La Marche Turque

La Marche Turque blends family memoirs, fiction and intimate confession in a subtle and innovative manner that leaves you wondering where the narrator’s persona ends and the author’s begins.

Moving from intimate confessions to court proceedings, from Istanbul and Paris in the 1930s to contemporary Tel Aviv, from the story of Benny Ziffer to that of Leon Majar, the novel weaves an unforgettable tapestry of passions and insight. On the one hand, there is the young Benny Ziffer, his idiosyncratic relatives and his relationship with a homosexual known as Z. On the other hand, there is the scandalous story of Leon Majar, a noted Turkish writer who befriended Ziffer’s aunt back in Istanbul, went into exile in Paris following a love affair with a young man, and was convicted of subversion in his absence. The two plots are linked by the narrator’s aunt, a member of Majar’s bohemian clique. This is a brilliant play of disclosure and disguise. Ziffer’s style is marked by a Proustean penchant for ruthless self-exposure combined with the self-effacing compassion of an enlightened outsider. La Marche Turque offers all the excitement and wonder of getting lost in the side streets of a bustling Mediterranean city in mid-summer.