Emine Sevgi Özdamar - A witty, picaresque account of a precocious teenager refusing to become wise and the story of a young woman who is obsessed with theater, poetry, and left-wing politics. The author's voice changes age from sentence to sentence. She talks about dreams like a child, while conveying the cruelty of the existent like a grandparent

Emine Sevgi Özdamar, The Bridge of the Golden Horn, Trans. by Martin Chalmers, Serpent’s Tail, 2009.

Read it at Google Books

In 1966, a sixteen-year-old girl leaves Istanbul and signs up as a migrant worker in Germany. The Bridge of the Golden Horn is a witty, picaresque account of a precocious teenager refusing to become wise and the story of a young woman who is obsessed with theater, poetry, and left-wing politics.


“There is something about the way she tells a story that would make her words sparkle under any circumstances, and in any tongue.”—Financial Times

Perhaps the complicated lineage of Ozdamar’s prose — written in German by a native Turkish speaker and translated into English (by Martin Chalmers) — has a part to play in this striking novel’s distinctive rhythm and style. The protagonist (unnamed, but I’ll call her by one of her nicknames, Sugar) is a middle-class 16-year-old Turk on her way to a job as a guest worker at a radio factory in West Berlin in the mid-1960s. “I will go to Germany, work for a year, then I’ll go to theater school.” Which is what she does, more or less. Like Ozdamar’s writing, Sugar’s journey crosses all kinds of divides — cultural, linguistic, political, even sexual. Drawn to left-wing politics by a communist hostel warden in Berlin, who gives her texts by Engels and Gorky, Sugar moves back and forth between East and West as the leftist causes of the 1960s and ’70s swirl around her — protests against the Vietnam War, the Shah, the pro-American leadership of the governing Turkish Justice Party and the Greek military junta. Sugar, much to the chagrin of her parents, is bold and determined, rather like this book. “To make you learn something,” her father tells her, “is harder than getting a camel to jump.” - Alison McCulloch



