WHEREVER LIFE TAKES YOU - EROL GÜNEY'S STORY

Minutes103’
LanguageORIGINAL LANGUAGE: TURKISH
DirectorBanu YALKUT

Born in Odessa as Michel Rottenberg, Erol Güney was as the son of a Jewish family. In 1917 the family moved to Istanbul. Erol Guney is known in Turkey by the title of a poem by the famous poet Orhan Veli; “Erol Guney’s Cat”. His friends Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet Anday, Aşık Veysel are famous classic poets of Turkish literature. Their girlfriends were beautiful jewisch girls, Dora, Bella and Eza, who shared the joy of life in the Turkey's « roaring fourties ». In 1940 a translation bureau were founded, where Erol Guney worked translating Dostojevski, Goncharov, Thechov, Moliere and Platon into Turkish. 1946 Guney left the translation bureau and started working as a journalist. In 1955 he wrote an article about the Soviet Union. This was the reason he was sent to a stateless persons camp in Yozgat. He managed to go to France, worked for AFP and Le Monde. Being still a migrant without passport, he decided in 1956 to emigrate to Israel, where he worked as a journalist untill he died the 11 october 2009.