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Discussion Questions
1. In Part I, George tells his daughter a story that his grandmother, Staramajka, told him and his sister Madeline. The story is mostly about George's mother, Agnes. Why does Staramajka tell the story to George and his sister? Why does George tell it to his daughter?
2. How would you describe the relationship between Agnes and the Turk?
3. What about the relationship between Agnes and Staramajka? What role does Staramajka play in the story of Agnes and the Turk?
4. What is the significance of Agnes's final words to Pete the Cop in Part I?
5. In Part II, why doesn't Marko write to his mother? Do you believe that Staramajka could forgive Marko for not writing to her? Why does "the steam go out of her heart" after Istvan's visit?
6. The other main story in Part II—the story of Staramajka (Jelena) and the blind Gypsy (Istvan)—is told to us as if we are within Staramajka's memory after she has died. How does the story's point of view (from beyond the grave) affect its meaning and impact on you? What do you think of a novelist presuming to show us what the afterlife is like?
7. What connections exist between Marko's story and the story of Jelena and Istvan? What is the significance of all these connections? In what ways is Marko very much his mother's son?
8. Does Part II help you better understand Part I?
9. Part III opens with the dying George wishing he could tell his daughter a story about his childhood with Kata. What does this story reveal about him?
10. How does George's adult relationship with Kata compare to his childhood relationship with her? What does Kata mean to George?
11. Why is Kata so eager to talk to George before he dies?
12. When Anica thinks about the night that she spent with Josef, she thinks, "They had performed a miracle. They had transformed an act of violence into one of healing tenderness. It was like turning not just water, but poison, into wine" (p. 296). How might this passage and its biblical metaphor relate to other parts of the novel?
13. What is the significance of Marie's final words in the Epilogue? What parts of the novel do they force you to reconsider?
14. In what ways do the events of Part I and Part II affect the meaning of Part III—and vice versa?
15. How much do you think George knows as he sets out to tell his story to Mary Helen?
16. The novel opens with an epigraph: "Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot." How do these words by poet Czeslaw Milosz shed light on the novel's meanings?
17. Can people really forgive one another they way they do in The Turk and My Mother?
18. Are Agnes and Staramajka immigrants or exiles? What is the difference between an immigrant and an exile?
19. Do you think of Staramajka as a victim of circumstance? a heroine? something else?
20. How do stories get told in your family? What purposes do they serve?
21. Do any of these characters remind you of people in your own family?
22. Readers who have immigrant grandmothers tend to identify strongly with The Turk and My Mother. One such reader said, "That's just the way I would write it, if I could write." Did you find the characters and tone of the book mostly familiar or mostly strange? If you were to write about these characters, how would you go about it? What would you do differently? What kind of advice or suggestions would you give the author?
A Conversation with Mary Helen Stefaniak
The Turk and My Mother has been called "hilarious, heartbreaking, and deeply touching." Is that the book you set out to write? Which adjectives would you use to describe the book?
I like those three adjectives. I also like "innovative," which is what Sandra Scofield called it, and "brilliantly constructed," which is not, strictly speaking, an adjective, I know. Jim Hazard said in a review that the book is "comic, touching, erotic, sad, violent, innocent, harsh, and crafty, just like the world it describes." So there's a whole list of adjectives, all of which apply. It's also a compassionate book, I think, a book that encourages forgiveness. Hence the epigraph, from a poem called "Gift" by Czeslaw Milosz: "Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot."
The Turk and My Mother covers great distances in time and space, and yet the stories keep intersecting, like strands in a braid. How did you come up with this braided structure for the book?
I modeled it after the way family stories are told, at least in my experience: piecemeal, with new facts and details emerging over time, different versions from different tellers with different agendas. Like Staramajka in the novel, my aunt Madeline—the real Aunt Madeline—did not trouble herself to explain who was who when she was telling you a story. With her voice and the voice of my (real) father in my head, the novel braided itself as I wrote it. In fact, I had to work at untangling it. I'd make one of the characters say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute!" and ask a question to accommodate the listener (and the reader).
The Turk and My Mother is a novel, and yet the acknowledgments go on for four pages, listing books and people that supplied you with facts. If this is fiction-and if you've got your license to make the facts fit the story-then why worry about all those facts?