  Consider Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn a kind of bildungsroman, a portrait of the artist as a young migrant worker as it were. The plot threads are familiar: discontented young woman leaves home to seek her fortune; she encounters resistance; she overcomes obstacles; she is transformed. In this case, the unnamed narrator, with dreams of becoming an actor, lies about her age to get a job so she can pay for drama school. At sixteen she leaves Turkey for Germany where she works on an assembly line installing radio valves. The novel goes on to detail four topsy-turvy years of the young woman’s ping-ponging back and forth between Berlin and Istanbul. In Berlin, she and her coworkers “lived in a single picture: fingers, the neon light, the tweezers, the little radio valves and their spider legs. The picture had its own voices, detached selves from the voices of the world and from own bodies. The spine disappeared, the breasts disappeared, the hair on one’s head disappeared.”
Though The Bridge is certainly set in sundry dreary places, it is not the usual catalog of critiques against mindless work, oppressive government, and dehumanizing bureaucracy (although it succeeds in doing that, if inadvertently). It is instead a collection of often obtuse reveries about self, family, friends, work, and everything around. The book’s often desultory settings are enlivened by a cast of vividly drawn characters and the hero’s own skewed perception of things, a perception marked by childlike free-association that later gives way to a kind of buoyant satire.
The Bridge of the Golden Horn’s thinly veiled autobiography concentrates on the intellectual, the artistic, and, particularly, the sexual awakening of the young protagonist. It follows her peripatetic life, one preoccupied with sexuality, theater, literature, and radical politics. Shadowing Özdamar’s own life, the protagonist travels from Istanbul to work in a factory in Berlin, and, like Özdamar, she returns to Turkey to study Brechtian theater. The hero wants to “live poetically . . . to awaken the passive life of [her] intelligence.” She believes that her virginity is one obstacle to that awakening. The hero’s slow, often ambivalent, and at turns almost methodical approach toward losing her “diamond,” her “maidenhead,” is usually depicted at a remove, with cool, tempered prose. At other times, Özdamar’s novel brims with rapturous flights and sometimes veers toward fabulist heights, but ironically, these moments are usually reserved for mundane observations and events.
The Bridge of the Golden Horn is built of densely packed paragraphs where sentences slither and writhe; often taking time to develop, these sentences are congested with repetitive words and phrases, and they unspool just short of unraveling completely from within Özdamar’s long, sprawling paragraphs. Özdamar’s prose resists quoting, and it defies a reviewer’s efforts to encapsulate her style. Here is a representative passage:
The snow had made the city a little more merciful... It fell softly, so softly that the time, when one was writing a letter or sewing on a button, also became softer. The holes of the button, the thread and the needle, the pencil in a hand moving across a white sheet of paper, always promised silence when it was snowing outside. The steam of boiling water or of the hot water that splashed on a body in the bathroom formed a bond with the snow. One saw the snow, one saw the objects, pans, pots, soap, the tables, the quilts, the shoes, a book on the bed. The snow said that we are born with it and will live only with it. We will rinse the pans in the room, it will be snowing outside, we will pull back the quilts, it will be snowing outside, we will sleep, and it will be snowing outside, and when we wake up, it will be the first thing we see. We will see it from the bus, from the factory window, the snow will fall into the black canals, make the heads of the ducks white. We could leave our footprints in it. . . . The snow could embrace one and create spaces in which silence could expand. Now it was gone.
Reading such prose feels like being inside of a snow globe, that feeling of breathless serenity and overwhelming encasement under a dome. One feels the power of Özdamar’s prose as coming from its thick and cascading accumulation of sentences. Indeed, like the snow that the narrator indelibly describes, Özdamar’s passages “embrace one and create spaces in which silence could expand.” But even within this silence the characters are surrounded by so much city static and industrial noise. The hero’s attempts at learning German from newspaper headlines sounds like clack clack clack. A couple’s “kiss voices” slurp slurp, punched-in timecards tink tink tink, a pocket watch goes tick tack tick tack, a faucet drips into a sink tip tip tip, church bells dong dong dong.
In his introductory essay to The Bridge John Berger writes that “since their beginning, stories have pretended to take place far away. Faraway and once-upon-a-time are code words for Here and Now. Just as information is the opposite of stories, informers are the opposite of storytellers. When a story is being retold every word becomes a code-word describing a Here and Now.” Stripped of its dense meditations and tangential, extended asides (but why would anyone want to cut these out?), The Bridge is, at heart, a fairy tale. In Özdamar’s novel, its “once-upon-a-time” is the age of a young woman’s innocence, the “faraway” is a long lost Istanbul. Germany is its “here” peopled with a wide and colorful cast that includes two sisters who wear “pale blue dressing gowns of electrified material,” an opera singer, a girl saving up for a breast reduction operation, a plainclothes policewoman, a Baudelaire-quoting engineering student, a Communist hostel warden, her crazed drama teachers, an exile from Greece’s Fascist dictatorship, and assorted lovers, pseudo-intellectuals, activists, and artists. Every encounter leads toward increasing the protagonist’s emotional, political, and cultural awareness. The novel’s “now” is a desultory time of war, political upheaval, economic uncertainty. It is the tumultuous late 1960s. The Vietnam War is on everyone’s minds. It is a “now” of trying to bring order to the chaos through books, in this case, pocket-sized copies of works by Baudelaire, Brecht, Marx, Engels, Shakespeare, and Lorca.
The namesake bridge of the novel’s title refers to the The Galata Bridge that spans Istanbul’s Golden Horn. Özdamar’s novel is part of a rich artistic legacy honoring the bridge, one that includes engravings, paintings, poetry, and theater. It was first built in the sixth century and as great an artist as Leonardo da Vinci was solicited for a redesign by Sultan Bayezid II. (His design was rejected.) The bridge in Özdamar’s novel is the fourth Galata Bridge, and throughout the novel Özdamar draws on the vast symbolic legacy of this marvel that bridges two disparate cultures. She writes:
I walked towards the Bridge of the Golden Horn, which links the two European parts of Istanbul. . . . The many ships beside the bridge gleamed in the sun. The long shadows of the people walking across the Bridge . . . fell on to the ships from both sides of the bridge and walked along their white bodies. Sometimes the shadow of a street dog or donkey also fell there, black on white. After the last ship the shadows of people and animals fell on to the sea and kept walking there. Across these shadows flew the seagulls with their white wings, their shadows also fell on the water, and their cries mingled with the ships’ sirens and the cries of the street sellers. As I walked across the bridge, it seemed to me as if I had to push the air ahead of me with my hands. Everything moved very slowly, as in an overexposed, old slow-motion film.
The Bridge of the Golden Horn was selected as part of English PEN’s “Writers in Translation” series and was awarded a grant because of its “clear link” to PEN’s aims; namely, to “explore a freedom of expression or human rights issue” and “contribute in some way toward inter-cultural understanding through illuminating an aspect of another country or culture.” Such links are forged in passages like the above—filled with lyrical assonances and soft repetition detailing shadow-play on the sea—as well as the often picaresque narrative as a whole. The book, like the bridge, fosters cultural reciprocity and understanding, ultimately leading toward understanding the tension between separation and intimacy, confusion and discovery, mystery and awareness. The wonderful and confident translation from the German is yet another bridge, one that ultimately brings reader and writer that much closer, and makes this reader yearn for the final installment in the trilogy, with hopes that it too is translated by Martin Chalmers. - John Madera

