"The Ash Tree" - a novel about the aftermath in America of the Armenian Genocide

The Ash Tree by Daniel Melnick is being published around the centennial of the April 24th beginning of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, with its new release date of May 15, 2015. Its cover painting with its frayed and white-washed frame is by the author’s wife, Jeanette Arax Melnick, and the novel is based partly on the lives of the Arax family. Combining history and fictionalized memoir, The Ash Tree is an important, beautifully written novel. Available from Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, and independent bookstores – or order from connect@westofwestcenter. For further information, see www.theashtree.net.    Price: $25. ISBN: 9780981854762.

The novel tells a timeless story of the romance between an immigrant and a young American woman. They meet and marry and raise their family in the sunbaked Central Valley of California. Armen Ararat is a poet, a farmer, and then a businessman, who escaped from the nightmarish history of Armenians in Turkey early in the twentieth century. From 1930 to the 1970s, Armen and Artemis, his Armenian-American wife born in Connecticut, raise two sons and a daughter. The Ararats grow into vivid, quintessentially American characters in this novel of survival, new life, and heartbreak.

Artemis and her daughter, Juliet, occupy the center of this world otherwise dominated by men. The dynamic, driven mother achieves a force and authority that challenge the limitations of her time and place. The daughter strives to develop into a forceful young woman in her own right, perceptive, artistic, and more at ease within herself than her mother.

Tigran is the older son – cautious, intense, solid – and Garo is the mercurial and risk-taking younger brother, forcing Tigran to try to protect him more than once against his will. Garo is passionate and charismatic. Large in spirit, he fearlessly embraces life, and he struggles against – yet is baffled by – the recoil of cruelty and evil he encounters. The family discovers that America is not the mythologized land of opportunity but is beset by the evils of poverty, war, racism, censorship, drugs, and corruption. The Ararats’ turbulent story reveals universal truths about the struggles of countless families, immigrant and native alike.

All five members of the Ararat family find their voices here and share telling this epic story of their striving to rise from the ashes of the past. The story moves back and forth among them: the immigrant husband and father, the powerful wife, their daughter, and finally the two sons. As the family rebounds in the aftermath of the genocide of Armenians in 1915, they realize themselves in the fertile yet hostile landscape of Central California, only for tragedy to find the Ararats again.

May 22, 2014: Andranik in the deleted prologue of my new novel "The Ash Tree"

May 22, 2014: Here is the cancelled prologue to my new novel about the Armenian-American family of Armen Ararat and his wife, Artemis – from the time of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 to 1972. The novel’s title is “The Ash Tree,” and it will be published April 24, 2015, on the hundredth anniversary of the begining of the Armenian Genocide; a description of the novel is to be found at www.theashtree.net .

Andranik in America – August, 1924

            I have been pummeled, shot at, imprisoned, and sometimes now I can hardly breathe. I am fifty-nine, and my time is coming to an end, sooner rather than later. There remain, of course, moments of life for me. After the Great War, I met an intelligent woman by the name of Nevart, and two years ago I married her – in Paris, lyrical bittersweet Paris, almost forty years to the day after my first wife died in Anatolia.

Paris is bittersweet because it is the site of our defeat five years ago – in 1919, when Wilson’s so-called Peace Conference gave us no promise of a homeland and no justice for the Ottoman massacre of our people. Naturally, we were not alone in being betrayed at Versailles. Yet we Armenians still idealize Paris, as much as do the Slavs. And we love the French language, the language of Racine and Rousseau, of Baudelaire and Verlaine – beloved by our great poets Siamanto and Varoujan, whose works are filled with echoes of them. In 1915, both men were murdered by the Turks.

So a breath of time ago I was married in bitter beautiful Paris. Soon we moved to California to aid my asthma, and I walk now beneath Fresno’s summer sun. Its fury beats down on me, through to the bone. I call it my constitutional, trudging about my backyard. A grey-green eucalyptus towers over one side of the yard, and a Fresno ash tree with its blood-red blossoms borders the other. Beyond the yard, I look out at parched, wind-blown fields, which stretch to the Sierras. The earth here is as hard as iron and dry as the moon. But when worked by spade and shovel, it can be planted with vines, which once irrigated yield tasty grapes. Many Armenian farmers make the attempt, pitting their knowledge and scant cash against the heat. My Fresno yard, though, remains hardpan. What energy I have, I devote to my wife and to my writing. In the shade by the side of our house we do, however, grow our purple basil, parsley, and mint, bushy and aromatic in terracotta pots. We can’t help it.

            The mornings I spend at my desk writing these words or sometimes in my basement workshop, where I build chairs and tables, for as a boy I was an apprentice to my father, a carpenter. I remember admiring the wonderful form of his tables, the perfect lines of their slender legs, the elegance of his carving, and also the clarity of his instructions. From the age of twelve to eighteen I worked toward whatever mastery I could achieve in his workshop. When I was seventeen, I met a short, tender village girl, and I courted her with some dedication. We married in April of 1882. Soon our son grew within my wife. When the time arrived in all its wonder, she died giving birth. Two days later the infant also died.

            Yes, a carpenter. My chairs are like my father’s, lithe and simple. A few weeks after my little loved ones died, my father walked into our kitchen, his head bloodied and his eyes blackened. A Turk had taken offense for no reason, in the way racists do. For a long week, I silently watched and memorized the perpetrator’s habits, his haunts, his walks. One evening, I followed him through a barren field and called out that I was the son of Ozanian. I beat the Turk to death. Soon after, I walked away from our village.