You need facts to write good fiction. For one thing, facts feed the imagination. Think of how much would be lost from the book if I hadn't come across that orchestra in Khabarovsk that was mentioned in two different memoirs, one by a Hungarian officer and one by a Polish professor, both of whom were prisoners of war in Siberia. The fact is, I don't know where in Siberia the real Uncle Marko spent the war. I might have had Marko making boots in Irkutsk or Achinsk, with no orchestra in sight. Without the orchestra, there would have been no reason for me to create Heinrich the violinist, and without Heinrich, Marko would have had no reason to tell Nadya about his musical past, which means I would have had no reason to invent the blind Gypsy, and where would that leave Istvan and Staramajka? Fiction writers use facts-whether from their own experience or from research-to furnish a novel with setting details and historical background, even with characters and events. Research gave me the Jones Island fishing village, pre-World War I Milwaukee, the geography and the political position of far eastern Siberia during the Bolshevik era and White reprisals that followed. It gave me the very young and very cruel Major General Kalmykov, the armored trains attacking villages, the peasants with their bellies ripped open, and, of course, the orchestra and its fate. I found these events and circumstances in history books, memoirs, and, in the case of Milwaukee, the newspapers of the time. Many smaller details that help make the fictional world in the book feel solid and authentic also emerged as I did my research: from the tunnels through the mountains around Lake Baikal to the smell of the Russian soldiers' uniforms to the carp sales in Milwaukee's second ward and the architecture of Milwaukee's city hall.
Alice McDermott says that once a historical or geographical or biographical fact enters a fictional narrative, the "fact" is transformed into something else, into fiction; it belongs now to a fictional world and leaves its historical/geographical/biographical existence behind. I like that idea. I believe it's true. In a wonderful, hilarious story called "The Dolt" by Donald Barthelme, the narrator's wife asks him if the story he has written is historically true—if it really happened. He responds, "It does not contradict what is known."
You don't want your fictional world to "contradict what is known." So you research carefully, you check the facts. But the facts are not the point. The facts are malleable. As a fiction writer, the reason you're creating your fictional world (apart from the pleasure of creation) and the reason for readers to enter it (apart from the pleasure of doing so) is, in fact, to use the power of what can only be imagined in order to better understand "what is known."
If this book is based on your family history, then isn't it really "creative nonfiction"? Why call it a novel?
The short answer is: because it is a novel. The Turk and My Mother is not my family history. It's a fictional family history. Some characters have real-life counterparts, it's true. I think of them as actors playing themselves in a fictional story.
And the long answer?
It's true that my grandmother Agnes did spend the years surrounding the First World War in Europe while her husband was in Milwaukee. It's true that my aunt Madeline conceived her first child before she married; and, according to Aunt Madeline, it's true that my grandmother punished her in the cruel way the story describes. It's also true that my father used to catch snapping turtles in the river as a child in Milwaukee and that he liked to swim in the filthy water of the canal with his friends and that he himself became a policeman in part because of his admiration for the neighborhood policeman who becomes Pete the Cop in the story. It's true that my grandfather's brother Marko served as a courier in the First World War, that he was wounded and taken prisoner, and that, as a prisoner of war, he worked for a shoemaker somewhere in Siberia. (Aunt Madeline claims that the shoemaker wanted Uncle Marko to marry his daughter, but the real Uncle Marko was a good boy and came home to the village instead.) Pretty much everything else in the story is fictional, including some of the main characters: the Kaszube girl, for example, and her mother Anica (with the "c" like the "zz" in pizza), also Nadya, Pitkin, Heinrich, the blind Gypsy Istvan, even Staramajka and the Turk himself. All made up.
This is what fiction writers always do, though, isn't it? We always begin with something "from life"—a comment overheard, a gesture observed, a story someone told us about a terrible or puzzling or odd thing that happened the other day, or when they were young, and so forth. This novel grew out of that story Aunt Madeline told me about my grandmother punishing her for being pregnant. It was a story that suddenly gave me a different picture of my grandmother from the one I had carried around in my head since she died, when I was seven. The story was disturbing enough to me to make me need to imagine my grandmother Agnes in a new way. It required me to invent a whole life and romance for her in the village before she came to America so that I could explain to myself what she did to Aunt Madeline. I know almost nothing about the real Agnes's life before she came to America. I had to invent a past for her that would make it possible for me to understand and ultimately forgive her.
So that's what I did. It worked, too.
That's a pretty labor-intensive way to forgive somebody—writing a whole novel. Do you always write novels when you need to forgive someone?
For me, writing fiction is a way of figuring things out. I've discovered that one of the reasons I write stories is to be able to understand how characters behave, to understand whatever weakness or pettiness or even downright evil is part of them. Once you've gotten inside a character's experience, you're more likely to empathize, even if that character is very different from you or does things you don't understand or approve of. Czeslaw Milosz calls compassion "that ache of imagination." I think that's exactly right: you have to imagine the other person's experience in order to feel for or with them. That's what literature is for, I think, or at least it's one of the great services literature can do for us: it enlarges our capacity for compassion.
