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Then hell broke loose in Syria, and they were forced to change their plans. in the 1970s, some 30 years earlier.Īfter her father had completed his medical studies, the couple planned to move back home again. Alia Malek's father and mother were fortunate in that they had left the family home in Damascus and come to the U.S.
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Since the Arab Spring, more than 11 million Syrians have been killed or forced to flee their own country. Published by Nation Books, 334 pages, $27.99 THE HOME THAT WAS OUR COUNTRY: A MEMOIR OF SYRIA And as his granddaughter tells it, the word miraculous seems just right. He pushed his own "physical and emotional limits" as he did everything possible to survive: He prayed disguised himself as a Turkish soldier dressed like Lawrence of Arabia learned Arabic, joined a clan went without food, walked across the desert with only two cups of water and became a translator for a German soldier. Miskjian, a devout Christian, depicted his situation as being miraculous. Ultimately, her grandfather, though, is the memoir's hero. They treated her as if she were part of their extended family. MacKeen decided to include her own journey in the book, wanting to make the point that "one person's act of kindness can transform a family for generations." Although her decision underscores the importance of kindness, it does detract from the book's unity, making the story somewhat confusing. Meeting the sheikh's descendants, MacKeen says, was a transcendent moment.
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At another time, she heard the muezzin's call to prayer, which she describes as a "beautiful male voice seemed to rise and fall over the city's hills." Moving from Adabazar - the town in which her family had lived - she crossed the desert and trekked into Syria, where her grandfather, a Christian, was given refuge by an Arab sheikh and his Muslim family. Visiting places and families he may have known, she attended Mass and a town hall meeting at the Holy Martyrs Armenian Church. MacKeen centers her book on her grandfather, focusing on the years 1914-18, covering his youth as a peddler and later a courier his conscription into a labor battalion his exile from his family home and his struggle to stay alive in Mesopotamian internment camps.Īpproximately 100 years later, MacKeen retraced her grandfather's steps. Saying that historians have rightfully disputed Turkey's take on this, MacKeen tries to set the record straight by presenting the details of what some call the first Holocaust. Interestingly, as MacKeen notes, the Turkish government still denies that such a genocide took place, arguing that the Armenians were enemies of the state. The other tells of her mother's extended family as they lived in the volatile years that led up to the Armenian genocide. One tells of her own efforts to follow in Miskjian's footsteps, believing that she needed to embed herself into his experiences in order to bring them alive on the page.
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His granddaughter, Dawn Anahid MacKeen, tells how he beat the odds in her dramatic memoir, The Hundred Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey, just out in paperback.īeginning her book with events occurring in 1910, MacKeen offers two narratives that interweave past and present. One and one half-million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in the years leading up to and during World War I. Stepan Miskjian survived. Published by Mariner Books, 368 pages, $15.95 THE HUNDRED YEAR WALK: AN ARMENIAN ODYSSEY