Adam Kirsch: Did the Armenian genocide have its own Primo Levi?
[Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor at The New Republic. This article originally appeared in Nextbook.]
A week before Germany's invasion of Poland, Hitler reportedly urged his generals to slaughter civilians--Slavs and Jews, the two most hated groups in Nazi ideology--without mercy. "After all," he flippantly asked, "who remembers the Armenians?" In fact, the attempted genocide of the Armenians by the Turks during the First World War was very well documented, at the time and ever since. Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the massacres, wrote at length in his memoirs about this attempt to wipe an entire population off the face of the earth. The word genocide had not yet been coined, but that is clearly what happened in Armenia between 1915 and 1918; in fact, Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish activist who coined the term, had the Armenian example in mind.
Yet it is true that the Armenian genocide has not entered into America's common cultural memory in the same way as the Nazi Holocaust. In part that is because it took place in the Ottoman Empire, from which few Americans come, rather than in Europe, where many Americans have their roots; in part it is because the U.S. never fought the Ottomans in World War I, as it did the Germans in World War II; in part it is because of the greater prominence of Jews than Armenians in American life. And sadly, it is also due to the continuing refusal of the Turkish government to acknowledge the crimes of its predecessor state, thus creating an illusion of controversy about a history that no historians doubt. (When the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk spoke publicly about the Armenian genocide, he was charged with the crime of "insulting Turkishness" and forced to flee abroad.)
In 2007, the Anti-Defamation League was rightly embroiled in scandal when it supported the Turkish government's plea to the U.S. Congress not to officially recognize the Armenian genocide. (After much controversy, the director of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, tempered his stance.) For, as many writers urged at the time, it is surely incumbent upon Jews, above all, to remember the Armenians, whose oblivion Hitler counted on.
That is why the publication of Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 is especially noteworthy for Jewish readers. In this eyewitness account of the genocide, written in 1918 and now translated into English for the first time, Grigoris Balakian offers an Armenian equivalent to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Balakian, a priest of the Armenian Apostolic Church, was deported from Constantinople in April 1915, along with a large group of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. For the next three years, until Turkey's defeat and surrender in September 1918, Balakian lived constantly under the shadow of death. Exiled, sent on forced marches, threatened by bandits and government officials, starved and sick, he managed to survive only by a combination of luck, daring, the corruption and inefficiency of Turkish officials, and the support of righteous non-Armenians who hid and fed him....
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A week before Germany's invasion of Poland, Hitler reportedly urged his generals to slaughter civilians--Slavs and Jews, the two most hated groups in Nazi ideology--without mercy. "After all," he flippantly asked, "who remembers the Armenians?" In fact, the attempted genocide of the Armenians by the Turks during the First World War was very well documented, at the time and ever since. Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the massacres, wrote at length in his memoirs about this attempt to wipe an entire population off the face of the earth. The word genocide had not yet been coined, but that is clearly what happened in Armenia between 1915 and 1918; in fact, Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish activist who coined the term, had the Armenian example in mind.
Yet it is true that the Armenian genocide has not entered into America's common cultural memory in the same way as the Nazi Holocaust. In part that is because it took place in the Ottoman Empire, from which few Americans come, rather than in Europe, where many Americans have their roots; in part it is because the U.S. never fought the Ottomans in World War I, as it did the Germans in World War II; in part it is because of the greater prominence of Jews than Armenians in American life. And sadly, it is also due to the continuing refusal of the Turkish government to acknowledge the crimes of its predecessor state, thus creating an illusion of controversy about a history that no historians doubt. (When the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk spoke publicly about the Armenian genocide, he was charged with the crime of "insulting Turkishness" and forced to flee abroad.)
In 2007, the Anti-Defamation League was rightly embroiled in scandal when it supported the Turkish government's plea to the U.S. Congress not to officially recognize the Armenian genocide. (After much controversy, the director of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, tempered his stance.) For, as many writers urged at the time, it is surely incumbent upon Jews, above all, to remember the Armenians, whose oblivion Hitler counted on.
That is why the publication of Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 is especially noteworthy for Jewish readers. In this eyewitness account of the genocide, written in 1918 and now translated into English for the first time, Grigoris Balakian offers an Armenian equivalent to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Balakian, a priest of the Armenian Apostolic Church, was deported from Constantinople in April 1915, along with a large group of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. For the next three years, until Turkey's defeat and surrender in September 1918, Balakian lived constantly under the shadow of death. Exiled, sent on forced marches, threatened by bandits and government officials, starved and sick, he managed to survive only by a combination of luck, daring, the corruption and inefficiency of Turkish officials, and the support of righteous non-Armenians who hid and fed him....