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Istanbul Boy: Boyle Gelmis Boyle Gitmez (That's How It Was But Not How It's Going to Be) the Autobiography of Aziz Nesin
227 pages. Part 1 of Aziz Nesin's autobiography.
- GenresTurkish
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
2 people are currently reading
91 people want to read
About the author
Aziz Nesin
387 books1,005 followersAziz Nesin was a Turkish humorist and author of more than 100 books.
Nesin was born in 1915 on Heybeliada, one of the Princes' Islands of Istanbul, in the days of the Ottoman Empire. After serving as a career officer for several years, he became the editor of a series of satirical periodicals with a socialist slant. He was jailed several times and placed under surveillance by the National Security Service (MAH in Turkish) for his political views. Among the incriminating pieces of evidence they found against him during his military service was his theft and sale for 35 Lira of two goats intended for his company—a violation of clause 131/2 of the Military Penal Code. One 98-year-old former MAH officer named Neşet Güriş alleged that Nesin was in fact a MAH member, but this has been disputed
Nesin provided a strong indictment of the oppression and brutalization of the common man. He satirized bureaucracy and exposed economic inequities in stories that effectively combine local color and universal truths. Aziz Nesin has been presented with numerous awards in Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria and the former Soviet Union. His works have been translated into over thirty languages. During latter parts of his life he was said to be the only Turkish author who made a living only out of his earnings from his books.
On 6 June 1956, he married a coworker from the Akbaba magazine, Meral Çelen.
In 1972, he founded the Nesin Foundation. The purpose of the Nesin Foundation is to take, each year, four poor and destitute children into the Foundation's home and provide every necessity - shelter, education and training, starting from elementary school - until they complete high school, a trade school, or until they acquire a vocation. Aziz Nesin has donated, gratis, to the Nesin Foundation his copyrights in their entirety for all his works in Turkey or other countries, including all of his published books, all plays to be staged, all copyrights for films, and all his works performed or used in radio or television.
Aziz Nesin was a political activist. After the 1980 military coup led by Kenan Evren, the intelligentsia was oppressed. Aziz Nesin led a number of intellectuals to take a stand against the military government, by issuing the Petition of Intellectuals (Turkish: Aydınlar Dilekçesi).
He championed free speech, especially the right to criticize Islam without compromise. In early 1990s he started a translation of Salman Rushdie's controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. This made him a target for radical Islamist organizations, who were gaining popularity throughout Turkey. On July 2, 1993 while attending a mostly Alevi cultural festival in the central Anatolian city of Sivas a mob organized by radical Islamists gathered around the Madimak Hotel, where the festival attendants were accommodated, calling for Sharia and death to infidels. After hours of siege, the mob set the hotel on fire. After flames engulfed several lower floors of the hotel, firetrucks managed to get close, and Aziz Nesin and many guests of the hotel escaped. However, 37 people were killed. This event, also known as the Sivas massacre, was seen as a major assault on free speech and human rights in Turkey, and it deepened the rift between religious- and secular-minded people.
He devoted his last years to fighting ignorance and religious fundamentalism.
Aziz Nesin died on July 6 1995 due to a heart attack, after a book signing event in Çeşme, İzmir. After his death, his body was buried in an unknown location in the land of Nesin Foundation without any ceremony, as suggested by his will.
Nesin was born in 1915 on Heybeliada, one of the Princes' Islands of Istanbul, in the days of the Ottoman Empire. After serving as a career officer for several years, he became the editor of a series of satirical periodicals with a socialist slant. He was jailed several times and placed under surveillance by the National Security Service (MAH in Turkish) for his political views. Among the incriminating pieces of evidence they found against him during his military service was his theft and sale for 35 Lira of two goats intended for his company—a violation of clause 131/2 of the Military Penal Code. One 98-year-old former MAH officer named Neşet Güriş alleged that Nesin was in fact a MAH member, but this has been disputed
Nesin provided a strong indictment of the oppression and brutalization of the common man. He satirized bureaucracy and exposed economic inequities in stories that effectively combine local color and universal truths. Aziz Nesin has been presented with numerous awards in Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria and the former Soviet Union. His works have been translated into over thirty languages. During latter parts of his life he was said to be the only Turkish author who made a living only out of his earnings from his books.
On 6 June 1956, he married a coworker from the Akbaba magazine, Meral Çelen.
