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FEBRUARY 23, 2005

Bob Dylan of Kagizman, Turkey

Mavi Boncuk

BOB DYLAN CHRONICLES (Volume One),

Simon & Schuster (Pages 92-93),

2004 (Copyright)

When I wasn’t staying at Van Ronk’s, I’d
usually stay at Ray’s place, get back sometime before dawn, mount the dark
stairs and carefully close the door behind me. I shoved off into the sofa bed
like entering a vault. Ray was not a guy who had nothing on his mind. He knew
what he thought and he knew how to express it, didn’t make room in his life for
mistakes. The mundane things in life didn’t register with him. He seemed to
have some golden grip on reality, didn’t sweat the small stuff, quoted the
Psalms and slept with a pistol near his bed. At times he could say things that
had way too much edge. Once he said that President Kennedy wouldn’t last out
his term because he was a Catholic.

When he said it, it made me think about my
grandmother, who said to me that the Pope is the king of the Jews. She lived
back in Duluth on the top floor of a duplex on 5th Street. From a window in the
back room you could see Lake Superior, ominous and foreboding, iron bulk
freighters and barges off in the distance, the sound of foghorns to the right
and left. My grandmother had only one leg and had been a seamstress. Sometimes
on weekends my parents would drive down from Iron Range to Duluth and drop
me off at her place for a couple of days. She was a dark lady, smoked a pipe.

The other side of my family was more light-skinned and fair. My
grandmother’s voice possessed a haunting accent – face always set in a
half-despairing expression. Life for her hadn’t been easy. She’d come to
America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not
unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right
on the edge of a big body of water.

Originally, she’d come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town, across
the Black Sea – the sea that the ancient Greeks called the Euxine – the one
that Lord Byron wrote about in Don Juan. Her family was from Kagizman, a
town in Turkey near the Armenian border, and the family name had been
Kirghiz. My grandfather’s parents had also come from that same area, where
they had been mostly shoemakers and leatherworkers.

My grandmother’s ancestors had been from
Constantinople. As a teenager, I used to sing the Ritchie Valens song "In
a Turkish Town" with the lines in it about the "mystery Turks and the
stars above," and it seemed to suit me more than "La Bamba," the
song of Ritchie’s that everybody else sang and I never knew why. My mother
even had a friend names Nellie Turk and I’d grown up with her always around.

There were no Ritchie Valens records up at
Ray’s place, "Turkish Town" or otherwise. Mostly, it was classical
music and jazz bands.

POSTED BY M.A.M AT 5:25 PM | 0 COMMENTS