IN MY SHOES: “Armenian Golgotha”
In his review of Father Grigoris Balakian’s memoir, “Armenian Golgotha” - which recounts his deportation from Constantinople on April 24, 1915 along with 250 Armenian intellectual and political leaders, and has been translated into Engish for the first time - author Chris Bohjalian leads off with his own family’s tragic history, for which he has no frame of reference as the son of an American-born Armenian who was determined to shed the shame and stigma of victimhood by never speaking of the Genocide:
Last month, while I was visiting my father in Florida, we had dinner one night with my aunt. We were discussing the way Jim Jones had poisoned 900 of his followers with cyanide-laced Flavor Aid in 1978, and suddenly my aunt was explaining that another way to poison someone is with a yogurt smoothie. "That's how the Turks poisoned your grandmother's classmates in Constantinople in 1915," she said. "They poisoned the tahn."
This story was new to me, and I am 47. But as a second-generation Armenian American, I've found that it's not uncommon for one of these UFO horror stories to materialize out of nowhere over coffee. My childhood was a combination of suburban cliché and Middle Eastern exoticism.
[M]y grandparents, Leo and Haigoohi (pronounced Hi-Gui) Bohjalian … emigrated to the United States from Paris in 1927, though both had been born near Constantinople just after the turn of the last century. …
Though no one ever told me the precise circumstances, I knew that three of their four parents had died in the genocide of 1915, and Leo - who had left Turkey - went back after World War I to find Haigoohi. Sometimes I was told that she had been hidden by a Muslim family, other times that she had found shelter in a convent.
Still, my father never spoke of what may have happened to his ancestors in 1915, and as a boy I never asked. And so their story emerges in unexpected, fitful thunderstorms - such as my aunt's yogurt smoothie story last month.
Circling back to the matter at hand, Bohjalian notes:
In some people's eyes, particularly those who wish to deny what really happened, the Armenian ordeal was a series of chaotic, decentralized, non-bureaucratic massacres - the opposite of the systematic, state-centralized, bureaucratic slaughter of 6 million in the Holocaust. Balakian's account, however, is rich with evidence of the Turkish government's complicity and its leaders' premeditation. Deportation, in their vernacular, was always a subterfuge for extermination.
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