Robin Hood of the Taurus

...In Memed My Hawk, Kemal has achieved a universality of theme within a Turkish framework...

...Kemal's hero embodies the spirit of a young nation in revolt against the corruption, degradation and injustice which had been its lot for centuries...

...Born in 1922 near Adana in the southern part of the country, Kemal received little formal education and spent his early youth in occupations ranging from field worker to reporter...

...Eventually, having failed to kill the Agha, disillusioned by the cowardly villagers to whom he has offered freedom, Memed snatches Hatché from prison and retreats to a hiding place in the mountains...

...The quality of the novel is enhanced by Kemal's description of several minor characters: In old Uncle Durmush Ali, kindly, stupid, avaricious, or in Iraz, the toughminded mother of Hatché, one feels the spirit of centuries-old Turkey...

...Yet these defects are offset by directness and simplicity of theme, a convincingly detailed characterization of the hero, and a lyricism which raises Kemal far above the level of his contemporaries...

...Those few Turkish novels written before the 19th century were poor imitations of Arabic and Persian works...

...Yashar Kemal, whose book Memed My Hawk was published in Turkey in 1955, is the first Turkish novelist to overcome these national barriers...

...He becomes a sort of Robin Hood of the Taurus, directing his efforts to freeing the peasants from their landlord's oppression...

...Reviewed by GABRIEL GERSH Contributor, "Commentary," "America" Modern Turkish writing is inextricably bound up with the development of the Turkish Republic...

...The overthrow of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of a national consciousness, and the subsequent social, political and linguistic reforms created generally favorable conditions for the growth of a national literature...

...Certainly no other Turkish book has given so authentic a description of the lives of Turkish peasants or the dry, dull landscape of the Taurus...

...More particularly, the substitution of the Latin for the Turkish alphabet and the removal—at least from the written language—of the mass of Persian and Arabic words that had encumbered Turkish, provided, for the first time, a means of communication between the intelligentsia and the people...

...After he is beaten and starved by the Agha, Memed flees to the hills in order to reach the sea...

...19th century novels were colorful attempts in the manner of Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, written in either florid Ottoman or French...

...His dialogue (in translation, at least) is sometimes awkward, his descriptions often shallow, his climaxes too hackneyed and therefore flat...

...He is a member of a group of young "social" writers whose works deal with the lives and problems of the lower classes of Istanbul, the Anatolian peasants forced into suburban industry and the peasants faced with the painful readjustments of the agricultural revolution and rapid modernization of Turkish life...

...His novel will certainly continue to find readers— and to inspire reformers...

...During the pursuit, he kills the nephew and wounds the landlord...

...One reason for the outstanding success of this novel is his sympathetic and loving treatment of the folklore and peasant traditions of his native Anatolia...

...Memed's various feats of courage are less interesting than his development into a leader...

...On the way, he comes upon a village where there is no Agha—"everyone is his own Agha," an old man tells him—and vows to liberate the villages of his own region and give every man a plot of land and a donkey of his own...

...When Hatché is killed by police bullets, he gives his baby son to a friend and becomes a lonely avenger, disappearing into mysterious oblivion once he has finally had his revenge on the old tyrant...

...He is not only a death-defying Robin Hood, but also a philosopher, a moralizer and a man imbued with the social ideals of the new Turkey...

...Hatché is imprisoned and Memed, in the time-honored manner, takes to the mountains as a bandit...

...Memed is recaptured but escapes again, taking with him his beloved Hatché, the fiance of the Agha's nephew...

...The novel was a new and untried medium for the writers of the early Republic...

...Like many of his fellow writers in the Middle East, Kemal is wary of a Westernized veneer that can corrupt without producing any genuine civilizing influence...

...Slim Memed, the novel's hero, is the son of a poor widow living in a Taurus mountain village, held in bondage by the "Agha," a rapacious and tyrannical landlord...

...Thus novelists of the Republic were faced with an unfamiliar literary form, a radically changed and still changing language, and the limited inspiration that the political and social problems of contemporary Turkish life could provide...

...Style, in the Western sense, hardly seems to concern the author...