Moris Farhi’s Rose-Tinted Turkishness

Illustration by Sophie Levy

In February 2020, the posthumous publication of My End is My Beginning, the last novel by Turkish writer Moris Farhi, immortalized the assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink as a literary protagonist who nonetheless manages to guide global human rights campaigns from the afterlife. Two months after the novel’s publication, the Hrant Dink Foundation received anonymous death threats for peddling “tales of fraternity” in solidarity with Turkey’s diverse ethno-religious minorities. In their hate email, the would-be assailants threatened to appear “suddenly one night”. Like all of Farhi’s writing, My End is My Beginning is a collection and homage to these tales — a magical neorealist fantasy of tragic heroism based on his life in literary activism.

As a college student in postwar Istanbul, local police arrested Farhi twice and beat him for distributing poems by Nazim Hikmet, a communist. Like Farhi’s mother, Hikmet hailed from Thessaloniki, as did Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, who controversially remained Farhi’s idol. But in 1970, he joined the Writers in Prison Committee at English PEN to petition for Kurdish rights in Turkey, later taking on the role of an affable civilian pasha as Vice President of PEN International in the last two decades of his life.

Forming a community alongside other members of the first generation of writers exiled from the Turkish Republic, Farhi never returned to his homeland after his post-secondary studies in London. His cousin, fashion designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi, an expat in France, sculpted his bearded, long-haired bust with a deep crack down the middle to symbolize the emotional rift of terminal exile. 

Farhi was the author of seven novels, and also wrote poetry and essays in English, his fifth language after Greek, Ladino, Turkish and French. He was an early modern secular Turk, equally Jewish and Greek, honorarily adopted into a Roma family — an embodiment of a regional pluralism that the Republic would seek to cover under the blanket of monolithic ethnocentric and religious nationalism. 

The protagonists of My End is My Beginning are two orphans, Oric and Belkis, who become lovers and Dolphineros, members of an international order of human rights activists. Farhi wrote the novel’s manifold plotlines to align with global reportage on state violence and media crackdowns throughout the 2010s. The characters crash an ill-fated Uyghur wedding, transmit the documents of a Russian whistleblower, demonstrate during Turkey’s historic 2013 Gezi Park Protests, and join other untold political causes. Led by shapeshifters called Leviathans, their nemeses are theocratic dictators subbed Saviours.

The Leviathan became milder, almost sad. “I must warn you: as life’s voice, Saviours will try all the harder to destroy you. Even as we protect you from countless ambushes, one day, there will be one that will kill you.’”

‘And then do the Dolphineros die?’ I asked. 

‘There’s no end for Dolphineros. When they pass away – killed or not – they’re transmuted into Leviathans. But they never tarry in their Samsara. They come straight back.’ 

Belkis gasped. ‘As you did! Now I know who you are! Hrant Dink!’ 

Weeks before his death on March 5, 2019, Farhi finished a draft of My End is My Beginning surrounded by friends and family at his home in the English village of Hove. Built like a Turkish wrestler yet exuding a pacific, ameliorating air, he wined and dined guests over tales of fraternity, such as the successful campaign to free the Iranian writer Faraj Sarkoohi, who, after evading a death sentence, recognized Farhi in Berlin because his prison guards had mocked the “fat, white-haired old hippy” leading every demonstration on his behalf in London. 

Farhi was born in Ankara in 1935, the child of an arranged Sephardic marriage between his mother, Paloma Cuenca, a bourgeois artist from Thessaloniki, and Hayim Daniel Farhi, a working-class Bulgarian polyglot from Izmir. A pianist, singer and painter, Paloma always felt she married low. She imparted to her firstborn son his creative temperament and Sephardic pride in the knowledge that her maiden name, Cuenca, derived from a Spanish town that served as the home of their ancestors, until their forced expulsion in 492 led them to Ottoman lands. 

Farhi’s birth came in the wake of the 1934 Thrace pogrom, which reduced the Jewish population of Turkey’s European region from 7,000 to 2,500. It also fueled antisemitic and fascist tendencies across the young Turkish republic. 

Farhi never finished secondary school, but his father spoke eight languages and was literate in four. He introduced the eldest of his two sons to Nazim Hikmet when he easily could have been branded a communist and jailed for doing so. My End is My Beginning portrays a poet who follows Hikmet and the principles for which he wrote, and died, in exile.

