With a collection of four stories on the comfort and burden of families, and nostalgia for childhood and all things lost – or never gained in the past – Yeşim Erdem’s “Filedelfiya Hikayeleri” (Philadelphia Stories) is an exploration on small-town life.
Filedelfiya here is not the city that once was the symbol of colonial America, and now one of the largest cities in the U.S. The stories have no relation either to the 1940 movie that made Katharine Hepburn a box office name, “The Philadelphia Story.” Filedelfiya here is an Aegean town in Turkey that no longer bears that name from antiquity and the Middle Ages.
One of the first ancient cities in the world, Filedelfiya is now a small town, known for its dried raisins and vineyards. And the town was also once home to writer Erdem, who prefers to refer to her hometown as Filedelfiya, not Alaşehir, perhaps to emphasize the transcendent nature of her stories that could come from any place in Anatolia, and who thinks the most distinctive quality of the town was simply the grape vines.
“Filedelfiya Hikayeleri” features four stories that are seen through the eyes of four people, spanning a period of four decades. The story of a little girl’s foray into the reality of stigmas attached to a certain kind of small-town woman is followed by a young man’s brush with unrequited love in the most unlikely place. The third story features a “bad guy,” who refuses to accept any responsibility in a life that would make him feel good and worthy, while the final and the longest story centers around a woman who returns to her town and to her family for one final visit upon her mother’s death.
‘Between two times, two states of mind’
While each Filedelfiya story is a distinct one with different characters, the people of the town pop up occasionally, making cameos in the most unexpected places. Because all the characters either live in the same neighborhood, Bahçeli Evler (Garden Houses), or at some point have lived there, they cross paths in the streets of the small neighborhood with big secrets and even bigger bouts of denial.
Like the house of Aunt Reyhan in the first story, the stories are about a “makeshift period between two times, two states of mind.” The characters are at different points, happy or sad, anxious or grieving, expressive or repressed, in love or in lust, but they all carry “an expression that belonged to town people, slow, quiet but without any hint of a sparkle.”
Erdem’s Filedelfiya is a place where people always feel stuck between two things, stuck between staying and leaving, leaving and coming back, judging and forgiving, traditions and modernity, nature and city. Even the color of the wall paint becomes a source to tear them apart: “The women of the town always wanted the different one, the modern one. But just when they were about to get what they had wanted, they would immediately decide to stay in the safe and calm waters of the old. Always going back and forth between the two, always hesitant.”
“The quiet decorum of the women” becomes a bookend to the blind eye men take toward the realities around them, toward the daughters who do not want to get married, gay sons who can’t come out in the suffocating air of the town and next-door neighbors who become pregnant out of wedlock.
“Filedelfiya Hikayeleri” is an unabashed exercise in nostalgia and a stab at the broken spine of the family.
“Everyone in our family is very adept at drawing lines,” says one of the characters. “When we draw a line, we don’t withdraw our affection. We just close the entrance into the dangerous zones.” But “blood is also thicker than water,” bringing together family members with deep-seated problems and grudges with “a kind of love you can forget in time but one you can never exhaust.”
Drawing a circle
How close to home are the family problems and the dead ends in the stories for Erdem? “I think it’s close to home for all of us,” Erdem said. “The stories reflect some of the childhood experiences in all of us. The growing pains, struggling to get out of your shell, not being able to get out of your shell, these are things we have all experienced. I can’t say I have specifically lived any of the stories, but we all have lived similar things.”
Erdem has been out of her town for a long time now. Having lived in different cities for years, she now lives in Istanbul. “The town, the neighborhood I have written about no longer exists. But an overarching feeling of nostalgia is always there.” Not Erdem, but one of the characters, perhaps summarizes her sentiments: “I missed the times when all the older people were not old but grown-ups, the times when we were children.”
For many, the feeling that will stay long after the book is over will be one of remembering. Erdem definitely was one to journey to her past when writing the stories. “Even though all of the stories are fictional, writing about the old times made me remember. It made me remember very small things that I never realized I had forgotten. We all come from neighborhoods, we grew up there. Then we leave our neighborhoods to study, to work. We flock to cities, some of us even to other countries. But eventually you draw a circle, and go back to your neighborhood. Maybe not literally, but emotionally, we want to make that journey.”
Has Erdem made that journey? “I think I have closed a chapter with these four stories. The first story starts in the 1980s with a little girl telling the story. And the final story is also a final visit to the town, a visit by a woman who is now an adult. When you look at it like that, I don’t think I will return to Filedelfiya.”
It seems right. At the moment, Erdem is working on a novel set in Istanbul, something along the lines of Pera Stories