This picaresque account of a young girl's intellectual and sexual coming of age from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies, through her adventures in Berlin, Istanbul and Paris, enacts multiple acts of translation and transmutation. Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's enunciation of an identity that begins in Turkish and moves into a bold, re-forged and enriched German is accessible and entertaining. The heroine's various incarnations as immigrant factory worker, language student and chambermaid in Berlin, then as a drama student and actress in Turkey, challenge the tired stereotypes that haunt too many literary representations of migration.
Ozdamar has a Dickensian talent for creating vivid portraits of ordinary people as complex and individual. The immigrants we meet are not simply pitiable victims; they include an opera singer and a secret policewoman, both fleeing unhappy love affairs, a girl saving up for a breast reduction operation, a lesbian couple and an engineering student who quotes Baudelaire. Vasif, the Communist warden at the hostel in Berlin and later a director at the Ankara Ensemble, and Madame Gutsio, an exile from the Fascist dictatorship in Greece, feed the teenager's prodigious appetite for revolutionary theatre, film, politics and literature.
Identity seems multiplied and enriched rather than compromised by translocation. As the heroine's mother remarks: "a language is like a person, two languages are like two people". Her father observes that she left Istanbul as a (Turkish) nightingale and returns as a (German) parrot, but this isn't quite right. Ozdamar's writing is subversively literal: when Turkish adjectives are transposed to German, they attain a fresh political and poetic force. The "diamond" of virginity becomes dubious wealth the protagonist is keen to be rid of rather than hoard, so that she can be free to "pursue the beauty of men". The urban ruin the factory girls skulk around after work becomes the "offended" station, the locus of homesickness.
Cultural ignorance, too, is used to make a political point. The intellectuals at the Turkish Workers' Association speak so often of Nietzsche that the factory girls presume that he's the German prime minister.
Ozdamar's novel is an act of literary transubstantiation between languages, cultures, and the flux and intensity of lived experience. Martin Chalmers's English translation from the German retains the rich strangeness of her writing, in all its demotic and lyrical variety. The novel reminds us that literature is a transforming energy at the heart of life. Book vendors in Istanbul lay out their wares, wind leafing through the pages. "Poverty ran in the streets, and the people who in their lives had wanted to do something about it and had been killed as a result now lay down in the street as books. One only had to bend down to them, buy them". Hence many of those killed "entered homes, gathered on the bookshelves next to the pillows and lived in the houses". - Alev Adil

In a foreword to this novel, John Berger says the author's voice "changes age from sentence to sentence". She talks about dreams like a child, Berger writes, while conveying the "cruelty of the existent like a grandparent". It is partly this combination of an acutely observant ingenuousness and a satirical worldliness that gives The Bridge of the Golden Horn its mesmerising power and charm.
The novel is the second in a semi-autobiographical trilogy by the Turkish- German writer, actor and director Emine Sevgi Ozdamar. The first, whose lengthy German title translates as Life Is a Caravanserai With Two Doors; I Came In One and Left By the Other (1992), retraced the author's childhood in a politically turbulent Turkey in the 1950s and early 60s. The Bridge of the Golden Horn (1998), written when Ozdamar was in her early 50s, takes up the story from its teenage narrator's arrival as a "guest worker" in West Berlin in 1966. Like the author, the would-be actor learns German from scratch as a young adult, working on a factory assembly line making radios to earn money for drama school in Istanbul. The scene shifts between Germany and Turkey, before political events in Turkey drive her away in the mid-70s, to work in Brechtian theatre in East Berlin. Yet the bridge of the title also spans the interlinked worlds of its narrator, as events in Europe and the US, from Vietnam to May 1968, trigger reactions within Turkey.
The wide-eyed 16-year-old, who has lied about her age to join the tide of Turkish gastarbeiter, at first views Berlin as a film in which "I didn't have a part". But her world, as a cloistered middle-class Turkish girl, gradually expands beyond the women's "hossel" in which she lives opposite the Hebbel theatre, through contact with the Turkish Workers' Association and an avuncular communist and his wife. While the girl initially thinks Nietzsche must be the German prime minister, she builds on her knowledge of Shakespeare with borrowed volumes of Gorky and Engels, Brecht and Büchner.
Alongside growing political awareness, the novel details her sentimental education, as she and the other girls master the "fear of brothers and fathers" that weaves a "spider's web that covered the whole room and our bodies". While older women warn against losing "your maidenhead, that is your diamond", a friend tells her: "You must sleep with men. Free yourself of your diamond, if you want to be a good actress. Only art is important, not the diamond."
Returning to study theatre in Istanbul, the narrator is taken to be a "modern girl" because she chooses, and pays, her own way. Returnees from Germany are deferred to: "Europe was a club with which we smashed each other's heads - European shoes never wore out. European dogs had all studied at European dog schools. European women were natural blondes." She learns acting partly from movies - as her mother learns how to answer the phone stylishly by copying Liz Taylor - while encouraged by her drama teacher to imitate the peasant street-sellers who cross the wobbly, low-slung Bridge of the Golden Horn, and become versed in the "oratorio of Istanbul".
Yet as her political commitment grows, divisions in the country ossify, from Grey Wolves and Ataturk Youth, to the 15 deputies of her own Workers' party, who "often wore bandages on their noses, mouths and cheeks, because the rightwing deputies beat them up in Parliament". After a military coup brings a clampdown on students and leftwingers, as volumes of Marx are thrown into the Sea of Marmara, and toilets across the city become blocked with leftwing sons' and daughters' incriminating leaflets and letters, the drama student is arrested, partly accused of aiding the Kurds after a journey to the east of the country. Finally released, she resolves to leave Turkey.
Ozdamar directs an insistently mischievous, deadpan irony at a range of targets, not least the self-important - usually male - political idealists of her day. The narrator explains to a hard-working prostitute that her lover "doesn't work, because he's a theorist", while members of a film commune "went out into the streets and with an eight-millimetre camera filmed people they thought were being exploited". Moments of unexpected lyricism further leaven the novel. A girl sitting uncomprehending with two men speaking German is "like a lonely person looking for foreign stations on his radio at night", while men flirting with a group of young women "both smoked cigars. When one spoke the other stretched his head up and blew a couple of rings in the air, and we, the three girls at the table, tried to get our wedding fingers inside these rings and hold on to them."
At first learning German from newspaper headlines, the fledgling actor returns home with two languages, as both a "Turkish nightingale" and a "German parrot". Or as her earthier aunt puts it: "The chicken who walks around a lot returns home with lots of shit under its feet." It is this complex, troubled, enriching accretion of languages and worlds that the novel - in Martin Chalmers's assured translation - so persuasively captures. - Maya Jaggi


