Professor Maximilian Wagner has not set foot in Türkiye for several decades. Since he has resided there from 1939 to 1942, after leaving his native Germany, to which he has never returned, and before settling in the United States. Already an octogenarian, this Harvard professor, “a tall man, with a black coat and hat and very blue eyes that caught the attention”, returns to the city that changed his life, invited by the University of Istanbul.
His link in it is Maya Duran, thirty-six years old, who will soon be the companion of a transcendental trip for both of them. Intelligent and independent, also the single mother of a troubled teenager, Maya soon discovers that three men are following her and the academic, whom she admires. These agents, who belong to the secret services of three countries, will not lose sight of them even in such intimate moments as when the old educator tries to play the violin, in front of the Black Sea, a frustrated serenade, over and over again, due to emotion. .
Serenade for Nadia is based on a disastrous event in World War II. Although the main plot takes place in 2001, it makes sense due to an avoidable collective tragedy that occurred on February 24, 1942. After several months floating damaged, without being allowed to evacuate the passengers, the refugee ship Struma was sunk at view of the entire Bosphorus.
The torpedo was fired by a Soviet submarine after the UK barred the freighter from docking in Palestine, its destination, and an Axis-Allied neutral Turkey also denied landing. Of the nearly eight hundred people crammed into a ship for only one hundred, almost all Jewish civilians fleeing pro-Nazi Romania, only one passenger survived, as the authorities did not lift a finger to rescue the shipwrecked.
A progressive reference in contemporary Turkey, the musician, writer, filmmaker and former parliamentarian Zülfü Livaneli makes use of this catastrophe to question Pan-Turkish nationalism. His message, which includes depth charges for the authoritarian and reactionary traits that the Erdogan regime already pointed out in 2011 –the original date of its publication–, is reinforced with other repressive episodes of the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Eurasian country, such as the armenian genocide.
The novel also recreates the Nazi escalation in Germany with a long story that stages the idyll between the Aryan Maximilian and the young Jewish woman who gives the work its name. Referred to in the first person by Maya, another woman – and a statement of principles in today's Turkey – Livaneli's is a polyphonic plea loaded with local color against excluding ideologies.
