"SKYLARK" TELLS HEARTBREAKING, GRAPHIC STORY OF GENOCIDE
By Carol Azizian – Journal Staff Writer
Flint Journal, MI
Feb 11 2007
As World War I breaks out in Europe, Sempad, patriarch of a wealthy
Armenian family, makes preparations to reunite with his expatriate
brother Yerwant, on their pastoral estate in Ottoman Turkey.
He dreams of building an English-style tennis lawn and a gazebo for
afternoon tea.
He orders Western trinkets – gold and silver cigarette cases and
mustache trimmers for the men; brooches and makeup compacts for
the women.
Little do Sempad, a pharmacist in Turkey, and Yerwant, a physician
in Italy, know that a genocide will destroy their idyllic visions
for the near and distant future.
Antonia Arslan’s debut novel is a wrenching, poetic and epic account
of mass killings of Armenians, acknowledged by many as the first
genocide of the 20th century.
Arslan, a former University of Padua professor of Italian literature,
draws on the story of her family to create this lyrical book.
As an avid reader of historical accounts and novels on this topic
and the granddaughter of a genocide survivor, I find Arslan’s novel
an important and timely addition to holocaust literature.
Some historians say hundreds of thousands (others contend 1.5 million)
Armenians were tortured and killed by the Turks under the veil of
World War I.
Turkish officials continue to deny that the Ottoman government planned
to exterminate Armenians in 1915.
In a recent column in Britain’s The Independent, Robert Fisk points
out that "on Oct. 19, 1918, Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the
Turkish senate and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who
committed the genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: Let’s face it,
we Turks savagely (vahshiane in Turkish) killed off the Armenians.’"
Outspoken Turks such as Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk,
who acknowledge the massacres of Armenians, have been charged under
controversial laws for "insulting Turkishness."
Just last month, Hrant Dink, editor of an Istanbul-based bilingual
Armenian newspaper, brutally was murdered for writing openly about
the atrocities.
As Arslan writes in her book, Sempad’s family (and Armenians living in
Ottoman Turkey) "have all been judged – and found guilty of existing."
She tells a heartbreaking and graphic story of the Armenians’ plight.
By using an omniscient narrator, she risks losing intimacy with
her main characters, but the world she fabricates is rich and full
of details.
Turkish gendarmes kill the Armenian men first – Sempad’s severed head
lies on his wife’s lap.
Their bodies are tossed into a mass grave (the tennis lawn). They
deport the women and children to Aleppo, Syria – torturing, raping
and starving them along the way.
A few of Sempad’s family members survive, thanks to the resourcefulness
of their friends – a conniving, limping Turkish beggar named Nazim
and two Greeks, Ismene the wailer and Isaac the priest.
The author’s sympathetic portrayal of the Turks who try to rescue
the Armenian family is intriguing.
Besides Nazim, who redeems himself through acts of kindness, there
is Djelal, a handsome soldier who pines for the radiant Azniv, one
of Sempad’s sisters.
Arslan informs the reader of the principal characters’ fates early on
– a stylistic technique that may be off-putting to those who prefer
nail-biting suspense.
Overall, the novel is a finely crafted and captivating literary work.
Carol Azizian is a Journal staff writer.
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