How does a five-hundred-page novel come into being?
- 17 Şub
- 4 dakikada okunur
Fragments of a memory stretching from 1975 to 2023.
A woman narrates; a “Tower” refuses to remain silent.
Where Mazal believes she is telling her own story, she begins to uncover the traces of others. Lost memories, forgotten sorrows, and intimate reckonings…
Am I in this story?Perhaps…
But even within what I thought was my own story, there are the imprints of others.
I am only a single line in this tale.It is the others who carry the weight of the narrator.
Back Cover Draft for the Novel Mazal Kısmet
Excerpt from the Book:
In the years when I first began to know myself, there was a sentence that often filled my ears, one my mother repeated to us children again and again:
“Don’t forget, Somos Judyoz — don’t forget, we are Jews.”
My restless, football-obsessed, mischievous brother Mordo was “Mordo” to my mother at home, but “Murat” in the outside world. When he was playing ball in the street, my mother would step out onto the balcony to call him in for dinner, shouting in her broken Turkish, half Turkish, half Ladino:
“Muraaat, come upstairs! Ven a kaza! Come home… don’t forget, Somos Judyoz.”
Years later, I began to wonder what lay beneath my mother’s insistence: “Don’t forget, Somos Judyoz.” Perhaps it was the residue of a memory stretching back four thousand years, to the ancient lands of the Eastern Mediterranean… A people scattered from Canaan to Babylon, and from there onto the roads of Roman exile — a journey that never truly ceased. A stubborn bond to a homeland from which they had been torn, yet never severed.
Or perhaps it was something simpler, more naked than that: the silenced cry that once ran through the veins of my ancestors, devastated simply for being Jewish, echoing again in my mother’s voice.
I do not know.
But I do know this: while my mother tried to preserve her children’s identity, she also gave them Turkish names. As if she wished both to conceal us and to make us visible at the same time. As if she wanted one of our hands in the past, and the other rooted in this land.
To my father, however, I was always “Mazali,” with the Hebrew possessive suffix -i — meaning, “My Mazal.”
Dear friends,
Today I would like to share a few lines about my novel Mazal Kısmet, which will soon go to print. Of course, I will not speak about its plot — that would spoil the whole magic of it. Instead, I would like to tell you a little about the stages a person goes through while writing a story or a novel.
This is, once again, an Istanbul story — a story set in the lands where I was born and raised. I had been carrying this story in my mind for a long time, and over the years, what began as a tiny seed gradually branched out, grew, and blossomed until it reached a point where it overflowed from my mind and began to live on the page. And for a long time now — ever since I began writing it — I have been living with this story in my mind.
In my bag, I constantly carried my pen and notebook — my little soldiers that helped bring to life the dialogues and scenes that appeared at the most unexpected moments, allowing them to breathe on the page through words and sentences. My pen, my notebook, and of course, my phone.
The scenes and dialogues that came alive in my mind would emerge at the most unlikely times. For example, at four in the morning, in darkness and heavy snow, while I was on the road, I would pull my car over at the most inconvenient spot just to record, by voice, the scenes flashing in my mind. At work, I scribbled dozens of notes on tiny scraps of paper in my pocket, and the moment I returned home, I would gather all the fragments of the day and either write them into my notebook or, if I had the time, sit at the computer.
There were days when snow was falling thick and heavy outside, and I continued writing at the keyboard, glancing out the window with a pang in my heart, lamenting the fading daylight.
Most importantly, during this process, I did not read much and did not watch much. Why? Because I did not want my story, in its purest state, flowing from my mind onto paper in my own words, to be influenced by anything else. I turned inward. I worked to ensure that the characters I created — born entirely from my own emotions and imagination — would remain authentic. Gradually, those characters grew stronger and began to guide the novel themselves; all that remained for me was to write.
Now, while the publishing house waits to print it, my characters are still speaking in my mind, still telling their stories — and I continue writing. Let’s see when I will finally place the last period.
You know, when I first began, I imagined it would be a hundred-page story. When I sent it to the publisher, I thought it was around three hundred pages — that’s what my Word document showed. But once it was formatted in the book template, it appeared as five hundred pages. It turns out my characters had far more to say than I ever imagined…
Who is Mazal Kısmet for?It is not a popular drama, not a fast-paced plot-driven novel, not a crime story, nor a romance. It is a novel of identity, written for the patient and emotionally perceptive reader.
Its reader enjoys “reading the soul,” because between the lines wander both the memory of families and the traces that recent history has left upon us.
"I’m off — I’ll continue chatting with the characters of my novel."
RahelÇela Behar
IYT dip not:
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*Daha önceki yazımı okudunuz mu?*
Have you read my previous post?
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