Radio Budapest, 1954: Sabiha Sertel, Zekeriya Sertel, Bianca Vidali, Nazım Hikmet, Gün Benderli, unknown, Necil Togay, and translator Zsuzsa

Cooking and Communism

The Meals and Memories of Gün Benderli

by Evrim Emir-Sayers and David Selim Sayers (Paris, France)

EDITORS’ NOTE: This essay was originally published as the scholarly introduction to Gün Benderli’s 2024 book, A Cuisine of Exile. To work as a stand-alone piece, the original has been slightly modified. For in-depth treatments of all topics sketched out here, we enthusiastically recommend the book itself. The material is reprinted courtesy of PICT Books.

Exile

When we pitched the title, A Cuisine of Exile, for our translation of Gün Benderli’s Sofralar ve Anılar (literally “Dining Tables and Memories”), she wasn’t exactly thrilled. Exile, to her, was an involuntary state, marked by sorrow, loss, and regret, and that wasn’t how she lived or viewed her life. True, she’d fled Turkey for political reasons. True, her nationality had been revoked. True, she hadn’t been able to go back for forty years. But then, she’d always wanted to go beyond, she’d always wanted the world. In 1947, the first time she left the country—to study in Paris—she was only eighteen. “Go see the world!” her mother had told her even back then, and even after she’d seen it all, from China to the USA, and even after she’d regained her Turkish citizenship decades later, she never moved back.

Ironically—but also all too logically—it was this openness to the world, this drive to cross all borders, whether cultural, political, or ideological, that forced her and many like her into exile to begin with. Gün Benderli was a teenager when, in the final weeks of World War II, the Republic of Turkey abandoned its long-held stance of neutrality, threw in its lot with the USA, and thereby laid itself bare to a gradual process of political and economic colonization that reached a temporary peak with the country’s 1952 integration into NATO.

This process undermined the entire raison d’être of the single-party state that had ruled the country since its foundation in 1923. The leadership of this state consisted of former Ottoman military officers, foremost among them the war hero and founding statesman Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who’d refused to lay down their arms following the Ottoman defeat in World War I, reconquered a part of Ottoman territory from its Allied occupiers, and proclaimed the new republic within the borders of that territory.

Atatürk’s idolization by generations of people who identify as Turks (far from every citizen of Turkey) isn’t so much based on the radical, “Westernizing” reforms that he pursued as part of his nationalist agenda, some of which unsettled even the most ardent Kemalists—witness the awkward scene of Gün’s father struggling to pray by his own father’s grave—and that remain controversial to this day. Rather, it’s based on Atatürk’s unassailed status as an anticolonial hero who spared his people the humiliation of imperialist rule suffered by so many Ottoman subjects following World War I.

It was this anticolonial spirit that fractured after World War II, taking the single-party state along with it. The first multi-party election, held in 1946, heralded not so much democracy as a decades-long progression of populist leaders who performed increasingly harsh variations on a single theme—anti-Soviet religious conservatism coupled with pro-American economic liberalism—while any leftist opposition was brutally suppressed. And it was precisely this leftist opposition to which the teenage Gün found herself inexorably drawn.

Support for the left was nothing new in Turkey, and neither was its suppression. Atatürk’s anticolonial struggle had enjoyed the Soviet Union’s backing, the Kemalist reforms were promoted as Soviet-style “revolutions,” and the single-party state adopted key Soviet features such as a centralized economy and five-year plans. At the same time, though, the state jealously guarded its own nationalist ideology, fending off any overt support for communism. The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), established in 1920, was banned in 1925, and individual communists, including some of the country’s most prominent writers and artists, suffered harsh persecution: Sabiha Sertel, the first Turkish woman to become a professional journalist and publisher, saw her hugely popular daily Tan (“Dawn”) demolished by a state-sponsored mob in 1945, and Nazım Hikmet, Turkey’s most influential poet, had been in prison for his writings since 1938.