If someone had asked me a week ago to imagine something impossible about a writer I greatly admire, I might have said “Janet Frame writing as brilliantly about politics and sex as she does about anguish and language.” Well, let me talk now of someone who comes very close to doing that. And as with those elaborate, exquisite fictions by Frame, I puzzled in reading The Bridge on the Golden Horn as to whether what I read was a novel, or an autobiography, or a narrative that deftly eluded conventional markers. I’ve deliberately avoided finding out more than the book’s brief note tells you about Emine Sevgi Özdamar, actor, author and film director, who grew up in Turkey and now lives in Berlin. My not tracking down other reviews nor quarrying Google was the first of my tributes to her. For if ever a work can carry itself in terms of its writing alone, this is it. I know few books that penetrate political values so adroitly, or stake out the eternal chess game of sex with such tolerant insight. It offers love scenes which are cameos of sharp wit as well as—to use that old word we have grown so cagey with—rare beauty.
Özdamar’s story begins with a young Gastarbeiterin arriving in Germany in 1966, wide-eyed, shrewd, virginal, soon to be stagestruck. It concludes eight years later, the narrator initiated into the cauldron of contemporary politics and sexual expansiveness, leaving Istanbul for Germany yet again. In terms of so much that the book establishes as decent and worthwhile, the fact that she leaves on the day Franco dies in Spain must be taken as a kind of earnest for a new world.
There are different ways you might be drawn to the story. You would be pushed to find a better account of what it was like to live as an intelligent but fairly much untutored young woman in the heady events of the late 1960s, as the tectonic plates of both youth and politics massively shifted. Or you might read it with equal insistence as a Turkish girl’s efforts to “modernise” as her country laboured at the same challenge, with the United States as its insistent mentor. And how well it brings home the disparateness between “European” and “Asiatic” Istanbul, the adventure and the risk in shuttling between the two. It is as though that ancient, seething city effortlessly serves as allegory for Özdamar’s time, as the twentieth century plays out how the privileged and the exploited draw their lines. The fabled bridge of the title, substantial and hallucinatory, timeless and in daily use, is never anything so reductive as “symbol”. But what it carries is the weight of its country’s history, the constantly thwarted move towards a just community, the sense of “connection” that the story’s ideals strain towards.
For all Özdamar’s unravelling of the ineptness and confusion of the Left, and the awful force that prevails against those who stand up to oppression, part of her story’s persistent attraction is its marvellously quirky optimism. In a few masterly paragraphs, she will catch the intellectual buoyancy and the individual decency of those—whatever their peripheral sillinesses—who will not submit, who believe against the odds that the “good society” is there for the making. We believe her. Another of her gifts is so convincingly to interweave politics and theatre, sexual adventure and ideals, and to do so at times with splendid comic effect. Her account of Turkish drama students taking method acting into their bedrooms, their assessing satisfaction by the dramatic clamour accompanying their performance, is hilarious. As too is the Marxist narrator, having attained true “political consciousness”, discussing “orgazum” with peasant women on the Iraqi border.
So often, as Özdamar’s strange eventful country became familiar, I thought how much more entertaining, more serious, this displaying of Istanbul’s human intricacy manages to be than the much-praised account of it in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. There is so much more liveliness to the city she portrays, more interest in other people and diverse ways of thinking, than in the fine but narrow tracing out of how a middle-class boy grew into the winner of Big Prizes. Although she too touches on that almost syrupy melancholy that pervades the educated Istanbuli sensibility. The Leftists, as much as their opposition, have an insatiable fascination with the Ottoman past, the life-in-death presence of an ageless city, so insistently beautiful and decayed, so inevitably stirring hüzün in those who love her and despair.
What rescues Özdamar from anything quite like that is her reckless, engaging involvement with what goes on day by day; her embracing social commitment; even more, her obsession with the swirls and currents of where language takes her. Personality—as much as in Frame’s three-volume autobiography—at every point is defined by the kind of language one opts for or submits to, and by the clarification when imagery is let loose. This is why questions about genre and labelling hardly matter, whether we think of the work as fictionalised memoir of highly wrought autobiography. It is a work freighted with brilliant, evocative writing, the insight that we are the language we use. At random, you know you are reading a compelling talent. Take this as the sole sample space allows, as the narrator watches Turks in Berlin.
The snow covered their moustaches. Three moustaches covered in snow make more headway against the snow than one moustache covered in snow. So each man, when he was with others, found his father, his grandfather, and it was good to be walking beside father or beside grandfather feet, when one was on a path whose end one couldn’t see. Then men walked together along the Berlin streets and spoke their language loudly, it looked as if they were walking along behind their words, which they spoke loudly, as if their loud language cleared the way for them. When they crossed a street, they didn’t cross it in order to get to another street, but because their loud words went in front of them. So they walked behind their words and to the people who didn’t understand these words it looked as if they were walking through another country with their donkeys or chickens. The men walked behind their words until they reached the Turkish Workers’ Association, there they smoked and drank tea. They didn’t say: “I’m going,” instead one stood up and said “We’re going.” When one poured tea into a glass, he said, “We’re drinking tea.” When a newspaper lay on a table, one said: “We’re going to read a newspaper.” Each “I” sewed itself on to the next “I” and made a “We”.
Language is as much the subject and the liberator in Özdamar’s evolution as it was in Joyce or Frame. She does not suffer by comparison with either. Her “portrait” too is of how a young woman becomes an international artist, and an open and admirable human being. If I seem a little over the top in my enthusiasm, that’s fine. To have been on the golden bridge of Özdamar’s prose—even in translation—for two hundred and fifty pages, quite makes its case. - Vincent O’Sullivan


