A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION ON A MEMOIR OF HER MOTHER
By James Barron
Maureen Seaberg contributed reporting.

New York Times
May 3 2007

As a first-time author, Margaret Ajemian Ahnert had hoped that her
appearance at a Barnes & Noble store on the Upper East Side would
draw attention to her just-published book, "The Knock at the Door,"
which deals with the Armenian genocide.

Her reading and question-and-answer session on Tuesday evening drew
attention, to be sure, but not the kind she expected.

A man in the audience was arrested after he and several other people
disrupted Ms. Ahnert’s reading, shouting and passing out leaflets
denying that the genocide occurred. Ms. Ahnert’s 209-page book tells,
among other things, how her mother survived the genocide as a teenager
during World War I and eventually came to the United States.

Ms. Ahnert said yesterday she did not mean "The Knock at the Door"
to be a political narrative.

"Here I was trying to tell the story of my mother, not making a
political statement," she said. "It’s a mother-daughter story, it’s
how it affected my life. It’s not just about the Armenian genocide,
it’s about my mother growing up, my life, and events in her life
that affected me. It’s a mother-daughter memoir. I’m not making any
historical statements."

Most historians say the Ottoman Empire was responsible for the death
of more than one million people around 1915 in a campaign intended
to eliminate the Armenian population throughout what is now Turkey.

Ms. Ahnert said the disruption came as she answered a question from
the crowd at the Barnes & Noble, at 240 East 86th Street near Second
Avenue. Some of those who attended her talk were her friends, including
former Gov. Hugh L. Carey and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert
M. Morgenthau, whose grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, was the ambassador
to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916.

"Someone in the middle of the back of the room stood up and said,
‘That’s not so,’ " Ms. Ahnert said. "Five or six men started to pass
out fliers of denial. I thought, oh, my goodness sakes, it’s like
Holocaust deniers. I was completely taken aback."

Mary Occhino, who was in the audience, said some of the people were
shouting, "This is a lie, this is a lie, this never happened."

"I got up and said, ‘Enough,’ " said Ms. Occhino, the host of a
call-in program on Sirius satellite radio. "Her mother lived through
the genocide – that’s all she said. They said, ‘That’s a lie, that’s
a lie, that never happened.’ But this story is not about genocide,
it’s about a mother’s love for her daughter."

The man who was arrested, identified by the police as Erdem Sahin,
41, a Turkish immigrant who lives on Staten Island, was charged with
resisting arrest, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail,
and faces lesser charges including disorderly conduct.

At a hearing yesterday in Manhattan Criminal Court, Judge Rita Mella
adjourned the charges in contemplation of dismissal, meaning that the
case will be dropped in six months if Mr. Sahin is not arrested again.

Mr. Sahin said later yesterday that he and the other protesters were
angry that France had "made it illegal to say there was no genocide."

The French National Assembly approved such legislation last fall.

"We realize that if we don’t do something, we will soon have no
rights," he said. "We are fighting for freedom of speech."

When asked about his views on the Armenian genocide, he said,
"Honestly, I’m not a historian, but historians say there is no
genocide."

The subject is taboo in Turkey, and in recent years, Turkish
writers who have referred to the genocide have faced reprisal. A
legal claim against the novelist Elif Shafak was dropped last fall,
but she cut short a six-city American tour promoting her sixth novel,
"The Bastard of Istanbul." Orhan Pamuk, who won the 2006 Nobel Prize
in literature, was also sued by a nationalist group for referring
to the genocide in a Swiss interview, and in January, Hrant Dink,
a newspaper editor who had challenged the official Turkish version
of the genocide, was fatally shot as he left his office in Istanbul.

A spokeswoman for the Barnes & Noble chain said it was unusual for a
reading to be disrupted. Passing out pamphlets violated the company’s
no-solicitation policy, she said, adding: "They were asked to stop
passing out leaflets. They refused. They were jeering the author.

They were asked to sit down and they refused." That was when the
police were called, she said.

Ms. Ahnert said she had appeared on college campuses and at a literary
festival in Florida without any problems. "This is something I hope
I don’t have to look forward to," she said.