Around the age of fifteen, Gün came across a poem that Nazım had written when he was fifteen himself. Deeply touched, she started tracking down his banned books and devouring whatever she could find. Shortly thereafter, in 1945, she embarked on a romance with the young communist Necil Togay, who inducted her into his leftist milieu. When her parents found out, they strictly forbade the relationship, which only served to push the couple into a premature marriage. Gün was seventeen. “Now, don’t be surprised that a city girl like me got hitched at such a young age,” she says. “At the time, we saw marriage as a way to escape the oppression at home. Of course, I was too naïve and ignorant to realize that it only meant exchanging one kind of oppression for another.”

From 1947 to 1951, the newlyweds spent several spells abroad, sponsored by Necil’s father, ostensibly to study, while “in fact, we were busy talking all day and night to liberate the oppressed from capitalist exploitation. We had no time to waste (!) on education.” At the same time, the political struggle in Turkey was heating up. In 1949, an international campaign called for Nazım Hikmet’s release, its Paris leg including names like Tristan Tzara, Pablo Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Yves Montand, and Simone Signoret. Nazım himself went on hunger strike and was finally released in July 1950. Less than a year later, he left the country, suspecting he’d be assassinated just as his friend and protégé, the seminal Turkish novelist Sabahattin Ali, had been in 1948.

Nazım’s departure was only the most visible manifestation of a more widespread leftist exodus and the establishment of an exilic milieu. Fahri Petek, a founding figure of the Socialist Workers’ and Peasants’ Party of Turkey, banned in 1946, left for Paris in 1949—he would become one of Gün’s closest friends. Sabiha Sertel and her husband Zekeriya left in 1950—they would spend many years working with Gün in Budapest and Leipzig. And then, in January 1951, it was Gün and Necil’s turn. Barely escaping an impending wave of arrests, leaked to Necil’s father in advance, they fled to Paris. Little did they know that Necil would never return while Gün wouldn’t set foot in the country again for forty years.

After a year spent in relative limbo, it was Nazım Hikmet who came to the young couple’s aid. The legendary poet had quickly emerged as a motivating and organizing force among exiled Turkish communists, and when Gün turned to him for advice, he suggested a placement in the Eastern Bloc, at one of the various radio stations that had Turkish language sections. They accepted, and in 1952, were assigned to Hungarian Radio, a.k.a. Radio Budapest. And thus began Gün’s new adventure, in the city she calls her home to this day.

It was in Budapest that Gün came into her own as an accomplished radio broadcaster and an active member of the TKP. It was here that she pursued higher education at the Lenin Institute, embarked on some of her most remarkable travels, including a 1954 trip to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and witnessed some of the most poignant political upheavals of her life, such as the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. And it was here that she had her son Can, in 1955, and her daughter Gül, in 1959. Gün describes these times as “exciting, beautiful years,” buoyed by countless letters of gratitude penned by listeners “from all provinces, districts, and villages of Turkey, from students, teachers, workers, farmers, young girls who wove carpets, housewives, soldiers, policemen, barracks, and prisons.”

The end of this bracing era announced itself in 1963, when Nazım Hikmet succumbed to a heart attack. To convey the devotion the poet had inspired in his milieu, and the  devastation that must have followed his death, we can turn to a story that Nazım himself told Gün in a recorded interview from 1954. The story takes place on an International Workers’ Day. Locked up in Bursa prison and having recently suffered his first heart attack, the poet was being held at the infirmary. At some point, two young workers, no older than sixteen, were dragged in. They’d gotten into a street fight and beaten each other to a pulp. During the night that followed, one of them secretly entered Nazım’s room, handed him a carnation, and wished him a Happy Workers’ Day. Apparently, this had been the plan all along: Since the prison strictly forbade anyone from visiting the poet on Workers’ Day, the boys had staged the bloody fight just to get in and raise his spirits.

Throughout his life, Nazım had galvanized Gün’s small, exilic community with the sheer power of his art, humanity, and charisma. His presence had infused the often-burdensome life of his comrades with solidarity, inspiration, and purpose—a purpose that started to wane in his absence. Shortly after his death, Gün and Necil were posted to Leipzig, where the TKP had its own radio station. Within months, their marriage was over. Leipzig itself proved a gloomy pit of ideological bickering and backstabbing. And in 1968, Gün’s disenchantment was sealed by the violent suppression of the Prague Spring. A year later, she returned to Budapest, where she resumed her work for the radio, but her days of active party involvement were over.