Of course, I didn't realize what I was doing—creating Agnes in order to forgive her—until after I had written the first part of the book. The writer is often the last to know.
Then what did make you write this particular novel—consciously, I mean?
From the beginning, I've thought of The Turk and My Mother as a novel about storytelling. I'm interested in how stories create who we are and how we see the world, how stories hold off death, how a story can change the listener, how a story can unharden a heart. This is why I was so pleased by Lan Samantha Chang's comment that the novel "reinvents the family saga and the art of storytelling as we know it."
In a way, the whole novel grows out of my Aunt Madeline's storytelling voice. She was always talking about people she knew, all in her wonderful nonstandard English, with Croatian and Hungarian words thrown in here and there. You knew what and whom she was talking about oh, maybe half the time. Listening to her, you really did wish you had an index. I wanted very much for the reader to experience that kind of storytelling. It was a great pleasure to listen to Aunt Madeline. If you could let go of your need for absolute certainty and clarity, then you could immerse yourself in her voice and the details. All kinds of vivid scenes would rise up in your head. Who, exactly, they were happening to didn't seem important.
One reader told me that, reading The Turk and My Mother, she felt the same way she did at her husband's family reunions, trying to keep everybody straight. I could tell that she wished I had made it easier for her to do that, but the truth is that I was delighted to hear her say it. If I had written the book in a more linear way—if, unlike Aunt Madeline, I'd made clarity my goal—then reading it would not introduce you to the way in which these characters experience their own lives. You would be looking in at them from the outside. I wanted to immerse myself and the reader in their way of being in the world, their way of understanding, all of which is "embodied" in their storytelling voices. A friend of mine said, "I wasn't always sure who I was while I was reading." I think that is a very interesting place for a reader to be.
Reading The Turk and My Mother is like overhearing someone telling a story at a bus stop or in a café; you don't know everything about the characters, but you get caught up in the story. You feel as if you're eavesdropping.
You are eavesdropping most of the time. Every story in the book is being told by one character to another character for a particular reason, and you're listening in. Then, when the storyteller fades away to let the scene unfold directly, the reader is often in the same position as the intended listener. In Part I, for example, Staramajka is really telling the story of Agnes and the Turk to Agnes, in order to make her remember what it was like to be young and in love, in order to "open a door in her heart"; so when we drop into the story that Staramajka is telling, we usually find ourselves experiencing the scene from Agnes's point of view. It's as though we are remembering the story with her.
In Part II, Staramajka is the most important listener for the tale told by the priest's letters. She's the one Marko wants to reach. She needs to imagine what Marko experienced, to see and feel from his point of view, in order to understand why he didn't return to her. In Part III, when Kata is telling the story of Josef and Anica, George has become the listener, the one who needs to unharden his heart, or at least to accept the truth about his father. To do this, George has to imagine what it's like to be Josef living in that boardinghouse in Milwaukee. So Kata tells most of the story from Josef's point of view, the point of view in which George has the greatest stake and interest. (She can do this, by the way, because storytellers-as opposed to mere fictional narrators-are omniscient. Pay attention to the next story you overhear at the café or, for that matter, the family reunion, and you'll see what I mean.) We can always pull back, as the narrative does at times, to the thoughts and words of the teller of the tale—whether it's George or Kata or Staramajka—but most of the time, we find our eavesdropping selves exactly where the storyteller wants the listener—whether it's Agnes or George or Staramajka or Mary Helen—to be, busily filling in the scene that someone wants us to remember or to imagine unfolding before us.
The narrative also has a layered effect, as you keep finding out things that change the picture. You have to pay attention!
The book does make the reader work a little to put things together. Those are the kinds of books I like the best, where the story is told in layers and circles. I'm thinking of books like Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin or Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. As a reader, I enjoy having to figure it out, having to wait. I love backtracking in a narrative, having something show up on page 100 that really happened between pages 9 and 10, seeing how events shift meaning when some new scene, formerly hidden, comes to light.
That certainly describes The Turk and My Mother. The last line of the epilogue is the most dramatic example. That line asks you to reconsider everything-the whole story.
Many readers have told me that they got to the end of the book and felt a strong desire to go back to the beginning and start reading it again. Now of course most people don't actually do that—they might go back and skim a little here and there—but I spoke to one book club where every one of them had read the book twice! Not only was I flattered, but my secret, impossible wish was fulfilled.
Your secret wish?