“Since their beginning, stories have pretended to take place far away. Faraway and once-upon-a-time are code words for Here and Now.” When these words from John Berger’s introduction are applied to this moving novel by Turkish playwright and actress Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, they ring inordinately true. The Bridge of the Golden Horn opens with the most well-known plotline: Once upon a time there was a young girl who sought more out of life than she currently possessed. So she left home, traveled to a faraway land, and along the way encountered a myriad of obstacles, found herself in both silly and impossible situations, all of which taught her valuable lessons by the novel’s conclusion. The end. Yet in the case of The Bridge of the Golden Horn, this familiar narrative device takes the reader along on a surprising and wholly satisfying journey with a quirky and complicated narrator. This unnamed narrator is a sixteen-year-old girl who dreams of being an actress, and so she forsakes her native Istanbul for Berlin—lying about her age in order to obtain a job as a migrant worker in a factory—in the hopes that she’ll accumulate enough money to send herself to drama school. As is usually the case in such stories, all does not go according to plan, and the novel chronicles the four year span—beginning in 1966—during which the heroine acquaints herself with love, sex, communism, and foreign languages. So she says herself: “I wanted to learn German, and then rid myself of my diamond in order to become a good actress. Here [Istanbul] I would have to come home every evening and look in my parents’ eyes. Not in Germany.”
Written in a fluid stream-of-consciousness style, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s semi-autobiographical novel propels the reader through the narrative with its long chapters and quick pacing; it feels like you’re straddling a cantering horse, powerless to slow down. The novel’s tone forces the reader to feel what the narrator feels at any given moment, whether it be about her family, home, sexuality, politics, or theatrical aspirations. With its clipped and direct prose, the narrative pulls you in without being sentimental or melancholy: “Every cigarette we smoked that night showed us that we had made a mistake. We had run away from the herd and now we wept for the herd. This was Berlin. This Berlin had not existed for us yet. We had our hossel [sic], and the hossel was not Berlin.”
While Ozdamar’s lyrical writing technique contains shades of Postmodernists who have especially favored a stream of consciousness style (such as Joyce and Woolf), her writing is wholly her own:
Berlin had been like a street to me. As a child I had stayed in the street until midnight, in Berlin, I had found my street again. From Berlin I had returned to my parents’ house, but now it was like a hotel, I wanted to go back on the street again. On the ship the men took the newspapers down from their faces and looked at me. Every evening a shipful of people would come to see me on the stage as an actress. The men would fall in love with me. I suddenly realized that I was very curious about what these men who would fall in love with me would look like. I wanted to die onstage like Moliere, in the middle of the set. I saw myself onstage, other actors carried me in their arms, I bled from my mouth, died and left behind no children who had to weep after my death. The ship was just in the middle between Asian and European Istanbul. The actress came out of my body, she pushed a man and child in front of her and threw them into the Sea of Marmara. Then she came back and entered me again. When the ship reached the Asian side, I knew that I never ever wanted to get married. I could hardly wait to get home. Before I got on the bus, I called my mother. ‘I don’t want to marry, I want to go to drama school.’
In addition to being the author of The Bridge of the Golden Horn, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar has also written plays, and is a trained actress. With this experience, Ozdamar has clearly gained a masterful understanding of the nuances of language, and sheutilizes literary devices found in playwriting to push the novel’s plot towards its conclusion, a technique that works brilliantly throughout the entire novel.
At its core, though, The Bridge of the Golden Horn is a modern-day fairy tale. While few would consider 1966 “long ago”, or Istanbul and Berlin “a far away land” (in the traditional fairy-tale sense; both are pretty far away from where I sit in Phoenix), the novel contains a colorful cast of characters, heartbreaking and hilarious events, a teenage girl on the verge of womanhood, and all of this takes place in a dramatically shifting modern world – a densely wooded forest of life, iconic of a fairy tale. In his introduction, John Berger states, “perhaps story-tellers have always been listened to because they fill a lack.” Luckily for readers, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s profound, illuminating, and ultimately lovely novel, The Bridge of the Golden Horn is a powerful story that can fill in for whatever may be lacking. - Jessica LeTourneur


