Sabahattin Alis Madonna in a Fur Coat the surprise Turkish bestseller

Why has a little known 1940s novel become a Turkey’s bestselling book? Maureen Freely on a writer who refuses traditional gender roles, and offers hope in an increasingly restricted society

When it was first published in Istanbul in 1943, it made no impression whatsoever. Decades later, when Madonna in a Fur Coat became the sort of book that passed from friend to friend, the literary establishment continued to ignore it. Even those who greatly admired the other works of Sabahattin Ali viewed this one as a puzzling aberration. It was just a love story, they said – the sort that schoolgirls fawned over. And yet, for the past three years, it has topped the bestseller lists in Turkey, outselling Orhan Pamuk. It is read, loved and wept over by men and women of all ages, but most of all by young adults. And no one seems able to explain quite why.

The story begins in 1930s Ankara, the Turkish Republic’s newly appointed capital. The narrator has fallen on hard times, and it is only with the help of a crass and belittling former classmate that he is able to find work as a clerk at a firm trading in lumber. Here he meets the sickly, affectless Raif Bey, who is, we’re told, “the sort of man who causes us to ask ourselves: “What do they live for? What do they find in life? What logic compels them to keep breathing?” When at last they make friends, it becomes clear that Raif’s reason for living cannot be his family. The relatives assembled under his roof treat him with the utmost contempt. And yet he welcomes their derision. Even on his deathbed, he seems to accept it as his due. But there is also a notebook, hidden in his desk drawer at work, which he asks his friend to destroy.

When his friend reads it instead, he meets a younger Raif, sent to Berlin by his father to study the manufacture of soap. Only a few years have passed since Turkey and Germany fought together on the losing side in the first world war, so he is warmly received by the pension’s other residents. But he is not much interested in the glad-eyed widows and the ruined colonialists, or for that matter, in soap. He devotes his days to reading, and his evenings to strolling the streets. One evening, he wanders into an exhibition of contemporary art to be mesmerised by a portrait of a Madonna in a fur coat. He goes back the next evening, and the next, until finally the artist introduces herself. For the work that Raif has been admiring is a self-portrait. And though Maria Puder is the sort of free-thinking new woman he could never have imagined possible, the two form an intensely platonic friendship, in which Maria becomes more male than female, and Raif more female than male. It suits them both, but the world, as it closes in on them, has other plans.

As it did for Sabahattin Ali. Born in 1907 in what is now Bulgaria but was then part of the crumbling Ottoman empire, he, too, went to Berlin as a young man, and his 18 months there turned him into a freethinking man. Returning to Turkey with trunks of books, he was sent to teach German in the provincial city of Aydin, and it was here that he did his first short stint in prison, accused of poisoning his students’ minds with dangerous ideas. After his release, he moved on to a job in the city of Konya, to be imprisoned again, after having been found guilty of reciting a poem critical of Ataturk. Told that he would never again find work as a teacher unless he was able to prove that he had changed his thinking, he published a poem in praise of Ataturk, entitled “My Love”.

By now he had established himself as a poet and writer of short stories. Like so many other writers whom he came to count as friends, he was a patriot of the socialist variety. The works for which he was most admired in his time were imbued by his dreams for the common man, and rooted in his knowledge of the injustices they suffered.

Though he carried on working for state institutions, his dissident writings ultimately led to his being removed from his post in 1945. He moved from Ankara to Istanbul, to be drawn into the struggle against the fascists then dominating Turkey’s single party state. The reward was a relentless hate campaign, which branded him and his fellow writers as traitors and Soviet sympathisers, but did not stop him establishing, with his friend Aziz Nesin, the now legendary weekly magazine devoted to political satire, Marco Pasha. It had, by its eighth issue, gained a circulation of 34,000. But it was not to last. After his co-editor was carted off to prison, Ali and others kept it going under a series of new names – The Undeniable Pasha, The Late Pasha, The Boorish Pasha, Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves. These were seen (and perhaps intended) to refer to the leader of the single party state, İsmet Pasha. With time, the newspaper ceased advertising itself as a weekly, promising instead to appear whenever it wasn’t impounded or whenever its editors weren’t locked up.

