VersionsBabamın Tüfeği [Türkçe, İstanbul, 2005]
Le fusil de mon père [Français, Paris, 2004]
My Father's Rifle [English, New York, 2005]
El fusil de mi padre [Español, Barcelona, 2005]
Das Gewehr meines Vaters [Deutsche, München, 2004]
Το ντουφέκι του πατέρα μου [Ελληνικά, Αθήνα, 2004]
El fusell del meu pare [Català, Barcelona, 2005]
Het vuur van mijn vader [Nederlands, Amsterdam, 2004]
Nire aitaren fusila [Euskara, Irun, 2004]
My Father's Rifle
My name is Azad Shero Selim. I am Selim Malay's grandson. My grandfather had a good sense of humor. He used to say he was born a Kurd, in a free country. Then the Ottomans arrived and said to my grandfather, "You're Ottoman," so he became Ottoman. At the fall of the Ottoman Empire, he became Turkish. The Turks left and he became a Kurd again in the kingdom of Sheikh Mahmoud, king of the Kurds. Then the British arrived, so my grandfather became a subject of His Gracious Majesty and even learned a few words of English.
The British invented Iraq, so my grandfather became Iraqi, but this new word, Iraq, always remained an enigma to him, and to his dying breath he was never proud of being Iraqi; nor was his son, my father, Shero Selim Malay.
But I, Azad, I was still a kid.
My father's rifle
Hiner Saleem
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 2004 by Hiner Saleem
Translation copyright © 2005 by Catherine Temerson
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & Mclntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published in 2004 by Editions du Seuil, France,
as Le Fusil de mon père
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Saleem, Hiner, 1964-
[Fusil de mon père. English]
My father's rifle : a childhood in Kurdistan / Hiner Saleem ;
translated from the French by Catherine Temerson. 1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-21693-1
ISBN-10: 0-374-21693-2 (he. : alk. paper)
1. Saleem, Hiner, 1964- 2. Kurds Iraq Biography. I. Tide.
DS70.8.K8S25313 2005
956.7'204'092 dc22
[B]
2004047127
Designed by Debbie Glasserman
www.fsgbooks.com
13579 lo 8642
