Description

In his distinctive and musical design, Mario Levi catches the town of Istanbul and its storied past with a rare intimacy and humor.A main function of modern Turkish literature, Istanbul Was a Story Book tells the stories of several generations of a Jewish family in the 1920s to the 1980s. Istanbul is their only house, and yet they reside in a situation of departure, separating themselves from the planet around them. As viewer, experience, and character, the narrator—at once inside and beyond his story—records their several stories, in addition to those of the neighbors and friends, making an extensive variety of figures, each doing their finest to survive the twentieth-century.