Robert Rosenberg

From the novel The Prince's Islands

We had already known many families from temple who owned homes there. The city's dwindling Jewish community, those of us who had resisted until then the gravitational pull of Israel, was still a tightly knit group. Our common ancestors had fled the persecution of Queen Isabella during the Inquisition in Spain, had wandered the Mediterranean, and had found safe haven under the Ottoman sultans. Five centuries later many in our households still spoke Ladino, a combination of medieval Spanish and Hebrew and Turkish. As children Yusuf and I spoke the language with our parents at home, but because we spent so much time in private schools, we often answered each other in Turkish. We rooted for Turkish football teams. We listened to Turkish pop music. We thought of ourselves as Turks. This was a source of grief to Mother, who saw our steady assimilation as nothing more than the tossing away of five centuries of tradition. Not only then did she view the island as a sanatorium for her sick son, but the waters around it demarcated new boundaries for our indiscriminate social lives. On the island we'd have primarily Jewish friends and one day, with the Lord's help, Jewish girlfriends.

The wooded island, the largest of a small archipelago off the Asian coast, lay an hour's ferry ride from the city. Its two steep mountains were separated by a wide valley, and at the peak of each mountain an ancient Greek monastery commanded magisterial views. In Byzantine times the archipelago drew its names from these monasteries, and was called the 'Priests' Isles'. Later, new monarchs established the brutal practice of exiling their predecessors to the island - where they were blinded, then manacled into the cells of the churches – and the archipelago became known as the 'Princes' Islands'. Across the years its horrors dissipated. By the 19th century the merchants of our city were building spectacular wooden mansions on its hills, and the island had evolved into a summer retreat. Over the last century it had grown increasingly popular, so that its close winter community of simple Muslim villagers was now overridden each summer by wealthy vacationers.

Through my earliest childhood memories, arriving from the tumult of the mainland, I had always been struck by the clean air and slower pace. Mediterranean pine blanketed the rocky slopes. A single road twisted around the shore, through the valley and back to the main village--whose narrow side-streets are to this day crammed with clapboard shacks of the families who have lived here for generations, and who own its restaurants, markets, and hardware stores. But the town's wider avenues, extending in an axis out from the main square, are lined with ornate wooden palaces and scented gardens of magnolia, lilac, and honeysuckle. The islanders like to boast that in the ruins of one such home Leon Trotsky had spent his first years of exile in our country. In another Mustafa Ataturk established the Anadolu Club, a British-style gambling hotel for the nation's elite. Despite its fading glamour, the island is still known for its tranquility. Cars are banned: one must walk, or bicycle, or take a horse-drawn carriage. It remains a place stuck in time.

Father purchased the vacation home from the oldest of his fourteen cousins, Semuel Naim, who had recently moved to Haifa. With a year-round condominium down there, half a kilometer from the Mediterranean, Semuel no longer needed a summer home in Turkey. "My cousin was looking to unload," Father would always recall, remembering those lost days. "We couldn't really afford it…but how could I not buy? It was exactly what we needed. We did it for your brother. We did everything for him."

Father was Semuel Naim's favorite relation, and he sold it to us for a loss. It was more cottage than home: there were only two bedrooms, a kitchen whose mildewed tile was long overdue for replacement, a back patio that faced inland to hills overgrown with umbrella pine rather than outward to the sea. Nevertheless, Father took possession of it that spring with all of the triumph of a West Bank settler. Yusuf and I helped him bang home the nails on the front right doorframe for Mother's mezuzah. On the opposite side of the door, at Yusuf's urging, we also hung the Turkish nazar.

Twenty-one years later, on his triumphant return to the island, Yusuf would hang only the nazar on his mansion gates, next to the metal sign that said 'beware of dog." Our cousin Byanka reported this after his death, and when people mentioned how conflicted this all seemed Byanka shrugged. "He'd forgotten who he was by then, the rich jerk! No con quien naces sino con quien paces," she said. It's not among whom you were born, but among whom you live.