In her autobiographical novel The Bridge of the Golden Horn Emine Sevgi Ozdamar writes with wisdom and humor about the artistic political and sexual adventures of a young woman coming of age in 1960s Germany and Turkey. Driven by her desire to assert her independence and become an actress Ozdamars sixteen-year-old protagonist leaves a comfortable middle-class life in Istanbul and takes a factory job in Berlin. On her arrival she doesnt speak a word of German and knows next to nothing about how to manage life in a foreign country. But thanks to her irrepressible curiosity and fearless hunger for new experiences she soon transforms herself into a sophisticated and worldly political activist and actress. Ozdamar herself moved from Turkey to Berlin in her youth and she draws on her firsthand knowledge of both places in order to imbue her novel with a wealth of realistic detail. She packs the books opening section with fascinating observations about working life in a Berlin radio tube factory noting for example that the workers always saw their forewoman in a distorted perspective because of the magnifying glasses they wore over their right eyes on the job.
Throughout the novel Ozdamar uses lively and lyrical prose to create an appealing voice for her nameless first-person narrator. She treats her protagonists sexual awakening with both sensuality and sensitivity and writes passionately about the great power that literature and theatre have to broaden ones understanding of the world. Ozdamars book is also often quite funny: in one passage she gently pokes fun at her protagonists naive political idealism by recounting an incident in which a peasants donkey eats her copy of Lenins State and Revolution. But for all its warmhearted humor the novel also does not shy away from forthrightly depicting the tragedies of poverty and political violence in 1960s Turkey.
As an actress playwright and fiction writer Ozdamar has received widespread acclaim for her work. With The Bridge of the Golden Horn Ozdamar has spun an appealing tale about a young immigrant who discovers herself through politics sex and the arts. - www.forewordreviews.com

The award winning Bridge of the Golden Horn was published in German in 1998 and fortunately for English readers has recently been translated with a wonderful introduction from John Berger.




Özdamar often uses her own life as a canvas for her narrative and there are many parallels here – arriving in Germany as a young woman in the 1960s from Turkey without a word of German and trudging back between the workers’ hostel and a radio valve factory. Her descriptions of learning German from the sounds of words and reading captions in newspapers have such a sharp authenticity.
Her German writing has been noted for its “Turkish” style in the patterns of thought and speech. It is hard to know how much has survived translation, but there is unfamiliarity to the way the sentences run from one another smoothly and swirl around the scenes and the characters. The feeling of being a young woman surrounded by an unfamiliar world while at the same time discovering her social, political and sexual liberation is captured superbly.
While many of the people populating the novel are described in a nuanced manner, not through physical description but through their peculiar actions or mannerisms, other familiar characters appear. Salvador Allende and Richard Nixon hover in the background, Lenin’s State and Revolution makes its mark and the communist hostel warden introduces Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Jack London, Tolstoy, Joyce, Sartre and a woman, Rosa Luxemburg.
The Vietnam War provides a focus for discovering the vileness of US imperialism as our nameless protagonist takes part in protests in Berlin and Paris. She discovers the political debates taking place in the Workers’ Association and begins to take acting lessons too.
The acting takes us away from Germany on a freedom fling with a drama troupe into Turkish delight and delirium, where the next coup d’état is always just around the corner. Learning the necessity to lie low, the journey is made through Kurdish mountain villages to the Marmarasea.
A deft storyteller, Özdamar immerses you in these tales, reminding you how it feels when everything is new and everything is possible. - roamingwithintent

German-Turkish Literature: an Analysis of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Mediha Göbenli (pdf)

While this book was interesting, I’m not sure it was my cup of tea. I think “hectic” is a fantastic way to start off describing it. We breeze through quite a bit of the narrator’s life and it’s hard to be sure what it meant. Despite the quick pace of events, the book felt very, very slow. Since it was a memoir (or a semi-autobiographical novel, as I see elsewhere), I expected to feel some sort of attachment for the main character, but it was surprisingly difficult. I certainly thought her journey was interesting. How many stories take place within a Cold War-era Berlin factory? Or in Istanbul? Not very many, at least not many that I read.
Sevgi’s goal in life is to become an actress. She’s willing to do more or less anything to get there. Saving money for theatre school is the purpose of her time in Berlin, but she also does plenty of other things in order to fit the image of actress. This includes many attempts at giving up her virginity, which she calls her “diamond”. Several men tell her that she is too young for sex, but she persists in thinking that her diamond is holding her back. This is just one of the occurrences which made me struggle to relate to her. When she does give up that diamond, she sleeps with men indiscriminately, often practicing her acting skills by faking her pleasure.
Something I did enjoy here was the book’s focus on literature, although not necessarily the political outcome of Sevgi’s learning. Sevgi is determined to educate herself, beginning with a book received from the communist hostel warden and continuing throughout her life. Books are treasures. By the end of the novel, however, it seemed that all of Sevgi’s learning, in fact her whole journey, was centered on teaching her to become a communist. While communism at its core is an interesting ideology, I found it hard to sympathize with someone who ignored the fact that communist countries regularly turn into dictatorships and continued following an idealized belief which has little to no real world value.
I suspect that were I older, I would have found more to enjoy in this book. If I’d lived through the events referenced in the USA, I would perhaps have been better able to draw connections and enjoy the allusions sprinkled throughout. As it stands, though, I found this book difficult to get through and at times, very much over my head. I can’t recommend it.- medievalbookworm.com/