Walking has been my destined mode of transportation. Even in childhood, we would walk the hours west from our Sivas village to Ozan, our ancestral home. When at eighteen I walked away from our village, for weeks I walked west hundreds of miles, finally reaching Constantinople. It was in 1883, and I joined the Armenian national liberation movement. After a decade, I found myself in Kars, where I was imprisoned for being a proud man and an Armenian. I am among those who have witnessed atrocious murder, and I have also been one who is willing to return blow for blow. When the Turkish prison guard assigned me clean-up, I swept with the stiff-bristled broom and suddenly turned to thrust it in his face. Blinded, he was unable to fend off my blows or prevent my escape. I walked two hundred miles from Kars to Sassun in order to join the Armenian General Serob; neither of us felt we had any choice but to defend the Armenians of Anatolia from Sultan Abdul Hamid’s slaughter of our people. And when Turks assassinated Serob in 1899, I searched the region with my men and tracked down the assassin, General Khalil, whose throat I slit.

Two years later, on foot, we snuck into the Armenian Holy Apostolic Monastery in the Turkish-occupied city of Mush. We were only a few score of men, but we held the Monastery for nineteen days, and we involved the European Consuls in our negotiations. That was our mission: to broadcast to the Europeans the tragic fate of the Armenians under Ottoman rule. On the last night, we dressed in captured Turkish uniforms and escaped through a secret door. I was first out. I was dressed in an officer’s uniform and walked calmly through the Turks’ lines, addressing soldiers in formal Turkish. Little did they know I was not one of their officers but their enemy Andranik Ozanian.

 When I fought in the Balkan War in 1912, the Bulgarian general said that “General Andranik was brave to the point of madness.” I dispute that, for all I did was to walk shoulder to shoulder with my men. Even as the men around me were struck down by on-coming fire, I would charge ahead; my aim was always to teach them to become aware of the origins of fire, its force and direction, to dodge it, and if possible to turn fire on itself. I had already lost everything more than once; I had seen what death brought down on the innocent, even an infant a few days old. Always I tried to relieve my men of fear. I would go among them, speak quietly, and ask after their families, their feelings and fears. In my austere way, I tried to be kind and loyal. “What did you eat this morning?” I asked, and “What did you dream last night?”

            This California valley reminds me of Anatolia. The starkly out-jutting Sierra Mountains, the stretches of tinder-dry brown earth, the interruptions of irrigated green, and the small towns like villages – it brings back our homeland. Anatolia, with its ancient Armenian farms and villages, is a similar patchwork of irrigated vines and blank dirt, of outcropping hills and hardened plains with a looming horizon of mountains. I would tramp across those plains with my men, whether in an army of thousands or a score of partisans, all of them ready to fight with courage and intelligence to defend our people. Never will I forget the years of fighting side by side with them. Life would be worthless to me if I had not pit myself in that way against fate and death.

Struggling to save Armenian lives in 1915, I led my army against the Turks, who were driving us from our lands and murdered 1.5 million of us. Using all our cunning and desperation, we freed Van from the Turkish siege in 1915, and in 1916 we fought against them in Bitlis. In 1918, I was made governor of all the Armenian cities of west of the Arax River, and we helped hundreds of thousands of Armenians to escape to the east as again the Turks attacked and sought to obliterate us. In those years, the political leaders of Armenia on both the right and left capitulated to the Young Turks and then to the Ataturk regime. Finally, they agreed to the worthless Batum Treaty, which created a shrunken Armenian nation. My army and I held out to the southeast in Zangezur until the end of 1918, but then bitter winter descended.

I first came to the United States in 1919. Wilson’s government would not see me or any other official from Armenia. Even now, if only America helped, the little we need is not too much to ask, and we could then raise a sufficient army to defend our now tiny nation. Across America, I have spoken to filled auditoriums in Boston, in New York, in Detroit and Chicago, and as far west as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Fresno. To Armenians and non-Armenians alike, I described how the Turks had expelled our people from Anatolia, how since 1896 they had murdered two million of us; over these years entire lost provinces of our homeland have been wiped out, and the legions of the disappeared call out to us: Do not believe the deceptions of the Turks; they will honor no treaty. We must protect our vulnerable people. By early 1920, I raised half a million dollars for our refugees.

For the sake of my lungs, I have now returned to California. In the afternoon, I walk the few blocks to our downtown Armenian café called the Asparez Club, where I sit by the window and quietly sip black coffee. Around me, Armenians gossip and play cards. These men fled from Turkey’s machine of death and now are mere shadows of themselves, provincial imitations of the Armenian life in Constantinople, Harput, Van, and Yerevan. Of course, there is Lulegian the publisher of our little newspaper and the gifted actor Zarafian, but it is as if they all pretend, as if they are acting rather than living, and then there are the boasting farmers and packing-house bosses, who worship the American god of money and whose loud voices fill the club. In this city named Fresno, the ash tree, these self-important men, leaders only by virtue of their wealth, come to my table to pay homage while I quietly sit and read Lulegian’s rag of a newspaper.

Maybe the young will rise from these ruins to save us. There is big Aram Saroyan, who at twenty years old is studying in law school; he’s a genuinely Armenian character, yet American too. There is also little Armen Ararat, twenty-four, both a farmer and a poet. He speaks such literate Armenian, it is as if we are talking together in the shadow of the Galata Tower in Constantinople, two witnesses to the disaster. But these young men are weak, tender shoots struggling to survive in the blasting heat of the intolerable Valley. They too pretend, act rather than live, though my heart is touched by their struggle in this place of no culture, no history, no hope. A few of my fellow soldiers have also found their way to this city of dust and ashes. On some Sundays, I visit with Colonel Dikran Haroutian, who helped to defend Harput. His wife’s cooking transports me back to vanished Anatolia, and there is his daughter Artemis, who is so pale yet so sharp as she assesses me with her big Renaissance eyes. In a better time and place, she could well become a colonel herself. 

