A gripping story of a family’s—and a whole people’s—displacement.
A family history chronicles the life of an Armenian couple who were separated from their homeland.
Both Hovsep Madenjian and Varteni Sarian were made orphans by the Turkish massacre of Armenians during World War I and forced to flee to Beirut, Lebanon. Hovsep met Varteni at the orphanage that housed her, was taken by her beauty, and was eager to marry someone to perpetuate his family line. She was less impressed by him and particularly turned off by his blue eyes and Catholicism—two things she loathed. However, he eventually won her over, apparently by professing his allegiance to a more progressive interpretation of marriage as a partnership. They struggled to have children—Varteni’s first two pregnancies ended in miscarriages—but she finally gave birth to a son, Mardig Madenjian (Ravished Paradise, 2015, etc.), the author of this second volume in a trilogy. The first installment tracked the history of Armenians from the 14th century to the horror of their oppression in the early 20th, and this second volume details the tumultuous aftermath of the Armenian genocide and the new challenges that World War II presented. Hovsep and Varteni had their share of challenges in Beirut—overwhelmed by refugees, the city’s economy suffered and decent employment was scarce, even for someone as impressively educated as Hovsep, who could speak four languages. The author jumps seamlessly between his parents’ struggles to those of all Armenians; for example, he ably discusses the rise of the Tashnag Party in Beirut, the Armenian demand for independence from France, the strain that the Palestinian War put on Lebanon, the intramural disputes between Lebanese Christians and Muslims, and the impact of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Madenjian always expertly catalogs the aching desire of the Armenian diaspora to return home, as well as its diminishing likelihood; he also addresses their demand that their brutal mistreatment by Turkey be properly acknowledged, if not redressed. His command of the historical record is extraordinary, although he tends to bury readers under a mountain of minutiae; also, this is a nakedly partisan history, laced with resentment toward the Turks. Nevertheless, Madenjian still manages an unusual combination of the personal and the historical, rendering global events with the tools of novelistic drama.
A gripping story of a family’s—and a whole people’s—displacement.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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