Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir
by Peter Balakian
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Book Summary Information
Author: Peter BalakianEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-02-10
ISBN: 0465010199
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Book Reviews of Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir
Book Review: A powerful memoir that connects the suburban bliss of the fifties to the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
Summary: 5 Stars
Black Dog of Fate is not the typical Baby Boomer memoir of growing up under Eisenhower and Kennedy, drinking pop and dancing to Elvis and the classics of early rock n' roll. The story at the beginning is very evocative of what life was like in the fifties burgeoning into the sixties - optimistic, carefree, family oriented. All the best early memories of Peter Balakian's life are excellently recalled and controlled; he writes about family, food, baseball, football, movies, girls, school, all the things that give a person a good, normal personal history, in essence, their very identity. But for Peter Balakian, there was a very important type of history that he was shut out from knowing, and that was his Armenian family history. Whenever he inquired about his family roots, his family would revert to the age-old belief that speaking was silver but silence was golden. And when it came to his personal family history, that is what he lived in: Silence. At the very beginning of the memoir, he recounts the wonderful memories of his grandmother, a wizened, street-savvy woman with a penchant for baseball, family, business, cooking and lots of other things. But there was an aura of the mysterious that always surrounded her, a dark secret that she kept hidden within the recesses of her soul. It was a secret that she took to the grave with her. Occasionally, she would tell a modified tale or dream that was related to Armenia and then let her grandson (Peter) to try and figure out the meaning of it for himself. More often than not, he was bewildered and disturbed and could not connect the dots as to how these bizarre tales related to his family and his ethnic identity. Still being young, Peter Balakian grew up in the dark, never fully exposed to the Armenian atrocities of 1915 in which his grandmother and two aunts were survivors. He was not allowed to see and understand the true evils that can lurk beneath the surface men's hearts. And that was fine with everyone in the family. The Balakian mindset, in a way, was that the past was the past, reopening it through family discussions, photos and letters would only open old wounds long since forcefully shut. It was not until he wrote a paper on Turkey that the can of worms slowly began to be opened, his father saying to the effect: "You're extolling the virtues of Turkey? My God, do you think a Jewish student would write such a paper praising those who aided Hitler?" With that paraphrased comment from his dad, Peter began to sense that something in his family history was being repressed, and he was slowly getting determined to find out what it was. Coming from a very intellectual family background (his aunt Nona Balakian was one of the founders of the National Book Critic's Circle Award, NBCCA), Peter slowly developed a passion for poetry and the humanities, and thus, took a direction towards academia. While still a student, he came across the memoirs of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, in which he graphically detailed the Turkish politics behind the atrocities of the Armenian Genocide. That led onto other inquiries, and his curiosity simply could not be satiated. Older and wiser, his family slowly began to open up about the death marches, rapes, bayonetting, looting, human bonfires, to the other sheer terror acts that the Turkish soldiers and politicians unleashed upon the thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children. His grandmother was one of the very, very few survivors, and I found myself actually having to put the book down for a breather, especially after reading the chapter titled: "Dovey's Story". Suffice it to say, Black Dog of Fate started off as one kind of book and then evolved into something else quite entirely. Chapter by chapter with its direct language, the reader just gets terrifyingly pulled into the lives of complete strangers who were slaughtered simply because they were Christians. This is an important memoir in the genre of genocide studies, because it documents a not well known genocide (like Pol Pot and the Killing Fields of Cambodia or the genocide of the Tutsis in Rawanda) in our global history. This was an amazing and enlightening read, a definitely good companion piece to the film Ararat by Atom Egoyan, also highly recommended!
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