AUTHOR EXPLORES HUMAN NATURE, ARMENIAN GENOCIDE THROUGH FICTION WRITING

The University of Wisconsin (Madison)
4/19/2005

CONTACT: Judith Claire Mitchell
PHONE: (608) 263-3773
EMAIL: jmitchell@wisc.edu

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MADISON – A fat packet of letters, written by a friend’s great-aunt
during World War I, inspired Judith Claire Mitchell, assistant professor
of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to write “The Last
Day of the War” (Pantheon Books, 2004), her first novel. To Mitchell,
those letters exemplified a key aspect of human nature; fiction, she
thought, would be an ideal medium to explore it.

“Clearly the aunt had gone to France in 1919 as a YMCA Girl because that
was where the boys were, but every now and then the frivolous tone was
interrupted by a startling description of war-ravaged France,” Mitchell
says. “In one letter, a single sentence about an encounter with an
Armenian rug merchant who lost his entire family in the genocide (in
1915-16) caught my attention, particularly because the very next
sentence was all about a dance that the aunt had attended. I was
reminded of the way we can come face to face with unfathomable human
suffering, acknowledge it for a moment and then fix our hair and dance
the night away. I was struck by how human this kind of behavior is, and
I wanted to see if I could create a character that embodied it.”

That character is Yale White, who goes to France hoping to “run into”
the Armenian-American soldier she lusts after. She finds him, and
through him becomes enmeshed in the covert organization he belongs to
(based on the factual Operation Nemesis) whose members are intent on
violently avenging the genocide.

Mitchell adds that one surprising offshoot of the novel has been the
flurry of invitations to speak about the Armenian atrocity. This past
month, for example, she spoke to Rhode Island high school educators
interested in using literature to teach about genocide. She also was the
first novelist invited to lecture at the Armenian Library and Museum in
Watertown, Mass.

Still denied by many Turks, the massacre of 1915-16 accounted for the
deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Early in
1915, Armenians in the army were disarmed, placed into labor battalion
and finally killed. In April, intellectual and political leaders were
rounded up and murdered. Remaining Armenians were arrested in their
houses. Many were shot immediately. Others were told they would be
relocated, and ultimately were: To the concentration camps of Jerablus
and Deir ez-Zor.

However, Mitchell says that current events also had their hand in
shaping the book.

“While I was researching the Armenian genocide, similar slaughters were
taking place in Bosnia and Rwanda. So, in addition to writing about the
human condition, I wanted to call readers’ attention to the first
genocide of the 20th century while commenting indirectly on the
century’s final genocides,” she says.

Mitchell is on leave to work on her second novel, again a historical
exploration of ethnic identity. This fall she will be teaching two
graduate-level courses, a pedagogy class and a fiction workshop for
students in the English department’s relatively new Master of Fine Arts
program. She says that being a writer herself gives her a great deal in
common with her students.

“It’s critical that teachers of creative writing courses be writers who
have struggled with the writing process,” she says. “You need someone
who realizes how hard it is to write.”

Mitchell will read from “The Last Day of the War” at the Armenian
National Committee of Wisconsin’s commemoration of the 90th anniversary
of the Armenian genocide. The event will be held at 10:30 a.m. on
Saturday, April 26, in the State Capitol. For more information on that
event, contact Zohrab Khaligian at khaligian@netzero.net.

###

Barbara Wolff, (608) 262-8292, bjwolff@wisc.edu

University Communications
News@UW-Madison
News Releases