April 24, 2014 - the 99th anniversary of the Armenian genocide

The Prime Minister of Turkey, who is head of the ruling Islamic party, has recently expressed his commiseration with the Armenian grandchildren of the survivors of the 1915 “massacres” – which he does not call a genocide. What is bad news and what is good here? The bad news is of course that the long-time ruler of Turkey will not use the term genocide, though he does speak of a million and more dead; the word genocide carries a political weight which is too great for him to bear at least this year. The good news is that the long-time ruler of Turkey has directly addressed the great loss of Armenian lives in 1915 when Turkey was under Ottoman rule, and this means that next year’s centennial of these deaths may well provide the occasion for added recognition and rapprochement.

The burden borne by the grandchildren of genocide survivors haunts all Armenians, even the most complacent, and it provides the theme of much Armenian literature over these one hundred years. It is particularly appropriate then, though unfortunately still too tentative, for Erdogan to address himself to those now fully mature Armenian grandchildren. Their significant burden has seldom been noted by Turkish authorities.

It is this burden carried by the children and particularly by the grandchildren of the genocide which has loomed large in my own thought and imagination. It has led me to write a novel I’ve just completed, “The Ash Tree.” The book is partly a fictionalized version of the story of my wife’s family, for her father – Aram Arax – was a witness in Istanbul in 1915, and his memories form a crucial inheritance for Jeanette and her brothers.

That story has been explored in her nephew Mark’s memoir, in other fiction, and in essays; what I’ve tried to do is to tell it particularly from the point of view of the women in the story. The mother and the daughter are two passionate and lively women, who experience in equal measure the tragedy and the comedy of this story.

I’ll try to describe more of "The Ash Tree" in future posts; I’ve been away from this blog due to illness, but am returning.

Aris Janigian's This Angelic Land

My review of Aris Janigian's new novel, This Angelic Land, appeared in The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) in Sunday's edition of the paper, August 12, 2012. Here's the link to the review: http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2012/08/in_aris_janigians_this_angelic.html.

Acts of Terror and Contrition: a nuclear fable about Israel - now available.

If you have read the excerpts from Acts of Terror and Contrition and find them (or the following description of my new novel) intriguing, you may buy the book by clicking on the cover image to the side here, on the title to this post, or on the Amazon.com link at the end of this post.


Acts of Terror and Contrition is both a political novella about Israel and a literary thriller telling the unofficial story of Israeli responses to Saddam Hussein’s missile attacks during the 1990 Iraq War – and the possibility that his missiles might carry nuclear warheads “to burn Israel to the ground,” as Tarik Aziz said then. This nuclear fable presents the secret history of the Mossad Operations Chief’s covert threats to force world governments to face what is at stake should Iraq launch a nuclear attack.


Desperate and unyielding in the face of Saddam’s threat, the Chief, Arie Schneider, puts a renegade plan into place, even as he confronts the machinations of the deeply-divided Israeli government ministers as well as his staff members’ rebellion against the extremity of his plan. Shadowing all this is the presence of the first Intifada, an Arab mother, and particularly her Islamist son, who plots his own act of terror. Enmeshed in the nuclear crisis, Arie must yet face his troubled wife, their two children, and above all his father, Rami, a holocaust survivor and retired diplomat. In opposition to the dangerous extremity of Arie’s plan, the old man summonses all his wisdom and his wily, struggling will to confront his son.

Acts is a literary novella, a version of the sacrifice of Isaac, about the unrecorded acts of terror and contrition which arise in 1990 within this circle of characters as their lives move toward a powerful and compelling climax. It is simultaneously a political thriller propelling us through dangerous close-calls and suspenseful political decisions in foreign capitals. It is also a powerful alternative history presenting a secret history of Israel’s part in the Desert Storm War. Above all, the novella explores the dread and opposition human beings feel toward the danger of nuclear radiation and nuclear weapons.

Eight stories of the nineteen-eighties accompany the novella, and these works record more personal “acts of terror and contrition” during the decade of Reagan and the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories cast a stark light – both ironic and sympathetic – upon the resinous hearts of these characters feeding what flames upon the troubled nights of the eighties. Both the novella and the stories in Acts of Terror and Contrition testify to the fraying connections between the personal and political, national identity and common humanity. And just as politics and identity are entwined here, so too are the forms the stories take: political fiction meshes with a thriller; raw slices of life yield the wholeness of a family chronicle; Americans come face to face with a range of strangers and specters; headlines haunt works of literary fiction.

In the first story after the novella, the wry secular Jewish owner of a New York toy company is visited one night in 1980 (Einstein's centennial year) by the spirit of the genius, and together they mourn the part the Jewish physicist played in developing the nuclear bomb. In another story set later in the eighties, a young professor creates a haunted, incendiary poem in response to the film “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” as he faces an inner breakdown before the needs of wife, mentor, department chair, and a famed visiting Russian poet. In the third and fourth stories, two elderly characters – one an Armenian-American, the other the Greek widow of an eminent German-Jewish expatriate pianist – seek the energy and clarity to go on in the face of maddening infirmities and the incomprehension of others. In the fifth story, a former political activist takes his family on a European vacation in 1984, and on an Italian train he faces his youthful double, a fiery student anarchist. The final three stories chronicle the life of a multi-ethnic American painter born in the forties, from his traumatic childhood, through his youthful trespasses, to his difficulty in finding balance – of communicating – in marriage and beyond; the third story in the trilogy portrays a last chance he has to break the cycle of failed communication and to right himself as a father to his teen-aged son, who himself struggles to maintain his humanity in the America of 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

You may get a copy of the book from Amazon.com via the following link:




My next post will be an attempt to explore some works of certain precursors of the modern novel.

Third excerpt from Acts of Terror and Contrition - a political novel about Israel

I wanted to mention how moved I am by the Israeli novelist David Grossman's vivid, sad, and honest new novel To the End of the Land.

Here is the the third excerpt from my political novel about Israel and unrecorded acts of terror and contrition during the first Iraq War. An earlier version of "The Old City" scene toward the end of this excerpt appeared in the journal Ararat, but the novel has yet to be published (if you have any thoughts about how to go about achieving that, please do contact me via Comments):

The little girl sat on her grandfather’s lap, and Arie sat in an easy chair next to the couch.

“I’m coming to get you, Gily,” Rami said as he put his creased hands up to his forehead, like horns, and wiggled them at the seven year old who laughed wildly on his lap. Elena stood watching her daughter and father-in-law; in her hands she held glasses of Slivovitz and ice for the two men.

“When you are ninety-five, Grandpa,” Gily said, “will you go poof?” She threw her hands up in a wide circle.

Rami laughed, repeating her wide arc with his free hand. “Who knows? That’s a long time from now.” Rami’s wiry frame, seated on the couch, seemed undaunted by his years. His face was tanned and wrinkled, its expression off-hand yet serious, smiling except for the eyes which were piercing beneath wire-rimmed glasses. His hair had turned from black to white in the last ten years.

After Elena gave the men their drinks and took her daughter with her into the kitchen, the father and son raised their glasses. “To peace,” Rami said in a ritual gesture.

“Did you solve this afternoon’s problem?” Rami asked.

“No. It only gets worse.”

“‘Everything we’ve built was built on sand.’ Before I go poof, I hope I won’t have to feel that again.”

“Knowing you, you won’t,” Arie said. “I remember the Singer: ‘Dust thou art, to dust returneth,’ et cetera.”

“I only knew that sort of despair in the forties. In the camp. You feel guilty at being a man.”

Gily carried a dish of flat bread to the dining table at the end of the room, and Elena followed her with a bowl of yogurt.

“Just five minutes,” she said and then overheard her husband speaking.

“The camp still haunts us, after almost half a century,” he said. Elena put down the yogurt and took her daughter from the room.

“To me,” Rami said, “the camp is a lens to see beneath the surface of things. Not only Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. There are the labor camps, the detention camps around the globe, our Palestinian camps. Even the kibbutzim.”

“You put that with the others!”

“Each reminds you of the need to endure. To face death and yet to survive. It’s the Jewish legacy. To live in order to explore the kibbutz of death.”

Rami took a long sip of the plum brandy. He eyed his son and nodded. “In Auschwitz, each train load of new victims was a revelation. As they moved closer to the selections, they were stripped of all signs of ordinary life. The Eternal Jew stood naked before us. When I saw that, it seemed to me that only facts retained value. The bits of food, the births, the weather. For months, that’s how we survived; we noted facts. Germans and Germany we mentioned as little as possible.”

“You survived,” Arie said automatically, “and months later I was born.”

“You were a sign to your mother, that we had come through.”

Arie sat silently in his chair. Amid the gassings, Rami and Magda had joined, with a lust to survive, even before their liberation from Auschwitz—and he had been born, a jettison of futurity, compounded of ash and lust, gas and the flame of hope.

“Dinner is ready,” Elena said. She and Gily brought in the rest of the meal. Father and son rose, and Rami gestured for Arie to go first. Then the white haired survivor seemed to dance after his son to the dinner table.


Her simple song flowed through twists of tune, turns, which poured out as if revolving weightlessly in space: “Baruch ata Adonai.” Elena stood as she sang the prayer before High Holiday candles, and then she sat down to serve the meal. There was lamb roasted with garlic and pepper; there were the potatoes, carrots and dried apricots, a dish from Europe which Arie’s mother used to prepare—and then two salads, one of lettuce and the other of finely chopped vegetables.

“I’ll be glad to see Moshe home,” she said. She passed the plates of the food to her father-in-law, her husband, and her daughter.

“Yes, Friday,” Arie said. “I wish I could go to the airport with you.”

“You must. He’s counting on it.”

“A situation is developing. I know I won’t be able to make it.” His wife was silent.

“I can go with you, Elena,” Rami said. “Why not?”

“Moshe will be filled with his trip. Six weeks, my God.” Her eyes began to hint of tears, and she turned to Arie. “He’ll want to tell you about it.”

“I’m going to watch the planes,” Gily said as she ate. “I’m going to see Moshe land.”

“Yes,” Arie said, “you and Mama and Grandpa are going Friday afternoon to see Moshe land. He will tell you all about Los Angeles and Uncle Morris and at supper he will tell me too.” Arie turned to Elena. “It’s a problem. I won’t even be attending Yom Kippur services.”

“Do you regret that?” she said loudly. Then she asked: “Why do we celebrate, Arie?”

“What! We do because we do! In our own way.”

“But we are agnostics. We don’t believe, yet we observe without believing.”

“Yes, without believing.”