For the indefatigable Gün, however, this was just the beginning of yet another chapter. In her private life, she embarked on a relationship with Yılmaz Gülen, a.k.a. Attila, a fellow Turkish communist in exile, radio broadcaster, and translator, with whom she shared her life until his death in 2009. In her public life, it was the dissolution of the Soviet Union that marked the transformation: While the Turkish language broadcasts of Radio Budapest were discontinued, the end of the Cold War also gave Gün the opportunity, in 1991, to travel back to Turkey for the first time in forty years.

As she reestablished her bonds with the country, Gün reinvented herself as a translator from Hungarian into Turkish. In 1998, at the age of 68, she published her first translated volume, Imre Madách’s 1861 dramatic poem, The Tragedy of Man. Since then, she has translated over a dozen Hungarian writers, and, with Attila, formed part of the four-person team that created the first comprehensive Hungarian-Turkish and Turkish-Hungarian dictionaries. In 2024, at the age of 94, while we were translating her into English for the first time, she was awarded the Balassi Grand Prize for Literary Translation by the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Cuisine

Of course, Gün is not only a translator but also an author. She has taken stock of her political life in her memoir, Su Başında Durmuşuz (“We Stood by the Water,” 2003). She has written on the internal debates at the TKP for various collected volumes. And she has devoted another book, Giderayak (“On the Way Out,” 2013), to her memories of Nazım Hikmet. But while we hope to translate more of her work in due time, we feel the best way to introduce her to an English-speaking audience is through A Cuisine of Exile, in which she combines some of her most memorable experiences with the recipes she picked up along the way. Because, of course, Gün is not only a translator, author, political activist, radio broadcaster, and mother, but also an impeccable cook!

Cuisine is an excellent medium through which to approach Gün and her milieu, in both a practical and a metaphorical sense. Towards the end of the book, Gün talks of Tassos Boulmetis’ 2003 film, Politiki Kouzina (rather unsuggestively rendered in English as “A Touch of Spice”). The film tells the story of the Constantinopolitan Greeks whom successive waves of persecution after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire forced to abandon their city. For these exiles, their cuisine is one of the last surviving strands of Constantinopolitan life, where different ethnic and religious groups, including Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and Turks, where able to blend their strengths to bring forth a rich, powerful, and enduring culture.

For all their republican and communist ideals, Gün and her comrades are also heirs to this multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic empire with its twin heartlands of the Balkans and Anatolia fused in the melting pot of Constantinople. Nazım Hikmet claimed German, Polish, Georgian, Circassian, and French descent. Sabiha Sertel came from a dönme family—an Ottoman religious community descended from seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam and based in Thessaloniki. Sabahattin Ali’s father hailed from the Anatolian Black Sea coast but met his mother in Ardino, modern-day Bulgaria. And Gün herself recounts how both her parents’ families migrated to Anatolia from the Balkans, describing them as “birds of passage.”

It is this heritage that allows Gün and her milieu to avoid the trap of nationalism, exposing the nation-state itself as the true exile, its physical and conceptual borders patrolled with equal zeal. “I’ve known all kinds of passports,” she says. “The Turkish students’ passport, the tourist passport, the stateless passport, the Hungarian passport, and, finally, the EU passport.” The document signals not just division, but also hierarchy: “Of course, all passports aren’t created equal.” At the same time, the division is maintained not just in space, but also in the mind. “I don’t know what exactly we were so afraid of,” Gün recounts her feelings when crossing the Berlin Wall. “It was more that an atmosphere of fear had been created and nurtured, so much so that it engulfed the entire identity of those living on both sides.”

Gün’s all-embracing approach to cuisine, arising from her multicultural roots, couldn’t stand in starker contrast to such provincialism. Throughout the book, we follow her as she picks up new recipes during her travels, reinvents old dishes based on locally available ingredients or tips from new friends, introduces classics of Turkish cooking to an international audience, and, out of all this, fashions her own form of fusion cuisine. “A Cuisine of Exile,” we have to admit, is far from doing justice to the outcome of this process. Just as Ottoman cuisine is a living testament to the harmony of various cultures, Gün’s own cuisine holds out the promise of a new, multinational culture, transcending political borders while respecting cultural boundaries and overcoming faceless ideologies through personal and deeply human encounters.

