The Books: “Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past” (Peter Balakian)

My history bookshelf. Onward.

BlackDogOfFate.gifNext book on this shelf is a memoir called Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir by Peter Balakian. FanTAStic book if you haven’t read it. He came out with a new book last year – not a memoir – but still a history of the genocide of the Armenians in 1915 – but this was his first big book. Peter Balakian is a poet, actually. He grew up in the 50s and 60s in Tenafly, New Jersey, and his book is completely eloquent about America at that time – about the struggle to live up to his immigrant parents expectations of him – but also the unbelievable pull of the Beat Generation, and poetry readings, and folk music. But really the book is about the fact that Peter’s family came to America, fleeing the Turks – and never spoke about their Armenian past again. (Until he started asking questions as an adult). He grew up knowing that they came from somewhere else, and that their family was a bit different than other families on the block (different because of the food they ate, that his mother didn’t work – and rarely left the house, etc.) – but he never had even heard of Armenia – and nobody told him about the genoicide. There is a family tree in the front of the book, and it’s a chilling display of what each family went through. 90% of the family members have a death date of 1915. It’s just … it blows your mind. Anyway, this is a book about Balakian’s personal discovery of his past, and … Well. It makes me want to cry. He’s a poet. He believes, obviously, in the power of language. In sharing language. He thought, all along, that this was part of his American heritage – Walt Whitman, etc. – and it WAS – but literature and the written language is a huge part of Armenian culture, too – so this is a journey of self-discovery for him. This was his way of honoring his family members – dead and alive – and also his way of speaking the truth – of getting the story OUT.

It’s also incredible that when he went to research the genocide – when he first learned about it – there was almost nothing out there about it. He had to send away for books, etc. NOW you can learn about the genocide – there is much more of a universal awareness that this HAPPENED – (there was Hitler’s famous remark, when he was planning his own mass murder: “Who remembers the Armenians now?”) Well, we remember now.

It’s a marvelous book. I highly recommend this one to you. (There’s also a wonderful story he tells about taking his Armenian mother to one of Allen Ginsberg’s readings in the 50s. Genius.)

Here’s an excerpt where Balakian first really discovers what had happened in 1915.


From Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir by Peter Balakian.

A few days before I was to leave for my first year of graduate school at Brown, I decided to return to my old job to earn a few extra bucks. Over the weekend, I picked off the bookshelf in my parents’ den a book whose spine I had stared at for years. Ambassador Morganthau’s Story, published by Doubleday & Page, 1919. It seemed like a book that would get me through the workweek. On Monday, as I stood under the big, arching copper beeches on Knickerbocker Road waiting for the bus to take me to work, I stared at the photograph of Morgenthau used for the frontispiece. A look from the era of Woodrow Wilson: the bifocals, the high forehead, serious eyes, the stylish mustache and goatee. The dignified face of a German Jew who came to America at the age of nine in 1865; who graduated from Columbia Law School at twenty-three and started his own law firm; a Democrat with an old mugwump’s idealism. In his youth, Morgenthau worked for the Jewish settlement houses and cofounded the Free Synogogue. Instrumental in the International Red Cross, a passionate supporter of the League of Nations, in 1912 he campaigned for Wilson and later for FDR. By 1913, when Wilson appointed him Ambassador for Turkey, he was a seasoned statesman. An ambassador to a strategic zone of international politics on the eve of the Great War.

It was an amazing fate that landed me in this great headquarters of intrigue at the very moment when the plans of the Kaiser for controlling Turkey, which he had carefully usurped for a quarter of a century, were about to achieve their final success.

By the time the bus came rattling over the potholes of Knickerbocker Road, I was lost in my father’s birthplace. Ships moored along the Bosphorus. The water, green, tepid, caique-flecked, the glitter of silver. Terraced clumps of fig and olive trees. The dome of Hagia Sophia, golden, with minarets jutting up. Men in fezzes. Smells of shaslik and sewage in the streets.