In 1972, he founded the Nesin Foundation. The purpose of the Nesin Foundation is to take, each year, four poor and destitute children into the Foundation's home and provide every necessity - shelter, education and training, starting from elementary school - until they complete high school, a trade school, or until they acquire a vocation. Aziz Nesin has donated, gratis, to the Nesin Foundation his copyrights in their entirety for all his works in Turkey or other countries, including all of his published books, all plays to be staged, all copyrights for films, and all his works performed or used in radio or television.
Aziz Nesin was a political activist. After the 1980 military coup led by Kenan Evren, the intelligentsia was oppressed. Aziz Nesin led a number of intellectuals to take a stand against the military government, by issuing the Petition of Intellectuals (Turkish: Aydınlar Dilekçesi).
He championed free speech, especially the right to criticize Islam without compromise. In early 1990s he started a translation of Salman Rushdie's controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. This made him a target for radical Islamist organizations, who were gaining popularity throughout Turkey. On July 2, 1993 while attending a mostly Alevi cultural festival in the central Anatolian city of Sivas a mob organized by radical Islamists gathered around the Madimak Hotel, where the festival attendants were accommodated, calling for Sharia and death to infidels. After hours of siege, the mob set the hotel on fire. After flames engulfed several lower floors of the hotel, firetrucks managed to get close, and Aziz Nesin and many guests of the hotel escaped. However, 37 people were killed. This event, also known as the Sivas massacre, was seen as a major assault on free speech and human rights in Turkey, and it deepened the rift between religious- and secular-minded people.
He devoted his last years to fighting ignorance and religious fundamentalism.
Aziz Nesin died on July 6 1995 due to a heart attack, after a book signing event in Çeşme, İzmir. After his death, his body was buried in an unknown location in the land of Nesin Foundation without any ceremony, as suggested by his will.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 26, 2023
This is a ragtag but enjoyable set of snapshots of a boyhood in the period around WWI and the transition to the republic. Nesin was a lifelong and extremely popular critic of corruption and autocratic rule in his writing, which ranged from journalism to drama and film scripts to short stories. But it was all tinged with humor.
From the 1977 foreward:
Nesin’s family was very poor. His father was an adherent of a Sufi lodge, and imposed a punishing daily regime of study on his son. No playmates, no toys. His mother was loving but sickly, dying when he was a boy of about ten. Yet out of this life and its frequent relocations about the city of Istanbul, he captures mini-portraits of strange characters and the delights of occasional stolen moments of fun. We enter hospitals, all kinds of lodgings that the poor carve out of buildings meant for other uses, coffee houses, Sufi lodges, bath houses, and simply the streets inhabited by rough kids and pack animals.
The writer is looking back on this childhood after decades of writing in opposition and of frequent stints in jails and strictures. He has an adult’s understanding of what was going on, and grants some leeway to his father and others. Underlying all is his commitment to the ideals of freedom and justice, whether the threatening autocrats be political or religious. So there is still some sense that things can get better if the struggle continues.
But then I started to read Dawn: Stories, a newly translated work by Selahattin Demirtas. Demirtas is a Kurdish lawyer and politician who has battled for human rights in Turkey for years, and now writes from prison. His short stories are metaphors for what he can’t express directly. I couldn’t even make it through the first story about a young man who must carry out the honor killing of his raped sister. Ertogan has extinguished even the sparks of the republic that Nesin fanned to keep alive.
From the 1977 foreward:
Indeed Aziz Nesin has today almost reached the point of being a folk “hero” with his satire. He represents an unprecedented victory of the written word in exposing intolerance, absurdity, cruelty and stupidity in our rapidly changing society.
Nesin’s family was very poor. His father was an adherent of a Sufi lodge, and imposed a punishing daily regime of study on his son. No playmates, no toys. His mother was loving but sickly, dying when he was a boy of about ten. Yet out of this life and its frequent relocations about the city of Istanbul, he captures mini-portraits of strange characters and the delights of occasional stolen moments of fun. We enter hospitals, all kinds of lodgings that the poor carve out of buildings meant for other uses, coffee houses, Sufi lodges, bath houses, and simply the streets inhabited by rough kids and pack animals.
The writer is looking back on this childhood after decades of writing in opposition and of frequent stints in jails and strictures. He has an adult’s understanding of what was going on, and grants some leeway to his father and others. Underlying all is his commitment to the ideals of freedom and justice, whether the threatening autocrats be political or religious. So there is still some sense that things can get better if the struggle continues.
But then I started to read Dawn: Stories, a newly translated work by Selahattin Demirtas. Demirtas is a Kurdish lawyer and politician who has battled for human rights in Turkey for years, and now writes from prison. His short stories are metaphors for what he can’t express directly. I couldn’t even make it through the first story about a young man who must carry out the honor killing of his raped sister. Ertogan has extinguished even the sparks of the republic that Nesin fanned to keep alive.
March 27, 2011
A series of vignettes under titles like "meat," or "tabby cat" that describe little moments of what it was like to grow up under the surreal, utopia-creating world of Ataturk's new Turkey. Not being able to read from one day to the next (after Ataturk changed the alphabet, and then it changed again later), the destruction of social markers of recognition (the whole culture of the fez that marked not only religion but class status), the increasingly pervasive role of the military in every day life(after it became one of the better jobs in the country, and after mandatory service was instituted), and trying to find a way to grow up in a country where all the old markers of manhood have been taken away. Valuable as both a resource and for some of the striking imagery and ways of looking at events that are to be found here.
(I should mention that this review is for large chunks of the first and second volume only.)
(I should mention that this review is for large chunks of the first and second volume only.)
May 28, 2013
Love it! Humorous & light-hearted but not at all superficial. I love anything written by Aziz Nesin.
January 10, 2020
Aziz Nesin is a treasure beyond compare. A poet and a scholar. This reflection on Istanbul is so moving and wonderful, even in translation. The original shows what a master of Turkish he truly was.
September 14, 2021
Kể cũng thú vị khi đọc cuốn này, lại nhớ tới nét tương đồng với tiểu sử của Michael Jackson. Nét chật vật và cô quạnh từ bé đã sớm thấm vào tâm hồn, nhưng dẫu sao, vẫn được bù đắp bởi tình cảm và những chỉ dạy đúng đắn từ người mẹ. Aziz Nesin vẫn là một biểu tượng của nhà văn chính trực, khảng khái, sống đúng và viết đúng với những gì mình thấy, đất nước mình trải qua, dẫu cho giờ đây giọng điệu những truyện cười của ông không được giới trẻ tiếp đón nồng nhiệt. Cũng chính vì khảng khái, nên ông nghèo, rất nghèo, và tù tội liên miên. Áp lực về cơm áo gạo tiền khiến ông để lại di sản văn chương đồ sộ (khác hẳn với kiểu cần phải có hứng mới viết được của những nghệ sĩ tân thời) (hơn 2000 truyện ngắn, mà đấy vẫn chưa hết) - "trên khắp thế giới này, chẳng gì có thể tạo ra nguồn cảm hứng và buộc nghệ sĩ phải làm việc nhiều đến thế, nhiều bằng những lỗ thủng trên đế giaỳ anh ta".
Cuốn sách cũng có thể giúp bạn đọc tiếp cận về Hồi Giáo một cách ban sơ, mà thực chất tính Hồi Giáo đã bao trùm lên hầu hết mọi câu chuyện, và cả tác động đến lịch sử Thổ Nhĩ Kỳ. Có lẽ, nếu bạn đọc có thể đọc cuốn này trước mọi câu chuyện hài của ông, thì sẽ để tâm hơn. Vẫn mong nhiều những tác phẩm khác của ông có thể được xuất bản bên cạnh việc tái bản những cuốn đã quen thuôc.
Luôn kính trọng và ngưỡng mộ Aziz Nesin - con người khảng khái, nhân hậu, cần cù hiếm thấy. "Trời sinh ra thế nhưng sẽ không mãi mãi là như thế".
Cuốn sách cũng có thể giúp bạn đọc tiếp cận về Hồi Giáo một cách ban sơ, mà thực chất tính Hồi Giáo đã bao trùm lên hầu hết mọi câu chuyện, và cả tác động đến lịch sử Thổ Nhĩ Kỳ. Có lẽ, nếu bạn đọc có thể đọc cuốn này trước mọi câu chuyện hài của ông, thì sẽ để tâm hơn. Vẫn mong nhiều những tác phẩm khác của ông có thể được xuất bản bên cạnh việc tái bản những cuốn đã quen thuôc.
Luôn kính trọng và ngưỡng mộ Aziz Nesin - con người khảng khái, nhân hậu, cần cù hiếm thấy. "Trời sinh ra thế nhưng sẽ không mãi mãi là như thế".
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews