True Romance with a Sailor

Martha Wilson is Canadian correspondent for the Japan Times (Tokyo) and
a Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

Yeshim Ternar has both a quirky sense of humor and a mind open to the
adventures that can happen when just walking down the street. Though
there are only six stories in this short volume, they successfully
convey Ternar’s imaginative boldness.

Yet she can also be subtle. In “The Apprentice,” a story about
expectation, self-image, and freedom, Ternar delivers a careful insight
as if allowing us only a peep at it: “When I was an extra, back in
1959, I once borrowed a mirror from another starlet. She was blonde, had
good legs and a beauty mark on her left cheek. I was a brunette with a
flat stomach and acting talent. She held the mirror in her hand and
freshened her lipstick ... I asked to borrow her mirror. She looked at
me like she knew I was envious. I realized I was envious when I saw her
look at me like that.”

Ternar often addresses body image (“Thin women never understand big
women,” she says simply, in “Spiritual Injuries”), and what it
means to live in the world as a woman. Her sense of the physical is
strong. She likes earthiness.

Many of her characters, though living in North America, retain intimate
connections to Turkey. In “Abraham Galanti,” the title character is
an 88-year-old scholar, who reads widely in Turkish, Arabic, French,
Spanish, and Hebrew. When a friend comes to him with documents
indicating the location of treasure buried centuries earlier, Galanti
realizes that the documents refers to Jews, not jewels. Unlike his
friend, who is disappointed, Galanti now finds the papers more valuable
than before.