The man first sent by the Kaiser to achieve the subjugation of Turkey to Germany was Baron Von Wangenheim, a Prussian autocrat whose ambition typified the new German Empire: “Pan-Germany filled all his waking hours and directed his every action. The deification of his emperor was the only religious instinct which impelled him.” He believed Germany was destined to rule the world. Turkey was a strategic place to the European powers; influence in Turkey meant access to the Dardanelles and new commercial markets in the Middle East and central Asia. In the imperialist struggles for domination, a controlling alliance with Turkey also meant being able to check Russian access to the Mediterranean. Germany’s Berlin to Baghdad Railway was one symbol of Germany’s hope for hegemony in the Near East.

Morgenthau used the phrase of my eighth-grade social studies text — “the sick man of Europe” — to describe Turkey, a country that “was in a state of decrepitude that had left it an easy prey to German diplomacy”. Abdul Hamid II, who was to be Turkey’s last functional ruling sultan, was an unbenevolent despot. He watched his empire begin to crumble as Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria became autonomous or independent and the empire sank into further financial ruin. Gladstone called Abdul Hamid II the “bloody assassin”, because during the last decade of the nineteenth century, the sultan took out his frustration over the diminishment of his empire on his Christian minorities, especially the Armenians.

Following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, which the Russians won, the peace drawn up at San Stefano gave the Russians control of the Armenian provinces of northeast Anatolia and hence the ability to protect the Armenians there from Turkish misrule. But at the behest of Disraeli the lines were redrawn, and the 1878 Treaty of Berlin gave the European powers only a theoretical obligation to protect the Armenians. The very sultan who had been abusing the Armenians again had direct responsibility for protecting them. The setback of the Treaty of Berlin left Armenians frustrated and demoralized but determined to improve their deplorable condition as “infidels” in Turkish society. As the sultan’s policy toward Armenians became even harsher in the 1880s and early 1890s, Armenians organized reform movements, most importantly the Hunchak and the Dashnak parties. These groups sought cultural freedom; equality before the law; freedom of speech, press, and assembly; freedom from the unjust tax system imposed on Christians; and the right to bear arms. In the wake of these demands, the sultan became further enraged.

After Armenians were massacred at Sassoun in 1894 for protesting the unequal tax laws for Christians, and more massacres of Armenains occurred throughout the empire, a small group of Armenians seized the Ottoman Bank in Constantinope in August 1896, staging a protest and demanding civil rights. No money was taken or bank property damaged, and after a thirteen-hour bloodless drama, the Armenians exiled themselves on a ship bound for Marseilles. The protest not only failed but resulted in Abdul Hamid accelerating his program of massacring Armenians with secret military forces; by the end of 1896, more than 200,000 Armenians had been killed.

The intensified culture of massacre initiated by the sultan in the ’90s went unchecked by the European powers and served as a prologue to what would happen to the Armenians in 1915. By 1908, Abdul Hamid’s crumbling reign was brought to an end by a trio of upstarts, Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Djemel Pasha, who called themselves Ittihad ve Terakki (the Committee of Union and Progress) and were known as the Young Turks. The Young Turks overthrew the old theocracy and promised a new secular nationalism and reform for the empire and its Christian minorities. In 1908, Armenians, anticipating an era of liberty and justice, were celebrating the new regime.

Morgenthau’s descriptions of Talaat, Enver, Djemel — the men who engineered the Armenian Genocide — fascinated me the way descriptions of Hitler did when I first read about the Holocaust. The leader of the triumvirate, Talaat Pasha, like Hitler, Napoleon, and Stalin, was an ethnic outsider — a Bulgarian gypsy whose peasant upbringing had not included the “use of a knife and fork”. A former telegraph clerk in Edirne, he was forty-one when he came to power.

[He] liked to sit at his desk, with his shoulders drawn up, his head thrown back, and his wrists, twice the size of an ordinary man’s, planted firmly on the table … his fierceness, his determination, his remorselessness — the whole life and nature of the man [took] form in those wrists.

As Minister of the Interior he was head of the secret police and he also administered the six Armenian provinces in the eastern part of the country.

Jemal Pasha, once a colonel in the Turkish Third Army, at forty-one became Minister of the Marine. In a photo from the Illustrated London News of 1913, he is pictured in his decorated uniform looking bemused.

Enver Pasha, age thirty-two, had been a major in the Turkish Third Army, “a Europeanized dandy,” with delusions of Napoleonic grandeur. He had “a clean-cut face, a slightly curled up mustache, a small but sturdy figure, with pleasing manners.” He hung pictures of Napoleon and Frederick the Great in his parlor, and “his friends commonly referred to him as ‘Napoleonik’.” Enver spoke German fluently, worshipped Prussian militarism, and believed he was divinely chosen to reestablish the glory of Turkey. Having spent years as a military attache in Berlin, Enver was the bridge between Turkey and Germany and a tool for Baron Von Wangenheim and the Kaiser, who cultuivated him as a possible instrument for their plans in the Orient.

For more than a decade, Morgenthau noted, the Kaiser and Von Wangenheim had advocated the evacuation of all the Greeks of Smyrna and the surrounding region; the Turks referred to the city as giaour Ismir, or infidel Smyurna. Morgenthau wrote that Pan-Germanism of this period advocated the virtues of deportation, “the shifting of whole peoples as though they were so many herds of cattle.” The Germans would practice this in Belgium, Poland, and Serbia during the Great War, but its “most hideous manifestation” would be inspired by Germany and practiced by Turkey on its Armenian population. How prophetic that Morgenthau, a Jew who emigrated from Germany to America in the middle of the nineteenth century, wrote this less than two decades before the next German empire would subject his own people to a ‘deportation” that would claim more lives than any other in history.

In 1913, Talaat ordered boycotts against all Greek merchants, and demanded that all foreign establishments dismiss their Greek employees. Morgenthau wrote:

I did not have the slightest suspicions at that time that the Germans had instigated these deportations, but I looked upon them merely as an outburst of Turkish chauvinism … By this time I knew Talaat well; I saw him nearly every day, and he used to discuss practically every phase of international relations with me. I objected vigorously to his treatment of the Greeks; I told him that it would make the worst possible impression abroad and that it would affect American interests … Talaat explained his national policy … if what was left of Turkey to survive, he must get rid of these alien peoples. “Turkey for the Turks” was now Talaat’s controlling idea.

My hands were sweating on the faded brown cloth binding. I ran out of the empty bus, down the escalator, down two more flights of stairs, through the turnstile and onto the platform to see an A train sitting with its doors open and aisles packed with strap-hanging commuters. I read standing as the train cut through Manhattan.

The common term applied by the Turk to the Christian is “dog” and in his [the Turk’s] estimation this is no mere rhetorical figure; he actually looks upon his European neighbors as far less worthy of consideration than his own domestic animals … “My son,” an old Turk once said, “do you see that herd of swine? Some are white, some are black, some are large, some are small — they differ from each other in some respects, but they are all swine. So it is with Christians.”

In Turkey,

[T]he mechanism of business and industry had always rested in the hands of the subject peoples, Greeks, Jews, Armenians and Arabs. The Turks have learned little of European art or science, they have established very few educational institutions, and illiteracy is the prevailing rule.

I sat sucking the air off the bottom of a Tropicana carton and thinking that the parallels in history are frightening; it was the same with the Third Reich and the Jews. The paradox of dependency and power that existed between the Armenians and Turks was a tinderbox.

Under Islamic Ottoman rule, the”infidel” Christians were excluded from military and civil service and government. They had no civil or legal rights; the Koran was the basis of justice. The Turks

erected the several peopls, such as the Greeks and the Armenians into separate “millets”, or provinces. And, they did this not to promote their independence and welfare, but because they regarded them as vermin, and thus not fit for membership in the Ottoman state.

In such a culture, a Christian was forever vulnerable to the arbitrary violence of any Turk: “And for centuries the Turks simply lived like parasites upon these overburdened and industrious people. They taxed them to economic extinction, stole their most beautiful daughters and forced them into their harems.”

In Armenia, Greece, and Albania, as well as the areas now comprising Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslav province of Macedonia, Turkish officials came each year and took to Constantinople the brightest and strongest male children between the ages of eleven and thirteen, where in the cruelest of ironies they taught them to beat down the cross and die for the crescent as Janissaries of the sultan’s personal army.