“And this doesn’t bother you? It should.”

“It’s the way things are.”

“No, pardon me, we should be bothered.”

“Pardon me, but no. It is just assumed. We are Israelis, we are Jews, and so we accept these customs. It is our identity. No fuss, no fanfare, just like breathing.”

“We don’t have to believe as the orthodox do,” the old man said, “in order to be Israelis. It’s only human.” He smiled at his son’s wife.

“Yes,” Elena’s voice rose into a clear soprano. “I know we should celebrate even when we don’t believe; we must. But I’m sure we should also be bothered by it.”

“Don’t fight,” Gily began to chant, the little girl’s voice bright and relentless. “Don’t fight. Don’t fight.”

“We’re not fighting,” Arie cried out, his hands slapping down on the table. His father stared sharply at him.

“How dare you shout?” Elena said. Her voice was high and pure.

“How dare I! Israel is about to become a battlefield again. The world is about to break apart at the seams. And you tell me I must be bothered by observing the holy days. How dare I!”

“You’re a tyrant,” Elena hissed in a whisper. “Ask your father! You blindly shout and oppress us. You don’t care a bit about your family. God help Moshe and Gily. You don’t care about any human being except yourself. A human being, my God. What is an Arab to you but dirt? You’re a fascist!”

Rami should not have been there. He pitched his voice rudely at them, like a buffoon: “Not bad for an American girl! What do you say about the Arabs, Arie? Are you a fascist or not?”

Elena’s face blanched.

“To hell with the Arabs,” Arie shouted, but then his voice grew quiet: “I did not mean to shout. I’ll tell you why I’m upset, but later, not here in front of Gily. Gilia, Gilia, how are you?” He glanced at his father; then with eyes half shut, he turned to his wife. “Elena, we must survive, we must.”

“Yes,” she said quietly, yet her voice floated away from them. “We must, Arie. But why—if we could know why. Why do we suffer, Arie? If we could only know.” She reached over the table to soothe Gily, who was staring terrified from her chair.


Arie lay on the bed, a crimson bathrobe belted around him. The new apartment’s wall-stucco was already cracking at its prefabricated edges. Through the window, Arie saw a shower of stars luminous above the cypress on the hillcrest. Elena was finishing the dinner dishes, and Gily had been put to bed. Before Rami had left, he had returned again to his memories.

“I’ve told you about the Jewish capos. Each of them had a motto. I will survive. Meaning I will never be selected. I remember especially the overseer in our hut, an impossible person. Well-mannered, religious, quiet, and slovenly, unpredictable, treacherous, murderous.” His father had talked on, and Arie did not tell Rami more about the crisis at Intelligence.

Now, alone in the bedroom of his apartment, Arie was drawn down into the flood of his day, its chaos and mystery. He reached out to each intricacy of the problem and tried to thrust past it. Stretching now full length on the bed, he held his body perfectly still.

Elena opened the door. As she changed into her nightgown, Arie described the day’s events to her, the murder of Ezra in Paris, the report from Eli in London, the call to the Prime Minister, and finally the suspicion that America was hiding the details of Iraq’s threat to Israel, that the region was headed for the brink and was losing control over the movement toward war, and that the global powers would allow Israel to be the battlefield. Elena opened the bedcovers, stretched under the sheet, and both of them lapsed into silence. Arie did not voice his dread that amid the chaos of deceptions, nuclear bombs would obliterate the land of Israel. He lifted his knees and legs to get under the covers and stretched by her, his head against her red hair. He pressed for shelter against the silent woman and kissed her gently. Quietly she murmured her opposition, as she reached her hands into his curly hair.

As they moved into the postures of love, he smiled and called her his name for her. “Sheba,” he called to her. They had walked beneath the canopy of trees in the Judean Hills and knelt together by a cool spring which must have flowed there for thousands of years since before the time when David sang, and they touched their hands cool and wet from the spring water gently to each other’s limbs and joined their bodies beneath the grove of gnarled and ancient trees. Finally memory gave way to the present moment.

Elena held Arie sleeping in her arms. But sleep was withheld from her, and her thin face glowed in the light from the stars.

Before him, Arie saw the cinder-covered plain, where he lay. Nearly naked men and women walked past him, crisscrossing the empty earth. Their bodies and those scattered about the earth glowed white. Next to him he recognized Ezra, bent and bleeding. Arie’s heart went out to him, and as he lifted him in his arms, Ezra crumpled red and black into a wisp of carbon. The wandering bodies crowded around him; he saw their heads were shaved and their bodies were the bodies of animals. A light powder of cinders began to envelop them all like fog. An incessant sound hissed in his ears like the sound of a factory whistle or an approaching rocket.

Arie jerked away from Elena. The telephone was ringing, and he reached to the bedside table to answer the sanitized line.

“Mr. Schneider.” It was the night operations officer.

“Yes.” Arie’s mouth was dry.

“There is a priority message, in code, I’ve processed from Dan Reisman in Washington.”

“Read it.”

“Now.”

“Yes. The line is safe. Read it to me.”

“‘New intelligence from Pentagon contact—Revised American war plans—Baghdad now strategic target, possibility of nuclear arms use in region—Barton killed 9 AM Washington by unknown assailant—Await instructions.’“

“No one,” Arie stood naked by the bed, “no one is to see or hear of this message until further instructions from me. I’ll drive down now.”

Arie dropped the receiver onto the phone, and he began to dress. Elena sat up on the bed, as he dressed groggily, with automatic movements. Arie leaned over and kissed her forehead.

