A historically astute, beautifully written portrait.
The biography of a woman haunted by her parents’ suffering as a result of the Armenian genocide.
Mary Zakarian was born in 1927 in Philadelphia, but her story begins well before that in Turkey, which her parents had called home. Her father, Moses, a musician and a weaver, departed Turkey in 1913 for the United States, leaving behind a wife and children who were killed in the 1915 genocide. Zakarian’s mother, Arek Kocharian, escaped to the U.S. in 1923 after her husband and two children also died during the genocide. An attempt at an arranged marriage between Arek and Zakar, Moses’ cousin, went awry, and Moses married her himself in 1924. When Zakarian was a young child during the Depression, Moses struggled to keep the family housed and fed. Even after their financial circumstances improved considerably, however, Zakarian was a witness and victim of their historical trauma. Arek was permanently alienated from the world—she never learned English, was deeply distrustful of others and scared of the outside world, and was prone to bouts of depression. Of Arek’s children, Zakarian was closest to her, and she adopted her fearful isolation. She never married or had kids and was plagued by anxiety and agoraphobia her entire life. But Zakarian was also a talented and ultimately successful artist. She earned considerable recognition for her painting in Philadelphia after attending several art schools, including the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, now renamed Moore College of Art and Design. She even opened an art school of her own in 1971, operated out of her home. Debut authors Allan and Susan Arpajian, the children of Zakarian’s sister, know the subject well and depict her candidly and lovingly—some of their portrait based on personal recollections and some on Zakarian’s journals and an unfinished autobiography. The authors depict Zakarian’s grim inheritance of sadness in poetically heartbreaking prose, capturing a life of suppressed guilt. Once Zakarian was reluctant to bring a particularly fetching fabric into the home because of this nagging torment: “ ‘I felt guilt and disloyalty to my mother’s pain.’ Having or enjoying beautiful things, or even engaging in a satisfying creative endeavor, was not for this daughter of a survivor.” While Zakarian’s extraordinary life, and particularly her attempt to transcend her trauma through her art, is the fulcrum of the story, the authors also ably reconstruct the history of Armenian tribulations and the resulting psychological scars. The Arpajians provide an impressively sensitive account of Zakarian’s Christianity, which was fraught with contradiction. On the one hand, it supplied some comforting reassurance, but on the other, it was more fuel for her guilt—her perceived shortcomings became sins. Despite the often melancholic subject matter, the biography is inspiriting. While it couldn’t be said that Zakarian triumphed over the emotional baggage that was her unfortunate bequest, she didn’t simply succumb to it either.
A historically astute, beautifully written portrait.Pub Date: April 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4128-6417-6
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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