( 213 ) The Terrible Years - Cengiz Dağcı - Riwayat Al-Hilal, October 2011

📖 💎 ( 213 ) The Terrible Years — Cengiz Dağcı

• 💎 Title: The Terrible Years (Al-Sanawat Al-Rahiba)

• Author: Cengiz Dağcı

• Translation and introduction: Dr Mohamed Harb

• Publisher: Riwayat Al-Hilal — Dar Al-Hilal, Cairo

• Issue: 753 — October 2011

• Series: Masterpieces of World Literature

• Pages: 300

• Size: 14 × 20 cm

The book opens with one plain question passed between two strangers: what is your name? From it unfold the memoirs of a young Crimean, Sadık Turan, born in a village on the Black Sea coast and raised through years in which the ground contracts beneath his people: confiscation, deportation, hunger, and then a war that drags him to a front that was never his — leaving him where he never imagined he would stand, between two sides that are both the enemy, and both demand that he choose.

Through one young man's account, the novel holds up a whole society: a nation starved, displaced and exiled to the ends of the earth with almost no one hearing of it.

First published in 1956, it is Dağcı's best-known and most consequential work. What sets it apart is that it is not an invention about a catastrophe but a catastrophe its author lived and then shaped into a novel. Born in 1919 in the village of Gurzuf near Yalta, he grew up under famine and repression; the Second World War broke out while he was in his second year at the Crimean Pedagogical Institute; he was taken prisoner by the Germans on the Ukrainian front in 1941, escaped the camps after Germany's defeat, and settled in London in 1946, writing while working the hardest and lowest-paid jobs available to him. He swore that everything he wrote about his life was true.