“Be careful, Arie,” she said. “Will there be war?”

He coughed and mumbled in a hollow voice, “I don’t know.” When he drove out of the parking lot and down the hill toward Jerusalem, it was half past eleven, and the night sky was pale with a spattering of stars.

* * *

It was a village, only vast and breathtaking; Haim drove through the Latin Quarter in the Parisian twilight and swung his small Fiat through the late afternoon traffic, searching for an opening in the flow of cars heading down Boulevard Saint-Michel toward the Seine. He made the decision to wheel and intrude, and pedestrians popped across the pavement as drivers accelerated. His eyes swept over the pedestrians he passed, the kiosks, the movie marquee near the corner of Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain, the crowded cafés. As much a carnival as it seemed, this village for the bourgeoisie and its fringe was a deception.

There was a parking space on the quay just to the left of the corner fountain, and Haim shot into it. Clouds had begun to threaten rain over-head, and up the Seine loomed the gothic flank of Note Dame. Scores of pedestrians streamed with him over the plaza, stepping around motorcycles and young people who lolled beneath the jutting figures spouting water from the fountain. The costs of this illusory village spoke from the faces he saw, from the corners of the mouths, the eyes: such were the costs of the Parisian past, its imperialism and violence. The blood of each generation had seeped into the streets of the student quarter, the oldest in Paris, so that the wind-blown, river odor seemed to carry the scent of blood. Haim crossed Saint Mutual and walked into the labyrinth of St. Severin streets, walkways with drains like sewers down the middle. These streets without cars housed small restaurants run by Greeks, Palestinians, and the Tunisian Jews.

He cut down an alley to a tiny Tunisian restaurant next to a cinema showing a Palestinian film on the latest unrest. Once inside by the stove, he saw the stacks of red sausages, the half-cooked hamburgers, the sandwiches of tuna, boiled potato, hot peppers, and olives. The odor of charred lamb and semolina for couscous, of cumin and garlic, was in the air. A man waved him to the back. Haim sat down at the furthest table by the short, old, Tunisian Jew, then unbuttoned his coat, and passed his hand over his short-cropped hair. The Tunisian clapped his hands at a waiter who brought flat bread, olives, mashed eggplant with garlic, and a bottle of anise-flavored Arak. He insisted that Haim eat and drink, and the Israeli sipped from a glass of the liquor and tasted the Middle Eastern food. After a minute, the host began to murmur that there was something he should tell his guest.

“What have you seen?” Haim said with calm, careful politeness.

“It’s very bad...the Iraqis,” his voice drifted into silence.

“Yes, I know.”

“Now, Nissim and Ezra...”

“Yes.” Such was the numbing cost of their work. “Please, tell me what you know.”

“Your man, Jaeger, is in the Quarter,” he let out his news. “At noon, he was seen near the Etoile. Now he is holed up in the rue Cujas.”

It had begun to rain lightly when Haim sprinted up Rue Saint-Jacques, past the walls of the old college. He turned down rue Cujas, and he saw the hotel which the Tunisian had specified. He slipped into a small bookstore and glanced at the hotel across the street. In its narrow glassed-in parlor, a thin, unshaven, blond man sat surrounded by what Haim took to be a half-dozen black-haired Palestinians watching a soccer game on television. After a few minutes, Jaeger threw on a jacket, took an umbrella, and drifted outside.

At the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel, Haim was almost upon him. The American—furling his umbrella—dodged down the street, an athlete jogging in the rain. In the darkening twilight, Haim flew after him, plunging through the pedestrians, racing past the Place de la Sorbonne with its dripping bust of Descartes overseeing the chaos of tourists and students escaping the rain. As he ran down toward the Seine, the Arak pulsed through Haim, insulating him against the pain in his legs and belly and the tight hammering of the holster against his shoulder. What mattered now were not computer codes or Iraqi missiles tipped with nuclear bombs, though he would find out what he could. What mattered was that Ezra had been murdered, that Ezra’s wife and son in Tel Aviv were mourning at this moment, that another Jew’s blood had been spilled, that his friend, always calm when Haim was full of fury, had been murdered by pigs, that Jaeger knew.

Soaked by rain, Haim was almost upon him again as now they fled across a bridge over the Seine. Jaeger slipped through doors into the dark of Notre Dame Cathedral. Haim sprang inside just in time to see him swerve into the darkness of an empty confessional, and he leapt toward the stall, barely grabbing Jaeger in the gloom. They tripped onto the stone floor by the gaping, gothic portal. Both of them were breathless and soaked, Jaeger spread eagled beneath. With a gun in his hand, Haim breathed out: “Questions, only a few questions about the Arc of Triumph.” They heard the noise of a priest approaching.

“Get up. Quickly.” Haim snapped. Together scrambling up, suddenly Jaeger jerked his whole weight into Haim, his knee into his groin, dodging into the dark and rain. Haim heard the echo of the man’s curse in his flat, mid-western accent. He stumbled after him into the autumn storm which earlier had swept over London, inundating Paris on its way east.

Part Two

Thursday, September 27, 1990

He left his office overlooking Jerusalem, took the elevator four floors down to the exit, and walked past the guards into the parking lot. It was after midnight, and the city lights were extinguished, giving way to a star-lit black. At midnight, he had called his father to meet. Rami was known for late hours, and the habit had grown with age. He stayed up each night until two and three.

As Arie left his office, he had called Simon’s apartment. On the eighth ring, Simon answered. His breathing was labored and barely controlled.

“Simon?”

“Arie.”

An image crossed the Intelligence Chief’s mind, of a man and a woman locked together. For an instant, he imagined their nakedness, the smell of their lovemaking, the liquid surging in her, his semen, their sweat.

“Simon, there are developments at headquarters. I need you here.”

There was mumbling in the background, and then the aide replied.

“I’ll leave immediately.”

“There will be instructions for you.”

As Arie hung up, he was certain that Rachel was there: his loyal aide coupling with this brilliant and intense policy analyst.

Arie’s gray sports car drove now toward the city to a street bordering Nachlat Shiva. Rami lived alone on the edge of the district, in a street of two story residences with walls of stone, wrought iron balconies, and vine-covered patios. Arie drove up to the walkway, and his father was standing alone at the corner. None of the orthodox was there to observe or harass them late at night. The Intelligence Chief got out of the car.

“Don’t bother,” Rami said as his son walked to the passenger door. The father swung the gray door open as if it were a bank vault or a cache of weapons. Arie stood next to him on the sidewalk, and as his father settled himself in the bucket seat the son smiled with deference at the old man and shut the car door with a click.

“Take me for a drive, Arie, around the walls of the City. There is a place I like near Zion Gate.” The son had wanted to talk in his father’s apartment, yet he kept mute. “This café is quiet and open late; it’s run by Armenians.” They drove out onto the thoroughfare heading down Shivtei Israel, past the entrance to medieval, orthodox Mea She’Arim boarded up and deserted. Father and son did not talk as the Old City wall crowded to the left. The silence between them was broken only by snatches of a song, which Rami whispered, a march in Yiddish. They drove south past Jaffa Gate toward the Mount of Zion with the tomb of David on it and the prison of Jesus nearby; inside the car, the old diplomat long removed from Europe sang softly in Yiddish:

“Kumen vet nokh undzer oyzgebenkte sho

Svet a poyk ton undzer trot: Mir zaynen do.”

The storefronts, the City wall, the clay-domed roofs of houses were blackened in the moonless night, and the City seemed barricaded. Arie parked his car near Zion Gate, and they emerged into the night. The southern wall loomed by them as they strolled toward the gate and the Old City’s Armenian quarter. The passing groups of armed Israeli soldiers—all of them assigned to police signs of Palestinian uprising—halted them only the first time to ask for identification. There were few people out.

“Jerusalem is good at claming up, father; for thousands of years, we’ve been building barricades. We’re good at shutting ourselves in.”

“Mir zaynen do,” Rami softly repeated the song’s cadence. “All week that has been running through my head. You know the Partizaner song? ‘Beneath our footsteps the earth will resound: We are here!”

They walked together down a darkened street, past tiers of homes, and Arie held his father’s arm firmly, as they came upon the café, still open among the thick walls of the Armenian district. The quarter’s closed windows and walls were lit only by the gleams of light filtering through slits in a few shutters and doors. From the café, several yards in front of them there came the noise of laughter and talk and men singing out orders for lahmajoun and beer. Here in Ararat Street there was a pungence to the narrow, walled walkway. The clay, the wood, and the latticework of iron bars absorbed the spice and scent of its inhabitants.

Rami opened the green door of the café, and father and son walked into a kitchen where several Armenian men sat impassive now on wooden chairs. A few yards away were steps down into a shallow hole in the cement floor, and at the end of this recessed area, a massive open oven was flaming. The chef stuck long poles into the arched and fiery opening. Inside the walls of the furnace cooked eggplant, chicken, and dozens of small lamb pizzas—the lahmajoun lay flat on long wooden pallets the chef pushed and then pulled from the fire.

Arie and Rami made their way through the kitchen to the side room with tables and late-night diners; as they walked, Rami resumed their conversation.

“We are here inside these walls. Like these Armenians. And our voices, our souls resound. That is Israel: thick walls and singing souls.” Rami was smiling. His eyes looked briefly askance at his son.

“Mr. Schneider,” the bald Armenian—who was fluent in Hebrew and willing to admit it—asked the white haired Jew, “a sweet perhaps?”

“No, Abrahim, the cognac is perfect. From Armenia?”

“Only for my best customers, Mr. Schneider.”

“Please, call me Rami. You know we have the same name. Call me Rami.” The warmth emanated from his father which was the mark of the man, compelling an acknowledgment even from those who otherwise would dismiss him.

They sat isolated in the back of the dining room. In the front were men playing chess and tavloo and cards, and they ate from small plates of the food from the kitchen. Two lone foreign tourists—a man and a woman—sat by the entrance, and they had a late night snack, cured and peppery basterma, rice filled grape leaves, and glasses of red wine. In back, Rami raised his glass to his son, about to sip the smoky liquid: “Mir zaynen do.” Arie could not smile, and Rami looked full at his son.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have to tell you,” Arie’s voice was cold with rage, “there is increasing evidence that the Iraqis have put nuclear payloads on their missiles. And the Americans are withholding intelligence of the threat from us. This afternoon, the CIA even cut our communications link for over an hour.”

“Why would they do this?” Rami asked, having seen a lifetime of hope and nightmare realized beyond imagining.

“Because they want war, father. Everyone is hungry for war—the Iraqis, the Americans, let alone the Europeans, the Russians, the Iranians. I don’t even mention the Palestinians. And they will all risk a nuclear exchange because they want war so badly. It is chaos. The American troops are headed for Saudi Arabia, and they carry anti-radiation gear. I’m convinced they will permit a so-called limited nuclear war in the region, if it seems ‘necessary.’ This means that Tel Aviv as well as Damascus, Riad, Baghdad—all will be incinerated.”

