The people from Kahramangasse
The people from Kahramangasse is a German-language novel by the Turkish author Reşat Karakuyu from 1984. The first edition of the two-part work was published by the Berlin publisher Express-Edition . A Turkish edition appeared in 2000 under the title Kahraman Sokağı Sakinleri .
content
The action takes place in Kahramangasse, one of the alleys in the slums of İzmir . The time of the action is the 1930s and 1940s.
In the street, which is multi-culturally populated with Kurds, Jews, Gypsies and Yugoslavia-Turks, the street boy Köse and his friends grow up among scrap iron dealers, porters, bathers, whores and street vendors, while their mothers do hard seasonal work in tobacco companies. Pranks by the boys are often in the foreground of the story.
Reviews
“[...] the Turkish author who has been active in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1973 has not written any ostensible social tragedy. Despite all hardship, illness, worry and illiteracy, the small cosmos in Ataturk's state functions between the Arabian Nights and the industrial society "
meaning
The novel is largely based on childhood memories of the author. Die Zeit also saw the picaresque novel as the "image of a culture unknown or forgotten in this country - the recent past of our Turkish fellow citizens". In Turkish reviews, the work has been compared to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer .