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In one of her last letters, Maria says she has got a surprise that she will reveal when they see each other face to face. They are only too aware that the space for free expression, and even free thought, is diminishing every day. Decades later, when Madonna in a Fur Coat became the sort of book that passed from friend to friend, the literary establishment continued to ignore it. During the cold war, they were translated into a number of languages in the Soviet bloc, and they are still much read in Bulgaria.

In his last letter to his wife, he boasted that the next time she heard from him, he would be writing from Italy, France or England.

The works for which he was most admired in his time were imbued by his dreams for the common man, and rooted in his knowledge of the injustices they suffered. And yet, for the past three years, it has topped the bestseller lists in Turkey, outselling Orhan Pamuk.

The desire for someone to hold your hand with that kind of tenderness, gazing into your eyes as though they hold the universe's greatest secrets. He is so impressed by the woman in the portrait that after that day, he starts coming back to the exhibition until the painter, Maria Puder, introduces herself to Raif. Raif accompanies a drunk Maria to her home, takes care of her and in the morning, they wake up next to each other.

But he is not much interested in the glad-eyed widows and the ruined colonialists, or for that matter, in soap. Having served his sentence for several months in Konya and then in the Sinop Fortress Prison, he was released in 1933 in an amnesty granted to mark the 10th anniversary of the declaration of the Republic of Turkey. The story is told by a colleague who barely knows Raif, and that too adds a cold irony to the storytelling. The contents of the bag he had with him survive in a photograph that appeared in a national newspaper in January 1949, and again in the last pages of the memoir that his daughter, Filiz Ali, published in 1995. Born in 1907 in what is now Bulgaria but was then part of the crumbling Ottoman empire, he, too, went to Berlin as a young man, and his 18 months there turned him into a freethinking man.The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. There, he finds out that Maria was quite ill, and since her mother left their home to go to Prague, she was hospitalized. He was born in 1907 in Eğridere township (now Ardino in southern Bulgaria) of the Sanjak of Gümülcine (now Komotini in northern Greece), in the Ottoman Empire.

Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul. There he finds a sick Maria, who is finally convinced that Raif is not like any other man and actually is in love with her. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected. It's about this quiet guy, Raif, a quiet dreamer who favored the realms of his imagination over the concrete world, falling in love with a woman in a painting.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. He is admired for the determination with which he defended his political beliefs, which are anchored through his writing. At this point, we have an elegiac flashback told in Raif's own words: sadness, pain and longing infuse this tale of a seemingly soulless man. Told that he would never again find work as a teacher unless he was able to prove that he had changed his thinking, he published a poem in praise of Ataturk, entitled “My Love”.