Language without a childhood
A tribute to the writing of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, whose novels have made Berlin greater, more expansive, warmer. By Harald Jähner
It's not necessarily boring to watch a film in a language you don't understand. You concentrate all the more on other elements of the film, gestures, body language, the landscapes, extras. Someone who doesn't understand the language is not necessarily watching the wrong film but sees more of the film than others. Putting this added experience into the right words is an art that few have mastered better than Emine Sevgi Özdamar.

She came to Germany from Istanbul for the first time in 1965 and she understood – nothing. She once related that her first German word was "Haltestelle" (bus stop). She memorised it in order to make sure that she would get out at the right street on her way back. Of course this didn't work; in Berlin there were just too many placed called "Haltestelle".
In her novel "Die Brücke vom goldenen Horn" (bridge from the Golden Horn) she instead tells about her first German words as sounding like "shak, shak, eee and gak gak." When she and her roommates from the rooming house went to buy eggs they had wiggled their bottoms and said "gak, gak" to the saleswoman. Much distance lies between this German and Özdamar's novels. These books are wonderful, because they convey the magic of learning a language. She writes in German, a language which holds no childhood for her. In contrast to Turkish, which still retains the enchanting power of early comfort, the lullabies and also the first triumph of saying "I", "I want". In contrast, life in Berlin gave her the opportunity to linguistically start from scratch as an adult. She learned German in a strange way, by memorising the headlines of the newspapers that hung in kiosks – without understanding a word. When someone asked her "Niye böyle gürültüyle yürüyorsun?" (why do you make so much noise when you walk?), she would answer, for example with the memorised headline "Wenn aus Hausrat Unrat wird" (when belongings become trash).
Admittedly, her father later paid for a course at the Goethe Institute, where she learned German in the classical manner. However, one can readily assume that her own original learning method honed her sense of the language. For her, words have a body, a form, not only in terms of letters but also as spoken words, and especially as words that never reach those to whom they were addressed. In "Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn" she describes how Turkish men walked through wintery Berlin: "It looked as if they were walking behind the words that they spoke aloud. (...) They walked this way with their words, and to people who did not understand them, the men looked like people walking with a donkey or chicken through another country."
Also in her book "Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde" (strange stars stare at the earth) the spoken word is not only heard but also seen. A passage describes a memory of a winter in an unheated shared apartment in Berlin, where breath condensed in the air: "When two of us stood in the doorways of two opposite rooms and talked to one another in the cold, I saw two breaths speaking with one another in the corridor. (...) When we all sat in the kitchen at the big round table and ate while talking with one another, I saw seven streams of breath form over the table, like the beams of light from seven pocket torches on a dark night."
For Emine Sevgi Özdamar language and loneliness go hand in hand. Language does not dispel loneliness but casts it in a strong light. She waves words about as you would a torch when searching for someone or something that might catch the light, she runs after words like men on snowy streets, aching with homesickness. When words take on a life of their own in an argument, when one word leads to the next, as the wonderful phrase goes, then the words around the kitchen table slice the air like scissors gone wild.
This author enables us to experience what a boon for literature a late-learned language can be, a "language without a childhood", without fully automated reflexes. If you can see and imagine as clearly as she does, then you are always somehow out of place. You see the foreign, regardless of where and when you became naturalised.
Whoever has read her "Die Brücke vom goldenen Horn" will never again be able to pass by the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin without recalling the words "insulted train station". This is what the women from the rooming house also call it, because the Turkish word for "broken" also means "insulted". The magnificent thing about the art of Özdamar is that she relishes in these unstable realms of language; she is anything but a hesitant, brooding wordsmith. She is fearless, willing to pick every apple from the tree of knowledge out of pure curiosity and zest for life.
Her magnificent books about her time in Berlin in the 1960s and 1970s describe the conquest of life, not only the mastery of a city. They are stories of a slow process of arriving, of landing, of wondering around in unfamiliar territory, of taking in the entire city. She virtually devours German theatre, her beloved Bert Brecht, whose plays she had already performed as a schoolgirl in Istanbul. Astounding how this young woman manages to overcome the inner border of the city, living in West Berlin while working at the Volksbühne in East Berlin with Benno Besson and Heiner Müller. She trumped all of us who considered the Wall to be an insurmountable obstacle. She would never have been satisfied with only half a city.
Berlin has taken on greater dimensions for me through the books of Emine Sevgi Özdamar; it has become more expansive, warmer. It is now all the more my home. For this I thank her.






Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Life Is a Caravanserai, Trans. by Luise von Flotow,   Middlesex University Press, 2000.



Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s Life is a Caravanserai should be read by anyone interested in migrant literature, if only for its dense and unruly condensation of the genre—a primer in zwittertext estrangement and difference. And how strange it is! Caravanserai subverts the migrant bildungsroman by situating the narrative in the homeland, Turkey, from memories in utero to just before the girl-protagonist’s moment of departure. Until the final train-scene where she rides to Deutschland amongst aging prostitutes, our teenaged heroine’s tapestry of myth and history, remembrance and insanity, is largely untouched by the foreign Other. True enough, “Erol Flayn” and “Humprey Pockart”—Americans who don’t have to eat, they just take pills—slip through the cracks, but what occupies her stream-of-consciousness is the contradictions rife in Turkish society. She is, all at once, a Kurd stricken by war and poverty, a devout Muslim woman who revels in ribald sensuality, a child whose thoughts are shaped by wars new and old and unending. Despite the grim memories evoked by historical retellings—from Anatolian marginalization to the oiled rise of Ataturk—Ozdamar brandishes wonderfully irreverent humor, or glosses over the characters’ pain altogether. After a semester’s worth of “writing from the margins”, this is unbelievably refreshing. Ozdamar manages to narrate Turkey without a whit of sentimentality, and at the same time, explores the Turkish gastarbeiter’s source culture without us-versus-Them hostility vis-à-vis Germany. It is through language that confrontation occurs: a German mutilated by halting grammar, its wounds filled with Turkish aphorisms and syntactic structures underlying a Kurdish core.
It must be said, however, that this review is inspired by Luise von Flotow’s English translation and this writer can only hope that it conveys half the nuances available to German/Turkish readers. As it stands, the language von Flotow uses is clipped, angular, plagued with a lack of articles, unruly prepositions and strange transliterated metaphors (ie. shaking out worms meant going for a walk), comprising a narrative completely devoid of chapter breaks. This makes for novel that is exhausting to read, but whose inner rhythms make strangely compelling. (One must mourn all that is lost in translation: several online articles state that “Cotton Aunt”, to Turkishborn, is a fond reference to a madame of a brothel.) The general consensus is that Caravanserai is impenetrable. Not completely so. What strikes me is the sense of prescience that dominates the narrative and, upon reflection, seems to dictate the strangeness of the language involved. As stated by her own mother, the protagonist “opens her eyes wide, like the insane.” Her eyes unjudgingly record all that is in front of her, a calm acceptance of truth that within society’s dictates is deemed madness. (Indeed, madness, particularly the politicized madness of women, is as crucial here as in many migrant texts.) This may be read as yet another transgression committed by Ozdamar: unlike many postcolonial heroines, the persona of Caravanserai has no issues with identity. She knows who she is, a surety that springs from the history of Turkey (but remains unfettered to it), one free to exist in the migrant land of Germany yet unknown. - icafernandez   



Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Mother Tongue, Trans. by Craig Thomas, Coach House Press, 1994.

Four stories on the lives of Turkish immigrants in Germany. One of them, Blackeye in Germany, is narrated by a man's donkey, while A Charwoman's Career draws on the author's own experiences before she went on to better things: stagehand, actress, playwright, theater director and now novelist. Lots of black humor.

In 1965, the author of this extraordinary volume left Turkey for Germany to work as a Gastarbeiter (guest-worker), beginning first as a cleaning lady in a factory, then becoming a stage hand in Berlin, an actress, a playwright, a director and eventually a prize-winning German author. This collection of pieces evokes the hazy hell of a displaced person trying to make it in an unfamiliar, often hostile culture, learning a tongue-twistingly forbidding language. Eventually, all cultural forms and norms--inherited as well as adopted--seem increasingly strange. "Stay behind. Stay crazy." is a sing-song saying on one segment of the book ("Blackeye in Germany"), written originally as a theater piece, in which a Turkish donkey recounts stories of his farmer's adventures as a Gastarbeiter . A fusion of wildly fantastical Scheherazade stories with the nightmarish surrealism of Franz Kafka suggests the book's overall tone. In the original, Ozdamar plays with the German language as with a dangerous weapon, using words like a circus performer juggles knives. Although not much of that wordplay comes through in the translation, it does retain the mesmerizing quality of the original. And that flowing, jarring word stream propels readers into the world of an outsider, forcing them to hear and see with the ears and eyes of a stranger. - Publishers Weekly

Caught between her adopted country, Germany, and her homeland, Turkey, and constantly shuttling back and forth between them, Ozdamar's heroine finds that she cannot fit into either place. She bemoans the loss of her mother tongue and desperately catalogs Turkish words and their meaning so that she will not forget her roots. Her plight is a real one, but Ozdamar adds some surreal touches: donkeys speak, and people inhabit the bodies of others. Unfortunately, these touches don't really work. While the xenophobia experienced by Germany's guest workers is as glaring as today's headlines, this is a confusing and ultimately unsatisfying narrative. - Peggy Partello