Imprinted Life discussion

Passage to Ararat is Michael J. Arlen exploration of his Armenian roots.

Michael J Arlen never knew of his father's Armenian heritage until a Scottish schoolmate questioned his Englishness. His father Dikran Kouyoumjian, changed the Armenian name to the anglocentric one of Michael Arlen, becoming a British then American citizen and novelist. The author describes this book as a father-son story, his father not unlike those emigrants who completely assimilated. So the son had to start from scratch to learn about Armenia and its people.

His father rarely if ever mentioned Armenia, a western Asia country east of Turkey, but some older Armenians in New York could tell him of the horrible sufferings of their families and villagers, inflicted post WW1--Uncle Krikor, Aram Salisian of the Golden Horn restaurant, the attendees at the Armenian cathedral. However, reading was the main way Arlen learned mountainous Armenia's ancient and modern history from 5,000 years ago, through the Persian, Greek, and Roman interest in it, and into the twentieth century.

Michael J. Arlen is now a grown man, deciding to visit Fresno CA to get further in touch with his Armenian roots. There he meets his father's friend, the Armenian-American author William Saroyan, accompanying Saroyan to Armenian hangouts.

After that visit to a once-thriving Armenian community, Arlen and his wife, arrange an official visit to (Y)Erevan, then the capital of Soviet Armenia, to research this biography of his father. Once there with assistance from the Cultural Committee, he still finds making an emotional connection to the people and places difficult. Even at the Monument to the Armenian martyrs, he is peevish and detached. A vast farmer's market begins to thaw his chilliness. He spends most of his time reading about Armenia.

About what is Arlen reading instead of gallivanting around the vicinity of Erevan, Armenia?
*Crusades
*Turkish invasions
*Armenian flight to Cilicia
*Byzantines

There are still many official visits to make with Sarkis, a representative of the Cultural Committee.
*refrigerator factory
*old churches
*museum of Armenian art objects
*Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, Matenadaran

So far, the memorial sites and history books have kept Arlen emotionally detached from Armenians. But, the fine workmanship of museum artifacts prompt his memory even though their delicacy is not to his taste. And, he is bewildered by the Armenians' image as "rug merchants" and "wily tradesmen", when they were also skilled artisans and horsemen. Sarkis provides Arlen with a different kind of book, Colophons of Armenian Manuscripts, 1301-1480: A Source for Middle Eastern History /Avedis K. Sanjian, collected colophons, scribal messages written at the conclusion or margins of a written manuscript. These "voices" give a contemporary account of Armenians' suffering at the hands of invaders, such as Sultan Muhammad II, in the villages of Serkwili and Sori and the monasteries of Sewerak and Hermon.

The reason for Arlen's mental detachment during his Armenian visit grows clearer. He is reading except for an occasional, obligatory visit with his hosts to an historical site. His wife nor his hosts cannot figure out why he seems unaffected by the evidence in memorials and museums that remember Armenians' tragic history though his factual knowledge of Armenia is great.

The reason is that the facts and the people do not answer why this tragedy happened to Armenians. It is the book's midsection that shows the cauldron of intermingling politics, economics, religion, language, and culture of:

Armenian traders, bankers, and translators of Constantinople;

Anatolian/Asia Minor Armenians of the countryside loyal to the Ottoman Empire;

Non-commercial, debt-ridden, autocratic Ottoman Empire of Abdul-Hamid II;

Progressive Young Turks for freedom and equality;

Christian Russia and Stalin's Russia (1930s-40s); and

Liberal Europe, especially Queen Victoria, Gladstone, and French reform movements.

These liberal, commercial interests began to tilt the balance of power away from Ottoman rule, giving the name the Sick Man of Europe to the Ottoman Empire, its debt in the hands of urban Armenians and interfering other countries. Abdul-Hamid II responded with calvary, surveillance, crackdowns, and suspicion directed at reformers and at Armenian non-Muslims.

The author Arlen, who's visiting his father's homeland Armenia, is discovering the history of the Armenian genocide and is asking how the Armenians' plight differs from that of other persecuted peoples--Jews, Ibos, Communists, Incas, Hindus, Indians, Ukranian peasants, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims. He also gives a history of Ahmed-Hamid II's Sultanate, of the Young Turks who succeeded him, and later government through post WW1. Some of the answers he discovers is Armenia's strategic location in the plateau between Turkey and Russia and Armenians' presence in both Turkey and Russia.

Michael J Arlen finally comes to the Armenian genocide of 1915-16. During that time, Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were disarmed to be workmen. A reign of terror began under the Young Turks and Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha with Kurdish assistance. Over 1/2 of Armenians, perhaps 800,000 people, disappeared through deportation to the Syrian desert, massacre, starvation, torture, exposure, epidemics, and concentration camp (Der-el-Zor).

Arlen also notes the increase in mass violence (aggression and murder) from the advent of technocracy, government experts in communications and technology that used railroads, gas chambers and crematoria, secret surveillance, and electric current torture that cast a wide net.

The Turks never admitted their guilt and criminality toward the Armenians; while the Armenians developed a self-hatred from their inability to resist and a feeling of collective guilt from being hated.

By the memoir's end, Arlen loses his detachment, brought to tears at the Monument in view of Mount Ararat--the climactic moment of this story when he realizes his brotherhood with Armenians and his pride in Armenia.

After flying out of (Y)Erevan, Arlen stops in Istanbul on the Bosphorus, looking for Armenians' presence, its heyday in Byzantine times. Armenian artisans did tilework and stonecutting in churches and other buildings even though tour guides attributed this artistry to Greeks or Turks.

Still in Istanbul, Arlen describes Armenian history after the 1915 genocide from 1917 to 1922, the Armenians' disappointed hope to become a nation after WW1, an Istanbul Armenian engineer's decision to learn English and join a son in Australia, and his new Armenian chauvinism.

This is a fine book, an adult man discovering his heritage not only from youthful memories and written histories but also from experiences in the country of his kinsmen.

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