Tom Haviv’s A Flag of No Nation sur­rounds the plight of his Turk­ish Jew­ish fam­i­ly in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. The book is divid­ed into five sec­tions: alle­go­ry, oral his­to­ry, lyric doc­u­ments, per­for­mance texts, and polit­i­cal visions. Through poet­ry, prose, and pho­tographs, Haviv directs our under­stand­ing of his family’s his­to­ry in Turkey and, lat­er, Israel.

It’s not only Haviv’s voice that per­me­ates the page — his grand­moth­er, Yvette, is fea­tured as well. In ​“LOSS­LESS­NESS,” the book’s stand­out sec­ond sec­tion, he takes emails and voice record­ings from Yvette about their shared his­to­ry and shapes them into poet­ry. They read almost like frag­ments of a mem­oir. Con­sid­er this snip­pet from the poem ​“AHMET | MELAHAT”:

Grand­moth­er

sit­ting among

pil­lows on a low bench …

Ahmet knelt 

and kissed her hand,

I was standing 

by the door

Here, Haviv is chal­leng­ing the notion of a poem, mak­ing it abun­dant­ly clear to the read­er that — at least in this sec­tion — while the book is dubbed a poet­ry col­lec­tion, what he’s writ­ing isn’t just poet­ry, but non­fic­tion. That said, some of the his­to­ry in the book relies on Yvette’s mem­o­ry, bring­ing the age-old cre­ative non­fic­tion ques­tion to the fore­front: when telling a sto­ry so heav­i­ly based in his­to­ry, how accu­rate are our mem­o­ries? But in this case, it’s less about accu­ra­cy and more about poignan­cy, and Haviv’s (re)telling of his grandmother’s sto­ry is as effec­tive as it is intriguing. 

In the next sec­tion, ​“LAD­DER ALLE­GIANCE,” Haviv con­tin­ues to push the bound­aries of what a poem can be, like in this bit from ​“HABIB | GER­RERA | ACE­MAN”: ​“For hun­dreds of years, many had been very com­fort­able with being Ottoman—as that empire was often / seen by Sephardim as the beloved redeemer of those fall­en from the Iber­ian Penin­su­la. Now they had to decide between becom­ing Turk­ish or / becom­ing Zion­ist.”

Per­haps this genre blend­ing is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the unique com­bi­na­tion of being Turk­ish and Zion­ist, a then-dan­ger­ous and (still) rarely seen com­bi­na­tion. Haviv’s use of both non­fic­tion and poet­ry could show his or Yvette’s alle­giance to both iden­ti­ties, and the dif­fi­cul­ty that comes with hav­ing to hide a part of your­self to appease the gov­ern­ment. Here, he’s able to edu­cate and engage the read­er in ques­tions of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics that not only plagued his fam­i­ly, but con­tin­ue to be rel­e­vant to Jews liv­ing in Turkey today.

Haviv con­cludes with his vision of a turquoise-and-white ham­sa flag that he pur­ports could unite peo­ple across nations, as the sym­bol brings togeth­er ​“Jews, Mus­lims, and Chris­tians,” as well as ​“Arabs, Turks, and Kurds.” With war in Israel and abound­ing anti­semitism in Turkey (and world­wide), the flag is a beau­ti­ful reminder that we have few­er dif­fer­ences than we think.

A Flag of No Nation is a genre-bend­ing, art­ful debut, full of rich sym­bol­ism and thought-pro­vok­ing ques­tions, leav­ing the read­er with a bet­ter under­stand­ing of — in Haviv’s words — Jews’ ​“noose of identity.”