To write a book whose ending would make the reader feel compelled to go back and reread the book, at least up to a certain point. I don't mean that I wanted to write a book that forced readers to go back because they felt they didn't understand. I wanted readers to be pleased by the first reading—not frustrated or confused beyond endurance—but I also wanted them to feel, having read the last line, that they now understood the book in a different way, they could see a different picture. When I finished the book and was preparing the manuscript to send it to my agent, my secret wish was so strong that I was tempted to copy and paste the first part of the book—up to a certain point, a certain scene—into the manuscript again, after the epilogue. I don't think my agent would have seen that as a very good idea.
Another way to look at it is that the last line of the book makes you see George and his storytelling in a different light. In fact, the epilogue repeats many elements—details, actions, words—that occur in an earlier scene, way back in Part I. That earlier scene answers the question raised by the last line of the book.
I don't suppose you would tell us which "earlier scene" you're talking about.
No, but I'll give you a clue. Look for a loom "like a harp with silver strings." Or maybe a "room like a box of silver things." You could say that the epilogue rhymes with the earlier scene.
So there's a mystery in The Turk and My Mother?
Maybe "puzzle" is a better word, or maybe "mystery" and "puzzle" are both ways of talking about the "braided structure" you mentioned at the start—where a detail or a character suddenly reemerges and events you thought you understood take on a new significance. Little pieces of information are always coming to light as the novel proceeds that make your whole picture of the family click into a new picture. Isn't that the way we get to know people in "real life"—especially people in our families? You think you know somebody—I thought my aunt Madeline was a little old woman who sat in the corner of her darkened living room praying the rosary—but then you find out some previously unknown "fact"—she ran away with Gypsies when she was fifteen (not true, at least of Aunt Madeline) or she conceived a child out of wedlock, as they used to say—and suddenly the little old woman is not who you thought she was. Those moments—when a bit of information changes the whole picture—happen again and again in The Turk and My Mother. They happen for the characters and they happen for the reader. And they certainly happened for the writer. I can't tell you how surprised I was when the blind Gypsy turned up at the door!
Publishers Weekly praised your "easy familiarity with the vernacular idioms of the old country and the new," your "zestful, respectful ear for different voices." Where do these voices, different from your own, come from? How do you cultivate them, get them to the page?
I've already mentioned listening to my Aunt Madeline's particular variety of English when she was alive and to the two precious tape recordings she let me make. (When my children were small, they liked to listen to the "Aunt Madeline tapes" like bedtime stories, even though they had no idea what she was talking about. They liked the sound and rhythms of her voice, the funny way she pronounced words, her favorite expressions, like "niceway," for "nicely," and "overdue particular," which meant "too fussy.") I also made a point of studying Croatian and, to a lesser extent, Hungarian before I went to visit the village of Novo Selo. (I live in Iowa City and Omaha and make the four-hour trip between them two or three times a month. I like to listen to language tapes while I'm driving.) Then, too, Croatian was my father's first language, and since I spent my early years in my grandmother's house, I heard Croatian and nonstandard English spoken around me. The rhythms and syntax and diction I picked up in all those ways show up in the dialogue and the narrative style of The Turk and My Mother. I wanted it to read, at least some of the time, like a translation.
What was your biggest challenge in writing The Turk and My Mother?
The biggest challenge in writing this book was trying to make sure the reader knew exactly where she or he was on any given page. You might start a sentence in Milwaukee in 1934 and by the time you get to the end of the sentence you're in Siberia in 1917. Lots of shifts in time require very careful attention to providing cues for the reader as to where we are and when. I don't mean the date or the name of the place—you don't always need to know that. I mean the reader must feel the world rise around the characters (the straw in the stable in Lemberg, Poland, or the ice on the breakwater in Lake Michigan, or a bowl filling with water in the moonlight) without ever thinking that the characters are somewhere they're not.
The big challenges were the management of time, the creation of place, and moving from time to time or place to place without unduly disorienting my readers. Not that a reader can't be in uncertainty—but I think you have to feel as if you're in good hands, that the author knows where you are even if you don't for a moment or two. You have to feel as if all that's needed will be revealed to you in good time. I hope I succeeded in making the reader feel that way.
What do you think is the greatest challenge for the reader of The Turk and My Mother?