In 1948, after yet another stint in prison, Ali was forced to shut down for good. Unable to find work as a teacher or writer, he decided, as had others in his circle, that there was no future for him in Turkey. Having applied, unsuccessfully, for a passport, it became clear that his only option was to find another way across the border. This may have been why he found, through friends, a job as a truck driver.

In his last letter to his wife, he boasted that the next time she heard from him, he would be writing from Italy, France or England. There followed a long silence, which ended with a public confession by a smuggler named Ali Ertekin, who claimed to have accompanied Ali to the Bulgarian border and then battered him to death with a shovel in a fit of patriotic anger, after discovering his true identity. It was a detailed account: he even mentioned that Ali was reading at the time. However, it is commonly believed that Ali died while being interrogated by the National Security Service, and that Ertekin, with whom the service had links, was chosen to take the blame. That Ertekin served only a few weeks of a four-year sentence gives weight to this theory.

Ertekin claimed to have committed the murder in the first days of April 1948. Ali’s body – if indeed it was his body – was discovered months later by a local man, after which his bones were carted away to parts unknown for tests. The contents of the bag he had with him survive in a photograph that appeared in a national newspaper in January 1949, and again in the last pages of the memoir that his daughter, Filiz Ali, published in 1995. They include a leather jacket, a wristwatch, a pair of glasses, a shaving kit, a bottle of cologne, a notebook, a pencil case, a Balzac novel, another volume by Onegin, a notebook, a stack of well-leafed newspapers, and scattered photographs which are hard to see, except for one – of his wife Aliye – that has been artfully propped against his briefcase. His daughter is still waiting for these items to be returned.

Her father’s books, meanwhile, travelled on without impediment. During the cold war, they were translated into a number of languages in the Soviet bloc, and they are still much read in Bulgaria. There is even a statue of Ali in Ardino, the town of his birth.

In Turkey, meanwhile, Ali’s death continues to overshadow his life, in much the same way as his life overshadows his work – and with good reason. It is impossible to read of his ordeals without finding contemporary echoes. The fate of Marko Pasha, his satirical weekly, calls to mind the almost 2,000 prosecutions by President Erdoğan’s of those who have dared to mock him. Ali’s murder, allegedly at the hands of an offended patriot, was echoed by the 2007 murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. It also calls to mind the foiled shooting of the main opposition newspaper’s editor, Can Dündar, as he walked with his wife into court to receive a five-year sentence for publishing an article about the ruling party’s involvement in the secret arming of jihadi groups in Syria. This was only a few weeks ago. And it was just the latest episode in a series of increasingly savage attacks on independent publishing and journalism. The suppression of critical voices is now as harsh, if not harsher, than it was during the fascist-dominated single party state that crushed Ali and so many others. When Ali’s readers cry for him, they are also crying for themselves.

And here we come to what the novelist and critic Kaya Genç sees as the key to the mystery of Ali’s suddenly renewed fame. His least acclaimed novel has become Turkey’s most celebrated love story today because it refuses the traditional gender roles that Turkey’s president seems hell-bent on enforcing, not just in the religious heartlands but also in the cities and towns that have been secularising, and liberalising, for almost a century. Anyone who departs from his retrograde norms, he decries as traitors or terrorists in the making. During last year’s election campaign, he went so far as to accuse Turkey’s LGBT community as being in league with Armenians, Kurds, and the hostile foreign powers that funded them. Hardly a day passes without his saying what a woman should be, and what a man – a real man – should do to keep her in her place.

During his lifetime, and even after his death, Ali was publicly taunted for failing to act like a “real man”. There was endless innuendo about his time in Berlin. He never responded to it. Instead, he wrote Madonna in a Fur Coat, conjuring up a time and a place in which it was possible to be true to one’s nature, with air to breathe, and to live and love without pretence, if only for a brief period. It is not hard to see how a novel carrying those dreams but set far away, in a long lost Berlin, might promise a refuge, and some hope, to young readers in Turkey. They are only too aware that the space for free expression, and even free thought, is diminishing every day. But with this book in their hands, they can see that a story that is true to itself, and honest about love, can travel through walls. It has taken more than 70 years, says Genç, but at last Ali is having his revenge – not just in Turkish, but in English, too. May his fine book travel far.

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