Joseph O'Neill's story of his two grandfathers, one Irish, the
other Turkish, moves between West Cork and Mersin, a port in
south-east Turkey. He knew from the age of ten that both were
imprisoned by the British during the Second World War, but it was
not until he was 30 that he was driven to find out more about the
historical and political circumstances surrounding their
imprisonment. Born in Cork, educated in Holland and England, and
now a barrister living in New York and London, he says it was a
writer's curiosity which finally pushed him into this obsession
with the family history. As a child O'Neill spent holidays in
Mersin with his maternal grandmother, and it is to there that he
returns to find out from her about Joseph Dakad, her husband, a
Christian Turk, who was arrested as a spy on the Turkish-Syrian
border after a business trip to Jerusalem to buy two hundred tonnes
of lemons for re-sale in Turkey. The account of Joseph Dakad's
journey and the horrific details of his time in captivity are from
his written testimony, re-discovered by O'Neill in 1995 and
translated from the Turkish by his aunt. The family continued to
run the Toros Hotel in Mersin where O'Neill's father stayed in the
1960s while working in Turkey, when he met and subsequently married
young Georgette Dakad - thus the Irish/Turkish connection. Jim
O'Neill, the author's paternal grandfather, was a republican living
in Cork city. It is from his widow, the other grandmother, that
O'Neill learns about the background to her husband's arrest in 1940
and the true story of the notorious murder of Vice-Admiral
Somerville in West Cork in 1936. This is a very honest account - 'I
found myself in a state of shocked, almost angry clarity, as if
these revelations of Cork's past, which were so tangled with my
family's past, formed a recovered memory of something I'd concealed
from myself', and illustrated with humorous and painful anecdotes.
He learns of his grandfather's time at the Curragh - the old
internment camp - from his Irish grandmother, and visits other
family members and the Curragh Military Museum. In the epilogue he
finally appears to come to terms with his findings. This is a
fascinating and moving account of political commitment, and its
effect on a family through the generations. (Kirkus UK)
In this story of a family and its place in history, Joseph O'Neill
reconstructs the fate of two men he never met and who never met
each other, but who have had a profound effect on his life. His
Turkish and Irish grandfathers, Joseph Dakad and James O'Neill,
were both vigorous and strong-willed men, patriarchs and
visionaries. And they were each imprisoned, one in Palestine and
the other in Ireland, during World War II. The Turkish hotelier and
entrepreneur was suspected by the British of being a spy for the
Germans, and left a vertiginous testament of his experiences in
colonial jails. The Irish labourer and poacher was a dedicated IRA
man in Cork, an area where memories of the Black and Tan war were
recent and bitter. In retracing their lives, their grandson writes
about the sunlit world of provincial Turkey, and the fierce
passions of rural Southern Ireland. The secrets he uncovers are
haunting and tragic, and resonate in him and his family. He
explores the different meanings of a passionate commitment, and how
compelling and dangerous they can be.
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