Elle était toujours contente, elle n’était jamais triste.
Mercan Léon Onmuş

A multi-lingual and multi-cultural life: Gertrude Marie Durusoy

Raika Durusoy (Ege Universität, Izmir) [Bio]
Email: raika.durusoy@gmail.com

 

She was born on March 7, 1943 in the middle of the Second World War, in a village called Soseň in the Bohemia region of Czechoslovakia, where two languages were spoken: German and Czech. Her father, Joseph Vermeersch, was from the village Frelinghien. The river in Frelingien became the border between France and Belgium at the end of the war, and his side of the river became France, thus he also became French, after being “born as a foreigner in a foreign country” in that same village (1). He had been recruited to the army during the war, and was captured by the German and was doing farm work for them in the village Soseň, where he met Leontine Schröder, the eldest daughter in one the farms. Gertrude Marie was the first fruit of this love, and she grew up in that village, at the same farm, until she was nine years old, with her mom, aunt and grandparents. So the first languages in her life were German and Czech, with Russian added at primary school. At that time there was Stalin’s portrait in the classrooms. Other memories of Soseň that she shared with us include her forest visits to pick up her favourite fruit, blueberries, and also mushrooms after the rain, the geese they had at the farm, due to which they had to go warily, with sticks, to the toilet in the garden… She could see her dad only for one month each year, during his summer vacations, as he returned back to his usual job as a high school teacher after the war. He could not marry Leontine and take his family to France until his mom passed away when Gertrude was nine years old. After this death, he went to Czechoslovakia and they got married at the embassy, with their nine-year old daughter, and went to live in France altogether, where Gertrude quickly had a sister followed by two brothers, all born in France. So she became French, and she was the only sibling born abroad, from a mother and father who were also –in origin- foreigners born abroad.
Her father wanted her to learn French quickly, and was afraid that she would continue to speak Czech at home with her mother, so she was sent to a French boarding school at the age of nine, in a foreign country for her. So her fourth language, French, entered in her life. It must have been hard. She had a severe illness at that school and had to be taken from school to get better. After adding English and Latin to her language repertoire at school, she went to Lille University to study German Language and Literature. As electives, she had taken Italian and Czech courses at that university, and she participated to some classes of Russian Language and Literature. She had accepted to teach French to Daisy, a Guatemalan coming to Lille for a year, and in return, she started to learn Spanish from her, which she completed later in her life through books.
So, how did she come to Turkey? With the same wind that took Leontine to France… As she was a very good student in German Language and Literature, she got the opportunity to go to Germany as an exchange student and she was sent to Münster with several other students. Fikret Durusoy was doing his specialization on Sports Medicine in Münster, as this branch did not yet exist in Turkey at that time, and the foreign doctors in the Sports Medicine Institute were responsible of the health of the exchange students. After a short first encounter, one day Gertrude has a bicycle accident and their acquaintance goes much further… Before returning home for a vacation, she informs her father on the phone that she would bring someone special, and her father comments: “Weren’t there enough German in Germany?” Then they get married on the 16th and 18th of December, 1965, first officially in Germany and the latter in a chapel in France, and start to live in Münster. So another language enters into her life: Turkish. She starts learning it from her lovely husband, and he gets also further reading materials in Turkish with the help of his sisters etc.
They move to Turkey in the end of 1967, for a position of sports medicine specialist at Ege University, thus to Izmir, where she starts giving French lessons at the French Cultural Center. Then they move to Ankara in 1971, where both of them start working at Hacettepe University, Fikret to found a Sportive Health and Cardiac Rehabilitation Unit, while Gertrude starts at the German Language and Literature Department. In the mean time she starts doing simultaneous translations at congresses. They move back to Izmir in 1980, where they start working at the Sports Medicine and German Language and Literature Departments of Ege University, and retire from the same departments in 1998 and 2008, respectively.
When she first arrives at Ege University, her new office is located by chance in the Geography Department’s corridor, just in front of the office of a poet geographer, Ahmet Necdet, who is also a francophone and who makes amateur poem translations. They get along very well and start translating poems into Turkish together, Gertrude mostly translating the meaning and Ahmet Necdet giving them a poetical sound/ form. She translates also many other types of books, like tourism books of the Ministry of Culture, theatre plays, novels, etc, from many languages to many languages. The list of her published translations can be found at https://translex.ege.edu.tr/tr-7089/gertrude_durusoy.html, thanks to Nilgin Tanış Polat. She has also unpublished translations like poems of different poets in different languages, which she has shared in poetry meetings and poetry journals, a novel of Aziz Nesin translated into French, a novel in German for kids translated into Turkish, etc. She received important awards through her translations.
