THE BLACK DOG OF FATE: A...

The people of Armenia--a portion of whose diaspora live in the United States--are easily recognizable by the patronymic suffix “-ian” on their names. They tend, on principle, not to anglicize this unless their families were late in departing from Anatolia (in which case, as a friend of mine from that region once dryly phrased it, “better to cut three letters than the whole neck”). The middle name in all Armenian families is also uniform and transmitted through the generations. It is “Survival.” All three of the authors here have this in common. But, having described the suffix correctly as a patronymic, I ought to say that the means of transmission of that middle name is very often through the female line.

There was a time when the Armenian historical experience was better understood in America than it is now. In the 1930s, Franz Werfel’s “Forty Days of Musa Dagh” was a major talking point, both as book and film. People remembered President Woodrow Wilson’s promise of “self-determination” for the Armenians. They also remembered the great humanitarian drive to “save Armenia,” launched in the early 1920s when a word like “famine” was less repetitively used and the word “genocide” had not been minted.

The Armenians were the anvil upon which coinages like this were hammered out. Ernest Hemingway’s short story “On the Quay at Smyrna” was a widely read story of the period. Since the diaspora, continuity has been maintained by the tales of William Saroyan (long associated with the thriving Armenian community of Fresno), by the writing of Michael Arlen and by fictional works such as D.M. Thomas’ “Ararat” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Bluebeard.”

The distressing fact about the narrative of the Armenian people is that it has a tendency to focus on the horrific calamity that befell Armenia and the Armenians in the four or five years after April 1915, when Turkey’s Interior Ministry first authorized the arrest of any Armenian suspected of “anti-Ottoman” sentiments. During this period, not only were upward of a million civilians put (often quite literally) to the sword, but their ancestral territory of eastern Anatolia was permanently “cleansed.” It is as if the Jewish people had experienced the Exile and the Shoah at the same time. There’s no getting around or over this fact, which preoccupies the authors of all three books.

But with “The Armenian People From Ancient to Modern Times,” we have reason to be especially grateful to Richard Hovannisian of UCLA for editing a brace of scholarly volumes that supply the history and the context. The contributors to the first volume (“From Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century”) locate Armenians as an ancient people living in the area bounded roughly by modern Iran, Georgia and Turkey. The Armenians were well-known to those who took part in the Greek-Persian contest and to those who marched with Alexander’s Macedonians. The Greek historian Xenophon had much to say about them.

As the centuries passed, two things occurred that prevented the Armenians from going the way of the Babylonians and the Bactrians: They evolved their own script, and they adopted Christianity. (They have a claim, indeed, to be the first nation to have done so.) This gave them a distinct identity in the region, an identity they had to defend with some tenacity against Zoroastrianism and other potential conquerors. In succeeding phases, Armenian independence had to be upheld against the rise of Islam and the split between Roman and Byzantine Catholicism. Add to this the commanding position they held across the confluence of trade routes, and you have a picture of a tough, self-conscious and enterprising people. Having managed to survive even the Mongol invasions of Tamerlane, they may have felt that providence had them in its safekeeping.

But, as Peter Balakian and Vahakn Dadrian in their different ways tell us, the combination of 20th century racist nationalism with modern warfare was almost too much for them. All Armenian history now has to be viewed as leading up to, and away from, the organized attempt to bring it to an end.

Balakian has probably written the most accessible account for the new or general reader, though Dadrian’s “The History of the Armenian Genocide” and the excellent essay by Christopher Walker in Volume 2 of Hovannisian’s work are first-rate supplements for those inspired to pursue the subject.

In “The Black Dog of Fate,” Balakian has written a sort of Armenian “Roots.” Growing up as a boy in the New Jersey of the 1960s, he offers a picture (Philip Roth without the self-abuse) of a suburbia with a secret. Keen on becoming an all-American, he was aware that his aunts and grandmothers were somehow different. They would use strange oaths and knew mysterious recipes. They had a non-American memory. His poetic interests, and the happy coincidence of an aunt who worked as a literary editor, led him to explore the rich tradition of Armenian writing and, later, to mount an investigation into the fate of his ancestors.

At first, he was resistant to what he feared would be tribalism and parochialism (he has an amusing account of meeting Saroyan, and of finding him a bit of a folkloric blowhard), but he soon found that the weight of history was not to be escaped. The black dog of the title comes from an Armenian parable, suggesting that fate is capricious. But the truth is more forbidding. What was done to the Armenians was calculated and deliberate.

One reason I have always defended the rights of holocaust-deniers is this: Arguing against them is good exercise. The Turkish authorities maintain a blank wall of denial about the genocide of the Armenians. They are supported in this, shamefully, by the U.S. government and by a cohort of degraded and purchased “historians.” How, from first principles, can the wall be breached?

We have, first, the dispatches to President Wilson from his ambassador in Turkey, Henry Morgenthau. The word “genocide” had not been invented in 1915, so this distinguished envoy had to employ the more robust term “race murder” to describe what he saw going on. The eyewitness account of just one of his consuls, Leslie A. Davis, detailing what happened in the single province of Harput is enough to make the case in microcosm. (Davis’ story was published a few years ago as “The Slaughterhouse Province.” The accounts of survivors of the Harput race murder, Balakian’s grandparents among them, display a unanimity and consistency in their accounts that are hard to laugh off.)

Friends of mine making a film 10 years ago found the mass graves in the desert exactly where survivors had told them they would be. And I can add an empirical finding of my own. The Turks tended to use Kurdish auxiliaries for the actual butchery of the Armenians, just as the Nazis mobilized Ukrainians and Latvians for their wartime atrocities. In Kurdistan a few years ago, I interviewed several Kurdish leaders who volunteered the complicity of their people in the massacre of Armenians and were very apologetic about it. Who would own up to such a crime if it had never been committed? Would that the Turkish government had half the grace of its maltreated subjects.

Physical obliteration is matched by an attempt at cultural erasure. But not all the books and atlases of the period have been destroyed, and even contemporary Turkish texts delineated the areas of Armenia that have been airbrushed from later schoolbooks and guides.

Yellowing photographs and documents in the Balakian family perform the much harder task of supplying names and faces and stories in this welter of atrocity and amnesia. Confronted with the overwhelming evidence of what happened to his grandmother’s family, Balakian reserves his most profound disgust and resentment for those--the tame academics and time-serving lobbyists--who still cynically maintain that there is no case for Turkey to answer. As the young American inheritor of the narrative puts it: “My grandmother made a modern statement before modernity caught up with what happened to her and to Armenia. In the closing of her suit filed against the Turkish government in 1919, she wrote: I assert that the Turkish government is responsible for the losses and injuries, because I am a human being and under the support of international law.”

In the retrieved testimony of this widowed, orphaned, dispossessed and exiled lady, who, as her grandson proudly says, “carried the voice of her witness from the old world to the new,” we can feel a stinging reproach that that 1919 promise of international law (the “Fourteen Points” of Woodrow Wilson, the letter of the treaties and the code of the League of Nations)--to say nothing of international justice--remains unkept.