The concrete setting of these encounters is the dining table, where people of all backgrounds come together, and where the culinary and cultural exchange takes place. Eating the other’s food requires a special kind of openness. Challenging us to literally ingest and digest a piece of the other, food triggers deep anxieties of contamination, which is why most children instinctively recoil from unfamiliar food and why many narratives, such as films, use characters who get food poisoning abroad to reinforce local identity. Gün’s own admitted reluctance towards Asian cuisines, mirrored by her guarded attitude towards Chinese migration, offers an example of such anxiety. But this is merely the exception that proves the rule in a life brimful of enriching culinary encounters that model curiosity, acceptance, and embrace of the other.

Like digesting the food of the other, offering our own food to the other allows us to practice fundamental human virtues such as conscience, solidarity, and care. Finally, the whole process of picking ingredients, turning them into meals, and serving these to others models an active engagement with our surroundings as opposed to a passive, detached observership. Global activists and intellectuals in the truest sense, Gün and her comrades aren’t content with merely adapting to their new cultural and political environments, but also take an active part in reshaping what they find. A touching example of such engagement is Shoes on the Danube Bank, the famous Holocaust memorial in Budapest conceived by Can Togay, Gün’s son.

Of course, this hands-on attitude promises to land its practitioners in plenty of hot water, whether in their homelands or abroad. Sabiha Sertel made this experience in the USA, where she faced resistance in her attempts to unionize Turkish and Kurdish workers in New York City and Detroit in the early 1920s. And some of Nazım Hikmet’s works were outlawed not just in Turkey but in the Soviet Union as well: His 1957 play, İvan İvanoviç Var Mıydı Yok Muydu? (“Did Ivan Ivanovich Exist or Not?”), was banned in Moscow after a run of just two days. Throughout her memoirs, Gün gives countless examples of people who refused to turn in their critical minds at the border as they went into exile—and rightly so: it was these very critical minds that proved their greatest contributions to whatever country was fortunate enough to welcome them.

The critical, curious, and creative attitude that Gün displays towards cuisine is reflected in all aspects of her life, from politics to people. Her memoirs showcase a much more developed sense of individuality and self-reflection than those, say, of Sabiha Sertel, which convey less of a personal voice than a veteran journalist’s tone, and which take care not to blur the party line with too many thoughts of dissent. While Gün’s political reflections are recounted more fully elsewhere, the snippets we find in this book, ranging from World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, testify to the sharpness of a mind that transcends all ideology and groupthink.

But the area in which Gün truly shines through as an original, critical thinker is in her readings of individual people, whom she treats with a rare and delicate balance of subjective and objective truth. While her close encounters with people always reveal their intimate, redeeming humanity, she never lets this prevent her from analyzing their (sometimes monstrous) flaws with ruthless, clinical precision. This holds equally for Nazım, her greatest idol, whom she cuts down to size for his failure as a father and spouse; her own father, whom she scrutinizes with an equal measure of compassion and criticism; and, last but not least, herself, including a scene, recounted with painful honesty, where she remains silent as a friend and comrade is “accused” of homosexuality at a political gathering. “I’m even more ashamed today,” she confesses, “most of all that I didn’t get up and quit the meeting right away.”

You are what you eat, the saying goes, and you become who you eat it with. Gün is more than just a connoisseur of food or an observer of people. She’s a curator, and every remarkable dish she collects is accompanied by at least as remarkable a person. Wherever we turn in the book, we’re greeted by authentic human beings: Witty people, humorous people, hopeful people, passionate people, fearless people, people who don’t lead transactional lives, people who pay the price for their choices, are happy to do so, and would do it all over again in a heartbeat. And what gathers them around Gün’s dining table isn’t circumstance, ideology, or some vested interest, but the shared humanity she recognizes in them.

