September 1, 2010
Both ONeills grandfathers, one Turkish Christian, one Irish Catholic, were imprisoned by the British during World War II. What had they done wrong? In researching their stories, ONeill discovers secrets, personal and political, and his gripping family memoir also reveals a seldom-told bloody history. All the detail gets confusing at times as the author visits the prisons and delves into letters, newspaper reports, official documents, and family stories. But the muddle and mystery of spies and counterspies are part of the authentic narrative. ONeills fathers father, James ONeill, joined the IRA. Was he complicit with Nazi Germany? Or was he an informer for the British? Were they planting information on him? The maternal grandfather, Joseph Dakak, was arrested on a business trip to Palestine and spent more than three years in prison there. Does a just war justify undeserved personal suffering? Was Dakak paranoid to think his fellow prisoners were informers? The political issues are sure to spark intense debate, but more than that, it is the miserable small story of individual lives that holds the reader.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)
September 3, 2001
The son of a Turkish mother and an Irish father, lawyer and novelist O'Neill was born in Ireland, raised in the Hague, spent summers in his mother's hometown on the Mediterranean and studied in Britain. When he was 10 or 11, in the mid-1970s, he learned that both of his late grandfathers were imprisoned during WWII. Twenty years later, he took it upon himself to learn why. The quest to determine whether his IRA-soldier grandfather was a murderer and his Turkish grandfather, a hotelier, was an Axis spy took him from County Cork to the coast of Turkey, and deep into the "dream-bright horrors" of history. O'Neill's Irish grandfather, jailed for five years for IRA activities, shared an internment camp with Nazi and Allied POWs held there "in accordance with Ireland's neutrality policy." At the same time, his Turkish grandfather suffered psychological abuse and extreme paranoia in various British and Free French military prisons filled with Lebanese, Turkish and Syrian " 'suspects and known pro-Axis sympathizers.' " During his research, O'Neill collected facts about everything from the poison used to eliminate the fungus that destroyed the Irish potato crop in the late 1840s to ethnic divisions among Armenians, Muslims and non-Muslim Turks in pre-WWII Turkey. Anyone interested in the Middle East, Ireland or WWII will find this account fascinating. Readers looking for tension, family drama and pathos, however, may be frustrated with the undifferentiated details and narrative detours that sometimes encumber this story of a grandson trying to connect with the grandfathers he never knew. Photos, 2 maps.