Chicago Sun-Times, IL
Oct 28 2007

Survival story
MEMOIR | Author tells of her mother’s triumph over Armenian genocide

October 28, 2007
BY HEDY WEISS

On the final page of The Knock at the Door — Margaret Ajemian
Ahnert’s deeply personal evocation of the slaughter of the Armenians
by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1917 — there is a photograph of
the author’s mother, Ester Minerajian Ahronian Ajemian.

Ester died in 1999, just a few weeks short of her 99th birthday. But
she might very easily have perished while still a teenager. This book
is a daughter’s tribute to her mother — the story of how Ester not
only escaped death, but triumphed over hatred and violence, and how
she eventually began her life all over again in this country. In
addition, it suggests why, nearly a century after the slaughter,
passions remain so high.

Of course Ahnert’s book has arrives at a fortuitous moment. There is
great controversy swirling around the resolution now making its way
through Congress — a bill that would officially designate the
Armenian slaughter a "genocide" (and surely generate some additional
tension in U.S.-Turkish relations). And within Turkey, highly
respected writers and scholars who recently have attempted to raise
questions about this ethnic catastrophe have felt the heat.

When, in 2005, the highly regarded Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk
(recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature) commented to a
foreign newspaper interviewer about the mass killings of Armenians
and Kurds in Anatolia, criminal charges were pressed against him
(though subsequently dropped). As Pamuk noted: "Thirty thousand
Kurds, and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody
dares to talk about it."

What makes The Knock at the Door so compelling is its eye-witness
quality. Though Ahnert makes it clear she based her story on
interviews with her mother over a period of many years, and that she
went on to shape the "words and the voice" heard in the book from her
own imagination, there is an authentic ring about it all.

What also rings true to anyone who has read about the Holocaust, or
about the more recent atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda, is the way
those who were once neighbors — and seemed to have carved out some
form of multicultural coexistence — quite suddenly became the most
bitter of enemies.

The scenario is familiar: Word of hangings in other towns, the
disappearance of Ester’s father; a mass flight set in motion that
would result in an ethnic cleansing of Christian Armenians. Though
some Armenians converted to Islam in an effort to remain unharmed,
most refused. Fleeing long-established homes and businesses, they
were either rounded up, murdered and tossed into mass graves, or died
of starvation as they marched to what they hoped might be a place of
refuge.

Ester was just 15 when she and members of her family set out to
escape. Ultimately, she was the only one to survive, but along the
way she endured rape, a forced marriage, beatings, isolation and much
more.

Ahnert, who struggles to come to terms with this history herself,
intersperses the chapters that recount her mother’s ordeal with more
contemporary sections that capture Ester’s final years spent at an
Armenian home for the aged in New York. To the very end, Ester showed
no sign of bitterness, believing it was "God’s job to judge."

Hedy Weiss is the Sun-Times theater and dance critic.

THE KNOCK AT THE DOOR
A JOURNEY THROUGH THE DARKNESS OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Margaret Ajemian Ahnert
Beaufort Books, 204 pages, $24.95

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