Mario Levi was convinced that if he had written his novels in French, which he spoke easily, many more people would have read them. But Levi chose the language of his homeland, and that was Turkish. “The language in which you played ball on the street as a child, in which you had your first love, in which you wanted to swear when you were angry, that is your language,” he once said in an interview. Levi was born in Istanbul in 1957 as a descendant of Spanish Jews. Shortly before his 67th birthday, the epic narrator, who stood for Istanbul’s Jewish heritage like no other novelist, died on Thursday in his hometown.
Obituary for Mario Levi: Energy in Chaos – Culture
