably impoverished life. In 1941 Irfan Orga arrived in London, and seven years later he wrote this extraordinary story of his family's survival.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEland Publishing
    Release dateOct 18, 2011
    ISBN9781780600208
    Unavailable
    Portrait of a Turkish Family
    Author

    Irfan Orga

    İrfan Orga (1908–1970) was a Turkish fighter pilot, staff officer and author, writing in English. He published books on many areas of Turkish life, cookery and history, as well as a life of Atatürk, and a universally admired autobiography – Portrait of a Turkish Family (1950).

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    Reviews for Portrait of a Turkish Family

    4/5

    60 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A very gripping novel about the tragic family history of a young boy, later a young man, in Istanbul and other places of Turkey. All classic themes come by, father - son, mother - son, brothers, grandparents, all grief big and small. And then the first World War starts and all changes. And again a can of themes is opened: wealth, poverty, togetherness, religion, anxiety, .... Near the end the story gets lengthy when the author tells about his own affairs in the military, while for me the depictions of the family, and especially the authors mother, are the best parts. The authors mother is a young beautiful wife at the start of the story and she gets confronted with the worst scenario in war. The relentless search for a new attitude, one would even say a new identity, after this tragic event is without doubt very courageous. Masculin viewpoints by the author, with his cultural background, do prevent him from being completely aware, so it seems, of this journey his mother has to go. Only in the end comes pure sympathy but then it's too late.Could have been written a bit more dense, a bit less selfcomplaining, and then it would have had more than the current 3,5 stars. Still very well worth your time.
    • 5/5
      I don't tend to go in for autobiographies; they tend to have stupid, long titles with subtitles and joke names and so forth, and they're often ghost written and useless. The Dennis Wise autobiography is a good example - a couple of pages read over someone's shoulder and that was more than enough for me.It wasn't always that way though. In the past, autobiographies tended to be more literary affairs, and there is no better example than this 'Portait of a Turkish Family.' It chronicles the early life and career of its author, and then is continued further by his son in an epilogue. This is very good writing (and, it turns out, was 'guided' in its English form by Orga's wife), and a fascinating exploration of Turkish life and culture in the years around Ataturk's coup.
    • 4/5
      I studied this book for an essay.
      Very touching reading about the dramatic events of the world war, from an uncommon perspective.
    • 5/5
      A tremendously beautiful and sad memoir; the author recalls his privileged Istanbul upbringing in the early 20th century. Servants, luxury, loving parents, holidays on a family estate, and visits to the Turkish Baths...all set amid beside the glittering Bosphorous.Suddenly this was all ripped away with the onslaught of WW1....the men sent off to die, the women selling off their treasures and moving into lowly accommodation. As the family begin to starve, and his cosseted mother has to find factory work, the children are sent off to a charity school...And things can never really be repaired thereafter....the boys forever feeling cast off; the mother suffering mental health problems from her privations. While the author made it through military school and flew for the Turkish Air Force, his later like in UK was beset by difficultiesLovely writing.