Echoes of History

According to Çankaya, he touched on what may be the last Western taboo: the Holocaust and how that suffering has been turned into a political tool. As a writer from a Muslim background, his position was even more thorny. Discomfort around the subject wasn’t just limited to his dealings with the publisher, it also played out in talk shows, at university, and in journalism. And on top of it all, due to his ethnicity, he wasn’t ‘allowed’ to be angry. In the end, Çankaya decided to comply with his editor’s wishes, but in doing so he made use of his own back story to map out his disillusionment with the system.  

Çankaya explores the mechanisms that bar him from writing about the Palestinian genocide. He explores the links between anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and World War II, and the colonial roots of Zionism. The crux, as he sees it, is that the suffering of the Holocaust is being turned into a political tool, not out of empathy for Jewish victims but because Western complicity during the war still weighs heavily on the conscience. 

Echoes of History is an intelligent account of adaptation and integration, code switching and class betrayal. It is about not being able to escape an immigrant legacy and remaining an outsider in the literary and academic worlds. But above all, it about which deaths we remember, and which stories we bury.

• Bestselling title: 25,000 copies sold

• Hard-hitting topic: what it means for a person of colour to navigate white institutions. Includes a behind-the-scenes account of a fraught editorial process.

• Examines the Jewish memorial culture from an culturally Islamic perspective