Aside from the cast of dozens of multilingual characters and the zooming around from time to time and place to place? Aside from that, I think the book introduces some readers to a way of thinking they are not accustomed to. There is a deeply felt sense of the hidden meaning in everyday things in eastern European cultures. "Now there is a miracle and no matter what," Aunt Madeline was always saying. Everything happens for a reason. There are no coincidences. Everything is taken very seriously, with the result that everything is often hilariously absurd at the same time. These are people, as one reviewer said, who believe in the evil eye and the wages of sin. I guess you could call it magical thinking. It's anti-ironic. Milosz talked about writing poems in "a bucolic, childish language that transforms the sublime into the cordial." I don't know if he was talking about Polish or Lithuanian, but he could be talking about the language of Staramajka as well, and in the language is her worldview, her way of being in the world. It's a way of being that allows her to insist, against all evidence, that her missing son, Marko, is on his way home. When someone reminds her of how many years he has been gone, she says, "It's a long way to walk." And she means it. And in the end, it turns out that she was right.
Author's Note
I've been fascinated by my father's family history at least since fifth grade, when I wrote a story about my grandmother and her five-year-old daughter traveling from their village in Hungary to Ellis Island on their way to join my grandfather in Milwaukee. I had them take a train from Paris to London—not possible in those days and not the route they traveled in any case—but my fifth-grade teacher let me get away with that, unwittingly issuing my very first fiction-writer's license to make the "facts" serve the truth of the story.
Many years later, my father took me on a tour of the old Milwaukee neighborhood on East Bay Street, where he grew up, and where I, too, lived, at least as a very small child, in my grandmother's upper flat. (This is the same upper flat where I picture Staramajka answering the door with a scowl on her face, the same house where I imagine Agnes pressing her ear to the ductwork in the basement.) My father died later that year, at the age of fifty-nine. In my book, though, he gets a chance to live past eighty, and he tells his daughter Mary Helen more stories than my father ever told me. This was a great source of pleasure for me in writing the book—sitting down with my father and imagining his voice, as I remembered it, telling me all of these stories.
Some years after my father died, I went with my elderly cousin Marie Sinyakovich (who is not from St. Louis, nor is she the daughter of the "real" Uncle Marko) to visit the village of my ancestors in Hungary, which is Marie's hometown. Novo Selo—or, in Hungarian, Totujfalu—is not much larger today than it was in 1921, when my grandmother saw it for the last time. It's a few minutes' walk to the Drava River, a short swim from there to the Croatian border on the other side. In the village, cousin Marie made fun of me for aiming my camera at everything. I took pictures of houses with foot-thick walls and red tile roofs (including the one where Marie was born), pictures of pigs and red brick barns, of cows coming home down the village street, each one turning off into her yard and ambling back to the barn behind the house—like so many cars pulling into their driveways. I took many more pictures than I needed of the storks that nest on chimney tops and telephone poles. I took pictures of the 400-year-old church and of the empty lot where my father's mother, the real Agnes, used to live. The house had burned down years ago.
This novel has its roots in that village and a few other real places, and in three or four events that really happened to four or five people who really existed. You could say that I planted those events and places and people in my imagination, like cuttings from a grapevine (maybe a grapevine brought to Milwaukee in the lining of a suitcase), and there they sprouted more characters and details and scenes, until they grew into a novel. My real father's real sister Madeline, who liked to tell stories even more than my father did, was an important source of those details. She was kind enough to let me tape-record her twice. All the "ethnic" voices in the book—but particularly Staramajka's—are echoes of my real Aunt Madeline's voice. I realized after I wrote the first part of the book that it was about forgiveness, that I'd written it in part to forgive my real grandmother (Agnes in the story) for something she did to her daughter, something my real aunt Madeline had told me about a long time ago. In order to forgive Agnes, to understand why she did what she did, I found I needed to imagine my way into her existence. The rest of the book developed from that beginning.
The Turk and My Mother opens with a reference to Doctor Zhivago, and like a Russian novel, it has a large cast of characters with unfamiliar-looking names. Before George launches into the story of his mother and the Turk-a story his grandmother, Staramajka, told him when he was a boy-he warns Mary Helen that Staramajka had a style of storytelling "that did not accommodate her listeners in any way." Although most of the stories she told took place in her tiny village, they "had casts of thousands," George says. "You needed an index to keep track." Well, it doesn't take long for the reader to figure out where George learned his style of storytelling.
The Turk and My Mother not only introduces a large crowd of characters, it also takes readers into unfamiliar territory: a Kaszube fishing village in the Milwaukee harbor, a tiny Croatian village in the Austro-Hungarian empire, the city of Khabarovsk in far eastern Siberia, and several places in between. We meet Croatians, Hungarians, Slovenians, Gypsies, Russians, Germans, Cossacks, Siberians, Kaszubes, and more. The characters are often negotiating two or three languages at once—a feat that I witnessed myself when I went to visit the village—and there's a lot of translation going on, all of which is delivered to the reader in English, of course, with the occasional Hungarian or German word here or there and a more generous sprinkling of Croatian.
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