Years ago I sat with family in what used to be called the “parlor” in the Tennessee home of my aunt, the oldest surviving sibling of my father’s nine brothers and sisters. I inquired politely about genealogical matters — in particular, about her grandfather, my great-grandfather, who died long before I was born.

She confirmed he fought for the Confederacy, as did most Tennessee males of the Civil War era. Then she mentioned his postwar work. “He was a mercenary soldier,” she said. “He went down to Mexico to fight.”

A mercenary? A man whose descendants include farmers, schoolteachers and pharmacists? I felt the rumble of long-buried history under my feet.

My aunt is long gone. I never got to ask any follow-up questions. Joseph O’Neill, a more determined sort, pursued to the end questions about his own grandfathers’ past in his subtle, gripping “Blood-Dark Track: A Family History.”

O’Neill wrote “Netherland,” a beautifully written novel about a lonesome Dutch financier who becomes friends with a circle of Third World cricket players in New York City. Thanks to this reissue of 2001’s “Blood-Dark Track,” I now know how O’Neill came by his cosmopolitan background. His father worked on major construction projects and took his family around the world to live, including a time in Turkey where O’Neill’s Irish father met and married his Turkish mother. There “Blood-Dark Track” begins, when O’Neill visits a storage room in his grandmother’s hotel and discovers his grandfather’s handwritten testament of his arrest and imprisonment in Palestine in World War II.

This event would inspire any would-be novelist, but O’Neill is both a lawyer (now nonpracticing) and a writer. As he investigates what happened in “obscure, sometimes frightful parishes of Irish and Middle Eastern history,” he demonstrates skills of synthesis as well as sheer doggedness, digging for answers until the last interrogation of the last reluctant relative.

He tells the story of his Turkish grandfather, Joseph Dakad, and his Irish grandfather, James O’Neill, in alternating chapters. Dakad’s story will be more obscure to readers unaware of the political currents that influenced Dakad’s hometown of Mersin, the Casablanca-like port in southern Turkey. Mersin’s history is roiled by post-Ottoman empire politics; jealousy of Syrian Christians (Dakad was one) who immigrated to Turkey, created profitable businesses and lived affluent lives; and the murder of thousands of area Armenians in 1909, a horrific event that none of O’Neill’s Turkish relatives ever talked about.

O’Neill does a beautiful job of recreating the old Mersin, where old villa walls hid lush gardens and where the port’s proximity to the eastern Mediterranean made it a hotbed of both Allied and Axis activity in the years between World War I and II. When Joseph Dakad travels to Palestine in 1942 to buy lemons, he is arrested and imprisoned for three and a half years by the British. His captors resort to psychological terror, trying to get him to confess he was a German spy.

The story of his Irish grandfather, James O’Neill, plunges the reader into an era in the 1920s when the Irish Republican Army, desperate to throw the hated British out of Ireland, resorted to terrorism and murder in West Cork — shooting Protestants just because they were Protestant. In this section, O’Neill has an unforgettable cast of relatives to work with, notably his grandfather’s cheerfully unrepentant widow, Eileen O’Neill.

It would be a disservice to readers to reveal his conclusions. Was his Irish grandfather involved in the murder of an Irishman who served in the British navy and was assassinated by the IRA? Was Joseph Dakad a spy? As the saying goes, it’s the journey, not the destination, as O’Neill calls his characters to account and questions his own moral rigor as an affluent, educated member of Europe’s modern professional class. “Blood-Dark Track” teaches an old lesson learned over and over; that however much we yearn for the future, the past is never far behind.

 

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