One day she streamed in the headline of a local newspaper, Yeni Asır, with the title, “10 languages, 10 people”, originating from a proverb in Turkish, “One language one person, two languages two people”, which means that when you learn a second language, you also learn a second culture. That is in fact what was happening in our daily life: On special occasions, she would prepare us Knedlíky with plums, a Czech serving, or in winters a dish with cabbage, sausages, and apples, again a Mid-European dish, she would prepare many French recipes, and she was open to try recipes from other countries, likfe an Iranian cucumber salad that she liked in her last years.
(new paragraph) In our family, we would call mom and dad “maman” and “papa”, although we were speaking in Turkish at home (though we started our lives bilingually, with mostly French at home), and we would call mom’s mom and dad “Oma” and “Opa”, in German, when we were in France! Me and my brother, we have two names, one in French and the other in Turkish, which we use in the relevant countries. We used to pass one whole month in France every two years, when we were kids, so we learned a lot of French culture and we developed strong bonds with the family there. Izmir gave a big opportunity to live with many cultures, due to the presence of the Levantines, that mom frequented due to the social atmosphere of the churches she attended. We used to go to many Levantine homes, and saw a mixture of French, Italian, Greek, Swiss, English and Turkish cultures at these homes. She was also keen to learn other languages, like learning Greek, or even Japanese. When I was a child, two Japanese families had arrived to Izmir for a few years, and we would visit them in Alsancak, they would come to us in Bornova. Mom used to learn Japanese from the mothers of those families, and even I had started to learn the alphabet, and I still keep my Japanese notebook. We used to play with their four kids, and we learned many Japanese games, received Japanese gifts from them, which I had kept and passed to my son Mercan Léon, and I had learned a lot of Origami then.
So really, languages also open a door to cultures. She always used her language repertoire, and kept it alive. I found many letters and cards in many languages in her house, among which there were communications in Czech with the family, her first mother tongue, and in her last years; she had switched to Facebook, after communicating for some years through e-mails, with her family in Czechia. When I tried to contact her acquaintances through the e-mail addresses that I found at her house, it was amazing in how many languages I had to write or get help to write, to reach her contacts in so many different countries around the world.
She also encouraged me and my brother to develop our language skills, like sending us out to Grenoble for one month when we were young, to improve our home-learnt French at a formal language summer school, and by creating opportunities to learn new languages, like sending me to the language course Italian Culture Centre in Izmir for three years, when I was a medical student, and enabling us to participate language courses in ADİKAM, European Languages and Cultures Research and Application Center (https://adikam.ege.edu.tr/) a centre that she had founded with colleagues at Ege University: Me and my father went to the Greek course for three years when I was doing my specialization (it was fun to be in the same class ) and my brother to the Russian course. I do not exactly know why, maybe a kind of coping mechanism, but after she passed away, I completed the Spanish course on DuoLingo, tried to improve my German, and I continue by learning Czech there…
I feel myself so lucky that I was their child, and I feel so grateful that I grew in a respectful environment. Maybe a respect contributed by multi-culturalism as well? Since getting to know other cultures could bring also respect to differences… An influence occurring maybe more in Izmir as well, due to the presence of the Levantines. Gâvur İzmir diye adlandırılan kentimizde belki bu kültürel çeşitlilik sayesinde farklı olana saygı daha fazla olabilir, bkz. Türkiye Değerler Atlasında (World Values Survey) İzmir’in Türkiye’nin bütün diğer illerden farklı ve tek başına boyandığı renklere. Je suis vraiment très contente et très fière d’avoir été leur fille ; c’était une chance, quelque chose de très spéciale. Ti ringrazio molto. Σου ευχαριστώ πάρα πολύ.I am really grateful to her and dad.

Isabel Raika Durusoy
Gertrude Durusoy’s daughter

(1) The article 4 of the 10 August 1927 law on French nationality says that, if someone lives in France and is 21 years old, all people living in France, born from strangers, become French if they do not resign from their quality of being French. Source: Article 4, Loi du 10 août 1927 sur la nationalité. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000000312717 Date accessed: July 26, 2021.