I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen

"That’s right, although it’s also a story of immigration as well. This is a beautiful book which deserves to be republished, it’s out of print. The title is rather unfortunate. I like everything about this book except the title: I Ask you Ladies and Gentlemen , which is rather meaningless. If it was given a different title, it could be a bestseller as a memoir of this period. Again, it’s without this sense of victimhood, it’s a story of survival, although of great tragedy because his parents are lost in the 1915 genocide. As a small boy he’s also basically sold as a slave at one point on the deportation march and survives by his wits in various families and then escapes. It’s also about the town of Trebizond – a place that you know, Bruce, and have written about from the Pontic Greek perspective – so there are many Greeks in this book. He also describes living in various bits of the Black Sea at the end of the First World War until he emigrates to America, and describes the immigrant experience of being both welcome and alien. It’s a story lived in real time and described very beautifully. It deserves much wider readership. The Armenians are a classic diaspora in that sense as they’re mercantile, adaptable. They have the stereotype of being able to survive anywhere, of practising various crafts and having business acumen. But the other thing to note here is that every generation is different. This is very much a theme of my book Great Catastrophe , which is about the aftermath of 1915. Every generation deals with this tragedy in a different way. In the 1920s it was through silence, talking about it at home, and survival. In the 1940s the issue hitches itself to Second World War politics. In the 1960s it’s different again, it’s about identity politics and the invention of the Civil Rights movement. It’s a reminder that nothing is static. There’s an assumption that the way an event is viewed in the collective consciousness of a community is the way it’s always been viewed, but that’s very far from the truth and certainly very far from the truth in the case of the Armenian Genocide. “Rather than a pure morality tale, these five books bring us back to the human story of the Armenian Genocide.” Absolutely. And of course the Armenians are rightly proud of the fact that they’ve had their own alphabet since the fifth century, one of the main streets Yerevan — Mesrop Mashtots — is named after the monk who invented that alphabet. One of the first publishing industries in the world was Armenian: first through the church, and later secular. So there is a great literary tradition amongst the Armenians and at least three of the writers here are very literary writers as well. That’s a very good way of putting it. They’re a very brainy, literary people but they’re also very adaptable and associated with business. They are one of those people that are quite small in number in the world but make quite a significant contribution to world culture. I agree. I want to add that not one of these books uses the word genocide and that fits with my own agenda in my book. There is an important debate about the word genocide and the events of 1915, but behind that there’s an even bigger story about what happened to the Armenians, what happened to their culture, and what is owed to them in terms of memory and honouring their culture. A more direct route to understanding those bigger issues – certainly in Turkey – is to leave the word genocide to one side and to engage with the real, living human history. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That’s right and I think if you read just these five books alone, you get a proper human and historical understanding of those events."