Books recount return to ancestral homes in Turkey
Elif Batuman's The Possessed (2010) and Viviane Wayne's Inshallah (2000) make a first-rate double read for Turkish Americans who wonder about their roots. American immigrants in general can learn a lot from these writers about what to expect and what they may find by "going home" to whatever country that may be. These authors have opposite goals, approaches and results to their search, offering, as a reading pair, one highly satisfying view of what your ancestry may actually offer you once faced head-on. Read together, we see what such a trip could amount to, not to mention, what it's more likely to amount to.

Both authors are sophisticated California women, Batuman traveling from Stanford and San Francisco and Wayne from her comfortable home in Newport Beach to what they will find among their Turkish relatives. Each is the master of her story, more focused on her own questioning and growth than on casting her lot with the natives. These are liberated women, not slaves to fortune. They are each liberated enough to know exactly what they are going for and what questions they bring. They know how far they will and will not go in absorbing their discoveries. Turkey is little able to bend them, though they depict a great deal of fascination and curiosity.

But here their stories part. The books have telltale subtitles also that presage why they are there and what they are looking for, and these could not be more different. Batuman is on an academic journey subtitled Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and Wayne uses the subtitle In Pursuit of My Father's Youth. Batuman's brain is frenetic with brilliant reflections, images, metaphors and comparisons. She is following her research and will not be enticed by her Ankara grandmother to lollygag on velvet coaches eating grapes. She escapes her grandmother's chauffeurs and her mother's evening security guards, preferring the company of linguists who ruminate on why Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying.

But Wayne is you and me. She only wants to get a peek at her relatives, hear their stories about her parents, see the abandoned ancestral home, buy a Turkish rug and drive through the country with a tour guide. Her picture of her mother as a toddler entering a Turkish bath in all the regalia that entails is darling. You wish it were a shot of your own mother. Her family house on Buyukada Island in the frontispiece needs to be opened up and seen, and she holds us till the end, waiting for the key, the chance to get in, into what it all means, if anything.

Batuman's sizzling brain turns a Turkish visit into a fascinating comparison of the Uzbek language with Turkish and wins her a Time magazine review as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. But it's Wayne who reads like the aunt who always read to you before bedtime as a kid. Her cadence, warmth, and simplicity dulls your senses and makes you actually feel weary with her at the end of each travel day. Somehow, though little ever happens or develops, you want to hear the story more every night, to just ride along and let her beautiful diction hug you into the submission she calls "Inshallah."

Turkey meant my father, whose past was buried there. Turkey was the omnipresence that overlay the life of my family. An invisible but palpable gauze of fatality blanketed our lives, and while I don't ever remember giving it conscious thought, I subconsciously knew that  this philosophy contrasted with the peculiarly American conceit that, with sufficient knowledge and effort, any problem could be solved.

Wayne is a real and committed traveler like any at the airport or the train station. Batuman is dancing past her Turkish relatives, also past Russian, Hungarian, and Uzbek colleagues and mentors, mocking them, assessing them, picking their brains, and sometimes falling in love with them.

So what do they achieve, learn, and pass on to us as special wisdom required for returning to our parents' homes? These are strong women and their answers are predictable. Batuman closes with a satisfying sigh. Essentially, she admits that she was right all along, that for her literature is everything. The stories of humanity are her best hope for learning about others. She has gone and will continue to go where the great stories are written and read, worrying that the Turks "do not read novels, though they love every other kind of literature."

Wayne, in the end, finds the abandoned ancestral home that is for her like Jung's discovery of the glorious collective unconscious, full of levels and secret meanings. This is the best part of her story, as its decrepit state and emptiness confront her as the real demon of her tale. We finally wake up from the beautiful language that drones along like tiring travel itself. We look into her wishful soul and the soul of Turkey, but we only find a wish and, she says, not enough time. Ever like us, Wayne is a secure American on an extended trip. It is time to go home with only a ghost of an idea of what "Inshallah" means to her, or to us, or to anyone.

We should all write both authors and suggest one more trip; one more for Batuman because no one can possibly get more out of any trip. One more for Wayne because she stopped short of her goal, leaving us all waiting for the bedtime story to change her frog into a prince or whatever all these pieces of her past may be able to do for her.

Chris Cryer is an English professor in Ventura, CA., and a former resident of Saudi Arabia. She has written for L.A. Cityzine, the Los Angeles Times and Damazine, a Syrian journal. This is her first contribution to the Levantine Review.