My First Passport.

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 16-APR-07

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

In 1959, when I was seven years old, my father went missing under mysterious circumstances; several weeks later, we received word that he was in Paris, living in a cheap hotel in Montparnasse. He was filling up the notebooks that he would later give to me, and from time to time, from the Cafe Dome, he'd spot Jean-Paul Sartre passing in the street. At first, my grandmother sent him money from Istanbul. My grandfather had made a fortune in railroads. Under my grandmother's tearful gaze, my father and my uncles hadn't yet managed to squander their entire inheritance--not all of the apartments had been sold. But, twenty-five years after her husband's death, my grandmother decided that the money was running out and she stopped subsidizing her bohemian son in Paris.

This was how my father joined the long line of penniless and miserable Turkish intellectuals who had been walking the streets of Paris for a century already. Like my grandfather and my uncles, he was an engineer with a good head for mathematics. When his money was gone, he answered an ad in the newspaper...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.