It’s telling that Gün devotes more space to her unsung heroes than her famous ones, and more to women than men. True, she has shared a table with giants of world literature such as Pablo Neruda and Nicolás Guillén. True, she has dined with political legends from Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai to Enrique Lister, hero of the Spanish Civil War. But the truly unforgettable figures here are Bert, the Austrian-Jewish resistance fighter whom we catch one night as she runs through the streets of Nazi-occupied Paris, her sick child in her arms, desperately seeking a doctor. Or Nurten, Gün’s childhood friend turned animal rights activist, who tragically dies in a wildfire trying to save her beloved companions. When Bert celebrates her 80^th birthday, having ended her career as a humble secretary, “so many people came together that we had to meet in the grand hall of a hotel,” Gün proudly reports. “When it came to friendships, life had smiled on her.”

As we see that gender, age, ethnicity, religion, or rank mean nothing to Gün when picking her people or writing on them, we come to understand that her cuisine, her relationships, and her politics are based on the same virtues. Her political commitments arise from her personal commitments rather than the other way round. It’s not rhetoric but role models she’s after, and she introduces them to us at every dining table she sets.

At the end of the day, Gün embraces everything that life throws her way with the same engagement and openness with which she approaches the people she meets and the dishes she eats. She’s never reproachful or bitter. She never plays the victim. And as she makes her way through life, it’s always with a sense of direction and a stoic’s conviction that what defines her are not the forces beyond her control but those within it, not the shape of her boundaries but the way she shapes her life within them. It would be wrong to read this book as a history or analysis of the twentieth century and its politics. But it would definitely be right to read it as a manual for how a critical mind can deal with the daunting challenges the century held in store.

Writing

If cuisine is one thing that gathers the people at Gün’s table, and their shared humanity is another, then the third one, surely, is poetry. Just like the individual role model, poetry offers an embodied rather than abstract vehicle of cultural transmission. We got a taste of this ourselves in July 2024, at the wedding of our dear friends Mortaza Behboudi and Aleksandra Mostovaja in Douarnenez on the coast of Brittany. The couple had asked us to prepare a few words for the occasion, and since Mortaza had recently regained his freedom after spending nine months in a Taliban prison simply for being a journalist, we decided to read out a poem, in Turkish and in English, that Nazım Hikmet had written in Bursa prison and that we’d recently translated and dedicated to our friends:

I’m inside the rising light
My hands voracious, the world so sweet.

My eyes feast on the trees
The trees, so hopeful, so green.

A sunny path winds behind the mulberry groves
I’m by the infirmary window, in jail.

I don’t catch the scent of the drugs,
Somewhere, carnations must be in bloom.

That’s how it goes, Laz Ismail,
the problem is not falling captive,
it’s how to avoid surrender!

Originating in oral, folkloric culture and flowing back into it, the discourses and lineages that poetry creates, preserves, and transmits challenge the written, official ones disseminated by the state and other institutions via centralized means such as education and legacy media. In the case of Turkey, for instance, poetry offers a completely alternative path to understanding the country’s history. A prime example, once again, is provided by Nazım Hikmet, whose Simavne Kadısı Oğlu Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı (“The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin, Son of the Qadi of Simavna,” 1936) takes an early-fifteenth-century popular uprising in Ottoman realms, reads it as a proto-communist revolt, and thereby lays the foundation for a local and popular history of communism stretching centuries into the past.

The act of translation is as political an act as that of poetry. Through translation, we can forge new histories and lineages, new paths of expression and thought, in any language. And so, given its potentially enormous impact, we were both astounded to find the field virtually barren when we started making our first translations from Turkish into English. The most widely available translations were, and are, of hacks who are ceaselessly peddled by an international PR machine while having little to do with what is appreciated or discussed in Turkey itself. In contrast, most of the works that actually go into the way that people in Turkey make sense of themselves and the world lay practically untouched.