“It may be,” Rami’s words were tentative; they trembled like an old man’s.

“Yes, it may be,” Arie said in a furious voice. “It may finally be world war. Now, of all times,” he said bitterly, “to celebrate the end of the Cold War, there will be a nuclear war. I must act, father. I can prevent it. I have the intelligence, I have the power. There are steps I can take, and I am taking them.”

Rami lifted his glass to his lips and swallowed the remaining half of his brandy in one gulp, tilting his head back like a Russian. “Let’s take a walk,” he said to his son, but Arie did not move. He sat sipping brandy by his father in the smoky, spice-scented room. With distant fury he said: “Who would bring children into such a world?” Arie looked up, and he saw his father’s face staring blankly across the table.



“Be careful,” Rami said as they walked into David Street next to the Armenian Quarter and near the café they had left. The son reached to hold his father’s arm, yet it seemed as if Rami were leading him.

“You know what your mother used to say about you? Almost your exact words: ‘How could we bring a child into this world?’”

“She suffered. A great deal.” In the camp, she had been strapped on the conveyor belt of death. Arie’s sorrow was beyond explanation for him.

“There is a lot we don’t speak of,” Rami said. They were walking past the noisy doorways of cafés and a few occasional pedestrians, some arrayed in Arab gown and headdress, some in shirtsleeves. Then, father and son turned left onto a street of churches, walking toward the Holy Sepulcher, and Rami continued: “Your mother always suffered twice. First she would imagine the possibilities for suffering. Not that there was anything false; she did not fake feelings which were not her own. No, she suffered because she imagined her suffering before the fact. Afterwards, she suffered in reality.”

“She was self-destructive.”

“I have no contempt for suffering, whatever the form. After the camps, Magda had a harmed soul; I felt compassion for her.” They were walking toward the twin-domed Church of the Holy Sepulcher, luminous in the night. “I believe you suffer twice, like your mother. I know it hurts.” He paused as his son maintained his hold on him. “No one can live as they should when they bear a double measure of such pain. We become enraged, and this can only obscure our vision. It can disfigure our humanity.” They passed the Hill of Golgotha buried within the stone shrine and turned up the Via Dolorosa, retracing backwards the Stations of the Cross. “But you’re a strong man; I’ve seen it time and again, how much control you have. Now you must be especially alert and strong.”

“I do the best I can,” Arie said, but his voice was bitter. “Is it enough? I couldn’t stop the Palestinian rocket from killing mother.”

“What could you do?” Rami cried out. Then he said softly: “You remember when she rose in her bed and stared, as if she saw a cataclysm out over the Mediterranean, and then she fell back. Is it awful to say, Arie, my heart broke then not for her death but in gratitude because I knew she would no longer suffer so?”

They walked to the corner of Al Wad road. The peasant-looking Special Operations Chief and his white-haired father silently headed for the Temple Mount, and at the Al Wad intersection they walked by a handful of young Arabs loitering at the door of a café. The black-haired men gestured at the two anonymous Jews and spoke in bursts of Arabic.

To be continued.

Comment on the Armenian Genocide in The New York Review of Books

   In the December 9th issue of The New York Review of Books, the brilliant historian Max Hasting writes an essay entitled "The Turkish-German Jihad" in which he comments on the Armenian Genocide as follows: "One of Berlin's most egregious mistakes was its decision dramatically to accelerate investment and effort in the Baghdad railway in the midst of the struggle [of World War One]. In April 1915, an Armenian uprising against the Turks in eastern Anatolia - possibly assisted by the Russians - prompted ghastly reprisals, wholesale deportations of the Armenian people to Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotmia, and deaths variously estimated between 500,000 and two million."
   Hastings' operative phrase - "prompted ghastly reprisals" - neglects to acknowledge the role of racism in the slaughter and deportations of 1915. The genocide of Armenians was an act of racial cleansing, the tragic and horrifying culmination of two decades of racially-motivated assaults on Armenians, intent on destroying this Christian minority in Turkey.
   Hastings goes on to write that the Germans "furiously protested" on grouds that were "not humanitarian but brutally pragmatic...The Turks proved indifferent to German pleas: they were overwhelmingly preoccupied with removing a perceived strategic threat to their lines of communication with Syria and Arabia."
   Again, Hastings' key phrase - "removing a perceived strategic threat to their lines of communication" - fails to recognize the racial and religious prejudice at the core of Turkish "preoccupations," not to mention the massive - perhaps 'total' is the word - dimensions of this genocide, which began with the systematic arrest and the summary hanging or deportation of scores of Armenian community leaders in Istanbul (far removed from the railway to "Syria and Arabia") on April 24, 1915 and ended with the expunging of Armenians from Turkish life.
   While Hastings writes of the Turks' "attitude presaging that of some of Hitler's lieutenants toward the slaughter of the Jews almost thirty years later," even this characteristically understated assessment is antiseptic and again fails to find the words to acknowledge the disease of genocidal "racial cleansing" which afflicted Turkey and Germany in these two periods. It is unfortunate to encounter such a blinkered rendering of the historical record in Mr. Hastings' usually excellent writing, let alone in a publication and intellectual forum as ambitious as The Review.
N.B.: A novel of mine about the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide was published in 2015, the centenary of the Genocide. Its title is "The Ash Tree" and it portrays the lives of the family of a survivor, over half a century in America. A record of my reading the first chapter is on YouTube at  https://youtu.be/kkU5Pyx4BM8

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Preview YouTube video The Ash Tree chapter 1