Elie Wiesel Praises Balakian’s Armenian Genocide Book
Never before in English, ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA is the most comprehensive
and dramatic eyewitness account of the twentieth century’s first
genocide conducted in Eastern parts of the Ottoman Empire, which is
today’s Turkey. It sheds light on the Armenian Genocide as no other
book has done.
On April 24, 1915, Balakian, an Armenian Apostolic priest, was
arrested along with some 250 other intellectuals and leaders of
Constantinople’sArmenian community. During the next four years, he
bears witness to the countless deportation caravans of Armenians,
tortured, raped, or slaughtered and subsequently mutilated on their
way to death in the Syrian deserts; through the testimony of many
survivors, foreign witnesses, and Turkish officials involved in the
extermination; and also to some brave, righteous Turks and their
German allies who resisted secret extermination orders. Miraculously,
Balakian manages to escape, and his flight–through forest and over
mountain,in disguise as a railroad worker and then as a German
soldier–is a suspenseful, harrowing odyssey that makes possible his
singular testimony.
Advance praise for ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA speaks to the memoir’s great
historical importance as well as to Balakian’s gripping eyewitness
narrative-
`Read this heartbreaking book. Armenian Golgotha describes the
suffering, agony, and massacre of innumerable Armenian families almost
a centuryago; its memory must remain a lesson for more than one
generation.’ 0A-Elie Wiesel
`Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha is a powerful, moving account
of the Armenian Genocide, a story that needs to be known, and is told
here with a sweep of experience and wealth of detail that is as
disturbing as it is irrefutable.’
-Sir Martin Gilbert –
`In this extraordinary account, Grigoris Balakian makes astute
psychological observations about himself and his fellow prisoners, and
equally astute interpretations of the behavior of Turkish perpetrators
and German collaborators in the Armenian Genocide. His writing is
clear and compelling, asrendered in sensitive translation. He has a
keen sense of history, and his extensive travels enable him to record
a tragic European panorama. This bookwill become a classic, both for
its depiction of a much denied genocide andits humane and brilliant
witness to what human beings can endure and overcome.’
-Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and
the Psychology of Genocide
`The translation and publication of Armenian Golgotha in English
islong overdue. It constitutes a thundering proof that those who deny
the Armenian Genocide are engaged in a massive deception.’
-Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing
Assault on Truth and Memory
`The first English translation of a seminal personal account of
thefirst modern genocide… Balakian survived to write this memoir,
which combines extensive research, an account of his own experiences
and testimony from eyewitnesse s, both victims and perpetrators. Poet,
memoirist and Armenian holocaust historian Peter Balakian, Grigoris’s
great-nephew, collaborated with professional translator Sevag to
render the blistering Armenian text into modern English.’
-Kirkus Reviews
The recovery of ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA is also an extraordinary
story. Since it had been published in 1922 it had remained available
only in Armenian, and it wasn’t until 1991 that Peter Balakian first
learned of his uncle’s memoir through a chain of circumstances he
describes in his prize-winning memoir Black Dog of Fate (just reissued
in a 10th anniversary edition). After a ten-year translation and
editing project, now Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag has brought this
story into an elegant edition in English.
Full of shrewd insights into the political, historical, and cultural
context of the Armenian Genocide–the template for the subsequent
genocides that cast a shadow across the twentieth century and
beyond–ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA is destined to become a classic of survivor
literature.
ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA is available for pre-order online.
Send to us by [email protected]
TO BE PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF APRIL 4