Our first major translation project, Sabiha Sertel’s autobiography Roman Gibi (“Like a Novel,” published in 2019 under the title “The Struggle for Modern Turkey”), made it eminently clear why this was the case. Within a few years of its publication, our translation had started reshaping anglophone scholarship on Turkish political history, but not always in the ways we would have expected. For one, we witnessed a concerted effort by anglophone scholars and critics to downplay or deny Sabiha’s communism and brand her a “feminist” instead (something similar is happening to Nazım, who, it would appear, was a “socialist” and not a communist). This went hand in hand with yet another concerted effort aimed at silencing our voices as the book’s translators by omitting us from academic citations and public events where universities and other institutions paraded Sabiha’s relatives, people who’d inherited her copyright rather than her convictions.

Clearly, we were faced with an attempt at gatekeeping, in this case aimed at controlling who gets a voice, and what they get to voice, in front of an English-speaking public. While such gatekeeping exists in all languages, it’s particularly annoying in English which, after all, is supposed to be the current lingua franca of the world. Part of the problem here is that English is usually seen as a language to be translated from rather than into. But while translations from English often serve to reinforce the hegemonic discourses promulgated by anglophone countries, especially the USA and the UK, translations into English have the power to break this hegemony and turn the language into a true lingua franca owned by us all rather than merely those who happen to be born into it. And hence the gatekeeping.

Politiki Kouzina proceeds along two parallel timelines: the past, where the various cultural groups of Istanbul happily chatter away in a polyphonic but intercomprehensible flurry of tongues, and the present, where each group has been exiled to its own language and can only reach the others via the intermediacy of English. The bad news here, clearly, is that English has forcibly inserted itself between us in an act of cultural imperialism. But the good news is that, having done so, English is now up for grabs. We can use it to communicate, after all—without it, for instance, the two of us couldn’t talk to Gün’s grandson Jonas. And how and what we communicate in it—all gatekeeping aside—is entirely up to us. Whoever has any doubts about this need look no further than the brilliant example of Bob Marley, who has shown us just how thoroughly English can be appropriated, decentered, and subverted in style and substance alike.

It’s an enormous privilege and responsibility to enrich and subvert the anglophone world with the works of Gün and her milieu. To date, we’ve been lucky enough to translate and introduce Sabiha Sertel, introduce Sabahattin Ali, and translate some poems and tales by Nazım Hikmet. (Beyond Gün’s milieu, we’ve translated individual pieces by the Alevi bards Aşık Veysel and Aşık Mahzuni Şerif, the poet Ahmed Arif, and the rapper Heijan.) But it was Gün who gave us our first chance to work with a member of this milieu who’s not only still alive but also known to us in person. We first met Gün through our Sabiha project, and she gave us the copy of Sofralar ve Anılar which, after spending some time cooking on the shelf, finally inspired us to DM her with the offer to translate it. She gracefully accepted, and the rest is history.

We never got to meet Sabiha in person—she died in 1968—but thanks to Gün, another key figure from the book entered our lives: Fahri Petek’s daughter Gaye. Over the last decade, Gaye has become one of our closest friends and mentors in Paris, and our translation of her own work, Histoire des Turcs en France, will appear from PICT Books within the coming year. Words cannot express how gratifying it has been to reconstruct, and link ourselves to, this three-generation chain of extraordinary women whose lives have been marked by political exile, Sabiha having left Turkey as a woman in her prime with a remarkable career to her name, Gün as a young adult who would come into her own abroad, and Gaye as a mere child whose memories of Turkey would be dwarfed by her life and accomplishments in France.

By all accounts, including Gün’s, Sabiha was an excellent cook. And while we may have missed out on that experience, Gün herself cooked us some delicious meatballs with carrots, a dish she’d once made for Nazım himself, on the same day she gave us our copy of Sofralar ve Anılar. Finally, Gaye continues to dazzle us with her astonishing culinary prowess every time we sit down at her table. As Gün insists, those who gather around the dining table become a sort of family—not necessarily a birth family, but a chosen family, an intellectual and emotional family, a family that you find, and by which you’re found, in equal measure. One of the most inspiring things about A Cuisine in Exile is how this family seems to keep finding you wherever you may go as long as you stay true to your own inner compass. And we’re happy to confirm, from our time with Gün and Gaye, that the book is absolutely right!

Paris, November 19, 2024 (Happy Birthday, Daddy)

Gün signing our copy of Sofralar ve Anılar, Budapest, September 12, 2016