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.

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

My Dinner with Andrei

Andrei Voznesensky died early this June, and his death marks the passing of a courageous, astute, and brilliantly ironic poet. His death marks, too, the ending of a cycle in Russia of humanistic struggle on his part and Pasternak’s, Yevtushenko’s, and other poets against the always eager manifestations of brutal power. Before I tell the story of  how he came to read his poetry at my university, let me offer the introduction I gave to the packed hall in 1985:

It sometimes seems as if our world and its history are marked by peculiar and profound silences - one thinks of the varieties of silence surrounding the genocides in the twentieth century. And one also thinks of the icy ahd historic silence that prevailed between the United States and the Soviet Union. It is our privilege this evening to meet and hear a person whose art is helping to break the odd and terrible silence plaguing our era. Andrei Voznesensky's voice as a poet cuts through the silence by means of a wide and brilliant accumulation of strengths. And these strengths make him perhaps the most distinguished Russian poet in the generation after the death of Boris Pasternak, who was his mentor. Voznesensky's poetry joins a scrupulous private lyricism to public themes. "I Am Goya" is a poem about the horror of the world at war; "The Call of the Lake" is about how to face the helpless silence of the Holocaust - and in each we feel the force of the poet tapping a deep inner response to the enormities which disfigure history. The joining of a scrupulous intensity to public themes is to be heard also in the sharp irony, sadness, and humor combined in poems like "A Chorus of Nymphs" about Soviet life or "American Buttons" about our own. And a poem like "Chagall's Cornflowers" - written in the mid-seventies, about the art of the Russian-Jewish emigre painter - is another revelation of the courage of Voznesensky's art, in the face of much unspoken anti-semitism. Indeed as his critical and independent imagination ranges over the twentieth century and both Russian and American societies, this courageous artist should remind us of the degrees of courage and of cowardice in our own lives. Our visitor has written that "the task of the poet today is to look deep inside man," and as his art prompts us to delve into whether we are alive or somehow dead at the core, we feel indeed grateful for those poems Voznesensky has written which are full not only of beauty and wit but of what Robert Lowell called his "sorrowing sympathy," his understanding - as in "Nostalgia for the Present" - or our shared human struggle.

I was so moved by his poetry reading in Cleveland in 1980, five years before, that my imagination remained haunted for months afterward, and I felt compelled to write some fiction about it. The story grew beyond the specific circumstances of the reading (the passionate urgency emerging from this ironic man as he read “I Am Goya” or the irritating dead-pan of the reader of the translations), and finally the story grew to imagine ways in which an American college teacher might, too, feel haunted by his society and history; hence the story’s title: “Your Name is Hiroshima.”

In early 1985, the poet was visiting Oberlin College near Cleveland, and with a certain urgency of my own, I mailed my story to him. I did not hear from him and learned he had left Oberlin for New York. In late June, at 6 a.m., the phone rang, and I heard a clear, penetrating voice say: “This is Andrei Voznesensky. I received your story. I like it very much and not because it’s about me. I want to meet you. Let me visit this fall. I can arrange to read at your university.”

On a frigid December morning, I met him at the Cleveland airport, and we did not stop talking. He ate a lunch of lamb, salad, and good bread with my wife, Jeanette, and me in our cottage-like house in Cleveland Heights; he said it reminded him of his dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow, and it made him homesick.

“You would like it there,” he said; “someday you must visit me.”

We spoke of Brodsky and Babel (“Do you know his great story ‘My First Fee’? You would love it.”) and of Rostropovich and Gorbachov, Auden and Lowell, Ginsberg and Balakian. For an afternoon party in his honor, I had invited all the usual suspects (ranging from a vice-provost to a brilliant undergraduate), but he would have none of it; he said he had come only to meet me and to read.

When I picked him up at his hotel before the reading, he asked me into his room and said he would be ready in a few minutes. He wore a fine silk robe as he finished dressing, and I was reminded of his remark that Rostropovich loved beautiful fabrics and furniture: “His home in Washington D.C., it is like a museum!” (The great Russian piano virtuoso Gilels once remarked that American supermarkets were like food museums.)

In order to promote his reading, I had pinned posters to the walls of the area’s universities, of Jewish delicatessens across the east side of Cleveland, etc. In the evening, the community of Russian Jews appeared in mass. The ballroom at the top of old Mather Mansion was filled to capacity. My introduction spoke of the Russian poet’s courage in breaking historic silences after Stalin’s death – about the Cold War, about the Holocaust – and I spoke of his poetry’s combination of wry critical intelligence and “sorrowing sympathy,” to quote Robert Lowell’s remark about him. For most of this audience, though, no introduction was necessary, and neither was the actor who read the translations (“I would have preferred you reading the translations”), for we were rapt by the power of his performance, which was only enhanced by his self-effacing ironic introductions in English.

As he read, he became his personae: Goya, then Gogol, then a witness to the killing of Jews in the nineteen forties. And we the audience became witnesses in turn; finding our ordinary preoccupations placed in stark perspective, we measured the degrees of cowardice and courage in our own lives. The applause shook the ballroom floor, as if he were one of those great Russian virtuosos, Oistrahk or Richter, who traveled here to stun America with their expressive force. No wonder he and Yevtushenko had filled stadiums in Moscow.

After the reading, he agreed to eat at a Greek restaurant; I gathered a half dozen of his most ardent listeners, and once there, we all raised our cloudy glasses of ouzo in toasts to honor Andrei.

The next morning on the drive back to the airport, Voznesensky asked, “Why, Danny, why is your story not published in America?”

“It’s a strange culture here, and publishing in America is a strange business.”

“A business,” he said and then added, “It is not easy to be American writer, no?”

I could not believe it: he was speaking something like what I had invented for him to say in the story I had sent him.

“Not easy,” he repeated.

“I think it’s harder to be a Russian writer, yes?”

He smiled with his characteristic self-irony and said, “I think, yes.”


[Daniel Melnick’s story about Voznesensky can be read if you click on the June 2010 post.]