news.am, Armenia
Oct 31 2009

Children of Armenia

11:52 / 10/31/2009`Children of Armenia’ by Michael Bobelian has been
just published by Simon & Schuster. Over 300-page long edition brings
forward the yet unresolved problem of Armenian Genocide.

`Like Native Americans, European Jews and Rwandan Tutsis, Turkish
Armenians seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
`Children of Armenia,’ Michael Bobelian’s first book, describes the
Ottoman Empire’s 1915 mass extermination of this Christian minority
without getting bogged down in `G-word’ histrionics,’ The Washington
Post reads Oct. 31.

`The purpose of this book is neither to prove the existence nor affirm
the veracity of the Genocide,’ Bobelian writes: The Armenian holocaust
is a historical fact.

`Children of Armenia’ focuses on the Turkish nationalism, world war
weariness, survivor psychology and Cold War squabbling that let the
world forget the unforgettable. Some will flinch at Bobelian’s
lionization of Gourgen Yanikian, an Armenian who shot two Turks in a
revenge plot hatched in the 1970s, but the author stumbles only when
he strays into Armenian exceptionalism, the idea that `no other people
have suffered such a warped fate ‘ a trivialization of their suffering
and a prolonged assault on the authenticity of their experience.’
Bobelian should know that if every culture insists on the supremacy of
its own suffering, the world will only grow more jaded about stopping
current horrors. Instead, any book about Armenia ‘ no, any exploration
of any genocide ‘ should pose questions relevant to today’s ethnic
cleansings. Otherwise, who will remember the Sudanese? ` reads The
Washington Post.