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A review by nini23
The Silence of Scheherazade by Defne Suman
4.25
The Silence of Scheherazade is a sweeping historical fiction set in the ancient vibrant city of Smyrna where Orthodox Greeks, Muslims Turks, Armenians, Levantine Europeans, Jews, Circassians lived in harmony in the 'Pearl of the Orient.' Translated from Turkish by Betsy Göksel. The novel opens in 1905 with a birth but moves fluidly through decades. The main culminating event is the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922 but also in the background is the military campaign by Greece into Asia Minor and Smyrna in 1919 as part of the Megáli Idéa, encouraged by Allied forces. I happened to be reading The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories by Andreas Karkavitsas, a late 19th/early 20th century Greek writer which provided some context from the Greek perspective on the aftermath of this Greater Greece ideal.
The blurb is a little misleading because most of the story actually concentrates on the Levantine Europeans the French Lamarcks, especially Edith Lamarck and her Indian spy lover Avinash Pillai, and a Greek teenager Panagiota with her family. Sumbul a Cirassian married into a Turkish family gets only a bit of the spotlight while the fourth family of Armenian midwife Meline is solely important in the role she had in the birth story secret. Nevertheless the different neighbourhoods, cultures, sights, languages of Smyrna come alive off the pages.
We want no such thing as "a Turk", "a Greek" or "a Bulgarian" - if you divide humanity like that, we will be crying tears of blood.
The blurb is a little misleading because most of the story actually concentrates on the Levantine Europeans the French Lamarcks, especially Edith Lamarck and her Indian spy lover Avinash Pillai, and a Greek teenager Panagiota with her family. Sumbul a Cirassian married into a Turkish family gets only a bit of the spotlight while the fourth family of Armenian midwife Meline is solely important in the role she had in the birth story secret. Nevertheless the different neighbourhoods, cultures, sights, languages of Smyrna come alive off the pages.
We want no such thing as "a Turk", "a Greek" or "a Bulgarian" - if you divide humanity like that, we will be crying tears of blood.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Death, War, and Grief