Farhi clung to the sentiment— perhaps a uniquely Sephardic one in Turkey— that cosmopolitan ideals could be made compatible with the founding principles of the Republic, as set by Atatürk, its inaugural president. His critical triumph, Young Turk, is an autobiographical bildungsroman presenting a pluralistic, yet flawed picture of Turkey’s treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Its French translation won the 2007 Alberto Benveniste Prize for Literature after its publication as his fifth novel in 2004. 

In the opening chapter of Young Turk, Farhi refers to a common trope since denounced by critical scholars as Turkey’s politicized “welcome myth:” 

Atatürk’s offer of refuge to those persecuted by the Nazis — an offer that not only saved countless European artists, academics and intellectuals from certain death, but also enabled them to pursue their careers — emulated the way Sultan Beyazit had opened the empire’s doors, almost 500 years earlier, to vast numbers of Jews and Moors fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.

Not even a century after Beyazit’s welcome in 1492, Sultan Murad III ordered the extermination of all Jews in the empire, only to be dissuaded by his Grand Vizier, who had an issue with Jews in Thessaloniki. While he eschewed Kemalist chauvinism, Farhi nonetheless idealized Atatürk for modernizing Ottoman multiculturalism into a nation where every citizen was a Turk— an all-inclusive term when Turkishness was to be recast as a universal, secular identity, rather than a purely ethnic descriptor.

In 1938, weeks before Atatürk’s death at 57, Turkey adopted two anti-Jewish immigration laws, which scholar Corry Guttstadt details in her 2013 book, “Turkey, Jews and the Holocaust.” Guttstadt disproved Armenian Genocide denier Stanford J. Shaw, who taught history at Ankara’s Bilkent University. A year later, Farhi praised his biased scholarship from the 1990s as a source on Turkish-Jewish harmony in an interview for Marius Kociejowski’s book God’s Zoo. 

Young Turk, Farhi’s sole novel set in Turkey, also overlooked Turkey’s antisemitic policies towards Jewish asylum seekers in Europe during the Nazi era. Turkish republic archives show that Turkey denied repatriation to 10,000 Turkish citizens of Jewish extraction abroad, most of whom had resided in France since WWI.

In 1942, Farhi started secular primary school in Ankara, groomed to develop a Kemalist outlook. His father had presciently franchised his uncle’s furniture business in the new capital of the Turkish republic. That year, the infamous 1942 Wealth Tax devastated non-Muslim minorities. With his linguistic prowess, Farhi’s father evaded the fate suffered by 1,870 debtors forced into slave labor near the Soviet border, where 21 people died. 

After a botched escape plan to rescue Jews from Nazi terror in Thessaloniki, Young Turk becomes epistolary during the war years. Selma writes to her love Bilâl, who went to Greece to save his relatives, only to vanish into rumors of his death. When the Wealth Tax hits, she writes that her father came home one day with a single doughnut. Farhi remembered his father showing him an apple during that time and saying it was all they had. 

Muslim neighbors helped the family. Their solidarity affected Farhi, who played with Roma youth encamped in the bucolic fields around Ankara proper as a child. His mother refused to let them in for dinner. As she lost her family in Thessaloniki to Nazism, she was regretful after learning of the Porajmos, the Romani Holocaust during WWII, which provides the context for Children of the Dawn, Farhi’s fourth novel. The book earned him honorary membership in Roma society. 

In his fictive guise as Musa, Farhi fraternized with Roma in Young Turk before going to the women’s hamam baths, an Ottoman tradition for prepubescent boys, with his housemaid Sofi. A survivor of the Armenian Genocide, Sofi is, like Roma, subordinated to his family as a servant “from the Anatolian backwoods”. Although she is “a member of a people that, like the Jews had seen more than its share of troubles,” she experiences a different class of suffering from local Jews, who arguably identified as Turks more easily than Greeks, or still, Kurds, were able.   

At the end of spring in 1954, Farhi accompanied two Jewish friends from Ankara down to the Bosphorus. They did not gawk like foreigners passing Rumelihisari, the 15th-century fortress built in 18 weeks by Mehmet II before he became Constantinople’s first Muslim conqueror. Under the plane trees of a tea cafe in the waterfront district of Emirgan, their charismatic humanities professor chain-smoked and plied them with rakı, asking them to declare their chosen vocations. 

In buttoned suit jackets, stiff ties, and slicked hair, holding each other’s hands affectionately, they epitomized the Westernized Turkish man of the 20th century. “A doctor!” said Asher Mayer, who ended up working in tourism in America. “A designer!” said Selim Baruh, who went on to do just that in Paris. “An explorer!” said Moris Farhi, best known as Musa. The professor interrupted him. “You have a feel for language and you write good essays. I wager you’ll be my best student yet! For a Jew, that’s phenomenal!” Farhi wrote, novelizing the memory in Young Turk. 

That student, a fictionalized version of Farhi named Zeki, confronts his professor, nicknamed Ahmet the Lover. “You don’t call Agop ‘you lovely Armenian’, or Takis ‘my devilish Greek,’” says Zeki. Ahmet admits that he treats Zeki, a Jew, differently than everyone else, and that doing so in the name of pluralism is still antisemitic. Zeki asks to be called “Young Turk,” which echoes some of the tendencies the author held himself: While conducting research for his third novel, Through the Wilderness, Farhi took his quixotic Turkishness to Latin America. He would correct locals that he was not a gringo, but a Turk.

After graduating from college, Farhi obeyed his father and went to study textile manufacturing at Bradford Technical College. After the anti-Greek “Istanbul pogroms” of September 6-7, 1955, his father told him to stay in the UK, not only because his mother was Greek or because they were Jewish, but because he could tell that his son was an artist, and artists did not fare well in Turkey. He successfully auditioned at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Turkey had become hostile to anyone opposed to its ethnocentric brand of Islamic nationalism. In a public interview in London in 2011, Farhi looked back on his career: “Had I been in Turkey, I’d probably be in prison now or dead. I would not be able to write such things in Turkey.” 

My End is My Beginning bookended Farhi’s oeuvre with themes from his second novel, The Last of Days, which reveals how the author’s rose-tinted Turkishness romanticized his writing on Armenian-Jewish relations. (Members of the Young Turks, who returned constitutional rights to the Ottoman Empire in 1908, were responsible for the Armenian Genocide.) He writes:

For centuries the wandering Jew and the wandering Armenian had practiced mutual aid, dispensing shelter, food and work as the pendulum of persecution swung from one to the other.

In his new book, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks, Marc David Baer demonstrates that while Jews in Israel and the US are newly recognizing the Armenian Genocide, many of Turkey’s Jews still remain silent. Baer’s usage of the word “Saviors” in his book’s title coincides with Farhi’s fictive critique of Turkish “Saviours”, as My End is My Beginning recalls when state forces opened fire on nonviolent demonstrators during the 2013 Gezi Park Protests. 

Hrant ranted. “I was about to conclude. These days a new species of Saviour has risen, without brains and without hearts. Take a good look! We’ve entered the age of killing without rhyme or reason.”

Dink’s assassination in 2007 prompted many of the Gezi movement’s estimated 3.5 million protestors to call for civil rights reform in Turkey. Months before an ultranationalist youth shot Dink outside the office of his Turkish-Armenian weekly, Agos, he had received a six-month suspended sentence for crimes of “denigrating Turkishness,”, sharing his high-profile case with those of writers like Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, both of whom also challenged  Armenian Genocide denial. 

Still, despite his pride and sentimentality, Farhi was never quite a nationalist. My End is My Beginning used the phrase “genocidal Turks” in reference to the story of a Yezidi man who defended victims of the Armenian Genocide. And while Farhi was a secular Jew, the novel frequently alludes to the Jewish idea of tikkun olam, Hebrew for “repair of the world.”

By the following September, when Azerbaijan launched a military offensive in Artsakh, part of the contested Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, supporters of Azerbaijan staged a nationalist rally in the Istanbul neighborhood of Kumkapi in view of the Armenian Patriarchate. As violent threats against minorities increase in Turkey, particularly in confrontation with the local Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities, assailants in Istanbul tore off the cross of one Armenian church and set fire to the door of another. As hate crimes against minorities increase in Turkey, Farhi’s writing offers a rare glimpse, penned directly in English, into how the first generation of modern Turks, raised in the nascent Turkish republic, might have written about their identities, lives and concerns had they enjoyed free expression. 

His faults as a didactic, ahistorical writer and starry-eyed representative of Turkish-Jewish unity expose the potency of the Jewish voice, and its silence, in Turkey. If Turkish Jews enjoy the human right to free expression, Turkish minorities would arguably gain their most powerful ally in the deadly struggle for democratization and civil rights in Turkey. There are still those who pass away in silence and exile. Even so, as Farhi says in the recurring mantra of My End is My Beginning— “Death is a lie.”