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ANKARA: Book Review; 'My Grandmother: A Memoir' By Fethiye Cetin

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  • ANKARA: Book Review; 'My Grandmother: A Memoir' By Fethiye Cetin

    BOOK REVIEW; 'MY GRANDMOTHER: A MEMOIR' BY FETHIYE CETIN

    Today's Zaman
    http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.d o?load=detay&link=143587&bolum=111
    June 2 2008
    Turkey

    As a girl, Turkish lawyer Fethiye Cetin knew her grandmother as an
    adored Muslim matriarch by the name of Seher. Then she learned that
    Seher had been born an Armenian Christian, HaranuÅ~_, who, several
    decades before, had been seized from the clasp of her mother by a
    World War I Turkish gendarmerie corporal officiating over a column
    of Armenians being marched out of Anatolia.

    "My Grandmother," now out in a translation by novelist Maureen
    Freely, is Cetin's compelling account of her gradual discovery of
    the deep contradiction between her proud nationalist education and
    the realities buried deep in Turkish society. The bare narrative
    offers few moral and historical judgments, few dates, no maps, no
    politics. There is also no discussion of whether the disappearance of
    the Armenians of Anatolia was the result of a genocide or massacres
    or civil war. Surprises abound: for instance, Seher came to feel great
    affection for the corporal as a new father. Asked why it all happened
    by Cetin, all the grandmother can ask back is, "What should I know?"

    The fast-selling original of the book is part of a genre in modern
    Turkish literature that tries to make amends for the gaping hole
    left by the Armenians in the country's public history. The theme is
    dominant in both Orhan Pamuk's recent "Snow" and Elif Å~^afak's "The
    Bastard of Istanbul." Cetin's book is already required reading for
    students in progressive Turkish institutions like Sabancı University
    in Ä°stanbul. Along with occasional recent exhibitions and conferences
    about the lost Armenians, these are part of a trend in Turkey that
    is grappling with a history of denial, nationalism and fears of
    political consequences.

    Altogether eight Armenian girls ended up as new-minted Muslims in
    the small Turkish town where Cetin's grandmother found herself. Even
    her brother Horen survived to become known as a shepherd called
    Ahmet. Initially working as domestic servants, then as free wives
    and mothers, they kept alive customs like colored candy-bread, which
    they would share at Easter without letting the children know why;
    they labored under discrimination enough already. Everyone in town
    knew they were of Armenian origin. Their official papers registered
    them as "converts," but they were mocked in the streets as "converts'
    sperm" or the "leftovers of the sword." The family is convinced this
    was why one talented relative was unable to take up a place in a good
    military school.

    Translator Freely, in a valuable introduction, reckons there could
    today be 2 million such descendants of Armenians among Turkey's
    population of 75 million. More than 30 other ethnicities still
    survive, and this new proof of the impossibility of repressing its
    inherent multi-ethnicity helps explain the shrillness and sometimes
    schizophrenia of Turkey's one-nation ideologues. Cetin argues that
    all in Anatolia are of "impure blood."

    The pain of the Turkish Armenians is not yet over. As a lawyer, Cetin
    represents the family of murdered Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor
    Hrant Dink, cut down in January 2007 by a young man inspired by this
    same deep-rooted nationalism, and hailing from Trabzon, an eastern
    Turkish city with a history of ethnic trauma. As Cetin's grandmother
    warns her children, telling them not to be afraid as they pass by a
    cemetery, "Evil comes from the living, not the dead."

    "My Grandmother: A Memoir" by Fethiye Cetin , With an introduction
    by Maureen Freely, Published by Verso, ISBN: 978-1844671694, $14.71
    in hardcover.

    --Boundary_(ID_O5OMK/ZSlhrg6GDF3oirow) --
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