My Grandmother: An Armenian-Turkish Memoir (Turkish 2004, English 2008) By Fethiye Cetin

Sometimes basic history is not what people want to hear, it upsets the status quo.  But, how does one present the history of genocide without doing it in accusation form, as if “upsetting” the status quo should even be a consideration?  Fethiye Cetin manages this challenge in a brief, very personal, and very powerful, book titled My Grandmother: An Armenian-Turkish Memoir.  She does not restate the horrifying statistics of the genocide itself, but the facts are just beneath the surface throughout her book, visible to all who care to focus their eyes. Her goal is to tell the story, and get on with the reality of today.

The genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in eastern Turkey during World War I by the fading Ottoman Empire remains a hot topic even today, and the official response is denial – not that people died, but that it should be termed a genocide.  As a response, it is an attempt to distinguish between war-related mass murder, and an attempt to destroy and eliminate a culture.  By detailing not only what happened, but also what came after, Cetin debunks the denial.

What comes after in the case of her Grandmother, is the memory of what happened, suppressed by the day-to-day necessity of what came next.

As the Ottoman Empire was under attack on all borders, an out of control attempt was made to unify the country by making it “pure” – ironic when one considers that one of the major markers of the Empire's power was its diversity, though not necessarily its equality.  Cosmopolitan is the term one could use to describe the Empire, perhaps more so than any time since Alexander.  Unlike Alexander however, they didn’t quite understand the concept of assimilating cultures, they tried to eliminate them instead.

In the case of the Armenians, some 2 million of them in the northeastern corner of today’s Turkey, assimilation was not a consideration even though they were Ottoman citizens.  As Christians they were suspect, potential/likely/probable allies of the Empire’s many enemies.  The result was a campaign to systematically eliminate them.  At first the able bodied men of Armenian villages were rounded up, and then mysteriously disappeared.  Then the remaining citizens were to be relocated to present-day Syria.  Their property and possessions were seized and “redistributed.”  During the forced long march across the country, anyone unable to keep up – those in poor health, seniors, small children -- were left behind and then slaughtered on the roadside when the main body of marchers were out of sight.  Along the way, men who needed a strong woman as a servant or concubine picked out their preference.  When the group arrived, dramatically reduced in number, those who survived were assigned.  The adult women became servants, the children were adopted, all were forced to convert Islam.  It was cultural genocide by any definition, though not at all unusual in the annals of history. 

Cetin’s Grandmother was one of those children.  She grew up as the adopted child in a then Ottoman, now Turkish household.  She was raised in the Islamic faith.  Everything before her adopted family life became a distant and very suppressed memory.  It was not until she was an adult preparing to go away to college that Cetin discovered that her Grandmother’s name was not what she thought it was; and so began her investigation of what happened to her Grandmother’s extended family. It is a story of discovering a nightmare the world would like to ignore, while looking for a family history.

It is important to note that this book, while presenting the facts about the final days of the Ottoman Empire, is not an attack on Islam or modern Turkey.  It does however, with commanding moral authority, recognize that history is what it was, regardless of what those who deny it might want you to believe.