January 30, 2007

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A family confronts a time of madness

An Armenian author re-creates memories of the ordeal of her people.

By Yvonne Zipp

Say the word "genocide," and anybody not currently running Iran will
immediately think of the Jewish Holocaust. Cambodia, Rwanda, and
Bosnia might also come to mind. But say Armenia and in the United
States even highly educated people may draw a blank.

Antonia Arslan has taken steps to rectify that situation. Those who
read her unsparing debut novel, Skylark Farm, will never forget the
events of 1914-1918, when more than 1 million Armenians living in what
is now Turkey were massacred in what is widely regarded by the
international community as a genocide.

Arslan’s family was among that number. Her book is classified as
fiction because she uses the structure of a novel to re-create events
that occurred before she was born, but not because she is inventing
them. In "Skylark," the Italian professor of literature has woven her
family’s "obscure memories" together with research, including
interviews with survivors and her own imagination to tell the story of
how three young nieces and one nephew escaped the genocide and made it
safely to their uncle in Italy.

The Arslans were a prosperous family living in the hills of
Anatolia. In 1914, family patriarch Sempad awaits the return of his
older brother, Yerwant, who had gone to Italy as a teenager to
study. Both men engage in elaborate preparations: Yerwant buys a red
Isotta Fraschinni with a silver monogram, so that he can travel in
style, loading it with gold and silver trinkets for everyone in the
family. Sempad, meanwhile, renovates Skylark Farm, the family’s
country house. He orders a stained-glass window from Great Britain,
lawn furniture from Austria, and has the ground dug for a tennis lawn.

But instead of the long-cherished family reunion, World War I
begins. A few weeks before Yerwant and his family are to leave for
Anatolia, Italy closes its borders. Yerwant desperately tries to get
information about his family, not knowing that a campaign to destroy
the Armenian minority had begun in April, and that by May, Sempad’s
tennis lawn had become a mass grave.

In the first part of the novel, Arslan introduces all the members of
the family, laying out who will survive and who will not. The language
in Part 1 can, understandably enough, veer into the overwrought, and
Arslan indulges in a few too many prophetic dreams. The human warnings
that Sempad and his family ignore are heartbreaking enough, without
throwing in green angels and deathbed prophecies. Also understandably,
Arslan tends to have Turkish characters spout overripe dialogue rather
than engage in a precise examination of the banality of evil. One
exception: in a chilling scene, the Interior Minister Talat Pasha, in
a secret meeting, orders the roundup of Armenian males and then goes
off to play backgammon with Armenian poet Krikor Zohrab. "He’s always
right on time, a real gentleman," Pasha remarks to his aide.

But once the massacre at Skylark Farm occurs – in a powerfully
unflinching scene – the narrative takes hold and Arslan’s writing
surges to meet her material. All the Armenian women, children, and the
elderly are rounded up and forcibly evacuated from the city. They
leave in loaded carriages, but are set on by Kurdish bandits operating
on orders from the Turkish zeptiahs. Those who survive are forced to
march, starving, all the way to Aleppo, where they will be deported to
the desert. No one is allowed to give them food; there is a law that
makes helping any Armenian punishable by death. (Arslan is careful to
mention the brave people, such as the holy leader of Konya, who defied
that order.)

At this point, the race to save the surviving Arslan children takes on
an inexorable momentum. Their unlikely saviors include a Turkish
beggar, a Greek wailer (a professional mourner) and the wife of a
French consul. As they march, Shushanig, the mother, and Azniv, her
second-oldest daughter, do everything to keep the children
alive. (Shushanig only has one son left, her toddler, Nubar. All the
men and boys in their city were murdered. Someone put little Nubar in
a dress as a joke that saved his life.) Azniv’s heroism is all the
more poignant because she could have fled to Paris with a Turkish
soldier who was in love with her.

The strength of the tale is striking: By page 23 readers know what the
outcome will be and yet it’s impossible to stop reading. "Skylark
Farm" operates like "Schindler’s List"; it’s a story of hope that
makes it easier for us to confront the horror of what happens when
evil is allowed to run unchecked.

* Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.

Copyright © 2007 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress