FAMILY TALES THAT TIE ARMENIAN TO TURK
Alev Adil
Arts & Book Review
June 20, 2008
My Grandmother By Fethiye Cetin, trans Maureen Freely VERSO £12.99
(114pp) £11.69 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897
Fethiye Cetin’s grandmother played a central role in her childhood
when she was growing up in Maden, a provincial Turkish town in
the 1950s, especially after her father died when she was six. She
knew her grandmother as a warm, resourceful and respected Turkish
housewife. Years later, in 1975, her grandmother revealed that she
was Armenian by birth, that in 1915 the men of her village had been
murdered, the women sent on a death march, and that she had been torn
from her mother’s arms by a Turkish police captain, who later adopted
her. Heranus, who was to become Seher, never saw her birth family
again, although her parents and her brother survived and settled in
New York.
??etin’s gripping and thought-provoking memoir inhabits the fault
lines between personal recall, inherited memory and history. It
reaches towards an understanding, if not of the events, then of their
aftermath. Her spare and elegant prose may be easy to read, but this
is no lightweight, sentimental book. An unassuaged loss sings through
??etin’s allusive, understated style. Maureen Freely’s translation
captures the style and tone perfectly.
History becomes a family secret kept even at Heranus’s
funeral. Politics is never spoken of and yet its presence is
palpable. The silences it imposes lead to erasures, not just
the changing of names, but the unspeakable truths those names
commemorate. The genocide is both a historical fact and an unbearably
personal secret Heranus shares only with her granddaughter, shocked
by her hidden heritage that "turned the known world on its head."
??etin proves herself worthy of such a legacy by bearing witness to
her grandmother’s remarkable resilience and goodness in the face
of tragedy. Childhood reminiscences – her irascible grandfather’s
appetite and tempers, family meals, laundry day, the pastries cooked
secretly to commemorate Easter – are cast in a new light.
Remembering and reconciling Turkish and Armenian histories
and identities is both emotionally charged, and politically
contentious. ??etin is a courageous writer; challenging official
Turkish history can still have fatal consequences, as the assassination
of Hrant Dink in 2007 has shown. Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian
newspaper Agos, helped ??etin in her search for the family. She
was to act as his lawyer when he was prosecuted for "insulting
Turkishness". ??etin ends her story in a New Jersey kitchen, as she
dances the halay with octogenarian Aunt Marge, the sister Heranus
was never to meet. Such small private celebrations make significant
strides in reconciliation between Turks and Armenians. This moving
testimony transcends politics and brings the Armenian tragedy to life
with tenderness as well as sadness.
–Boundary_(ID_EwZ9c+8l3O+DjghlSnuymg)–