Mutterzunge

If only I knew where I lost my mother tongue, the narrator wonders in Sevgi Özdamar's prose debut from 1990. After many years in Berlin, Turkish, her first language, has become foreign to her. In her search for her roots, she falls in love with the scholar Ibni Abdullah, who introduces her to the grandfather tongue Arabic, the language of sacred love and the Quran. She also tells the tale of the poor Turkish farmer who ends up in distant Germany and finds himself working as a street sweeper—like so many of his people who transformed into the servant class of West German cities in the 1960s and 70s. Ultimately, in this clever, confident book told with mischievous irony, even Ophelia descends from the stage of her homeland to become a cleaning lady in a German theater.