After my morning pickups at Peralta, Cunard, MOSK, and Norton-Lily, I took a coffee break. I bought a carton of Tropicana orange juice from the woman who wheeled the coffee cart around the eleventh floor at 10:30 and I went to the storage room, a dimly lit bowling alley of a place in which I often wrote poems. It was lined with brown boxes of Xerox paper, manila envelopes, stationery, Scotch tape, mimeograph paper, binders, and all the other things that made offices run in those days before computers. In the narrow space between the stacks of boxes, the silence settled on me.

And then Armenian church came back to me — not what I learned from the lessons of the Gospels and the Nicene Creed — but the theatre of it all. The haunting minor keys of the hymns I could still sing in Armenian. The echoes of the deacons and altar boys chanting. The ashy, resinous smell of incense spreading in clouds as the deacon walked into the aisle swinging the silver censer with its chains and bells, and the sound of acolytes shaking gold scepters ringed with tiny bells as the altar curtain opened and closed and we sat and kneeled and stood. When the priest in the high-collared, gold-and-red embroidered robe raised his jewel-studded cross to the congregation we crossed ourselves, and then he disappeared behind the curtain.

What I had learned in Sunday School was this. Armenia emerged from Urartian civilization sometime around the sixth century BC. For a short time Armenia held the status of a world power. (Our Sunday School teachers made sure we knew this.) Under King Dikran II, known as Dikran the Great, who ruled from 95 to 55 BC, Armenia reached the height of its empire, extending north to Transcaucausia, east to the Caspian Sea, west to central Anatolia, and south to Cilicia on the Mediterranean Sea. The Romans under Pompey feared Armenia’s power, and Pompey sent the general Lucullus to conquer King Dikran and subjugate Armenia. We were told that the final battle between the Romans and the Armenians was a close one, decided by something like a blocked field goal. Dikran’s son, Artavazd II, who wrote plays in Greek and founded a Greek theatre in his court, was kidnapped by the soldiers of Mark Antony, who put Artavazd and his family to death.

At the turn of the fourth century, about AD 301, the Armenian nation officially adopted Christianity, thus making Armenia the first nation to become Christian. Armenian Christianity developed independently from that of Rome and Byzantium. To consummate its cultural identity, in the early part of the fifth century, King Vramshapuh commissioned a monk, Mesrob Mashtots (later sainted) to invent an alphabet, enabling Armenians to read scripture in Armenian which, until then, had been a spoken language. The Armenians thus were freed from their dependence on Greek and Persian for written language.

When Persian King Yesdegrid tried to force Armenia to adopt Zoroastrianism in the fifth century, promising them gifts and honors in return, the Armenian leaders replied: “From this fatih none can shake us, neither angels, nor men, neither sword, fire, water, nor any bitter torturers.” So the Persians invaded Armenia with an army of close to a quarter of a million men and teams of elephants, attacking an Armenian army of about 60,000 men, led by Vartan Mamikonian. Saint Vartan — who I pictured then like Vince Lombardi but with a beard and a sword and a shield — was killed, but after a long, exhausting war, the Persians, seeing that the beleaguered Armenians refused to give up, finally withdrew. This was 451, and Armenia remained Christian. Armenia’s neighbors on the ancient map — the Cappodocians, Chaldeans, Sumerians, Babyloninans, Scythians, Parthians, Hittites — were gone, but the Armenians had survived, their religion and their alphabet keeping them unassimilated by their neighbors.

I pictured those wind-bitten stone churches built out of the Armenian highlands of Anatolia, with their wooden belfries prescribed by Ottoman law so that no bell could be heard. I could hear those wooden clappers making a thump like a muffled throat. Then I thought of St. Thomas’ Armenian Church in Tenafly, where women in coifed hair and mink coats sat in mahogany pews, their perfume mingling with the incense, as the morning light came through the pale colors of the flat, modern images of Jesus, the Virgin, and the Apostles in the stained-glass windows. The store-bought carpet glowed with the colored light, and the large windows in the Sunday School rooms looked out to the split-level and ranch houses with swimming pools and tennis courts on Tenafly’s east hill.

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3 Responses to The Books: “Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past” (Peter Balakian)

  1. Artyom says:

    I read the book when it came out and it was a phenomenal read. Balakian is a great writer and has a great mastery of his medium, and given his poetic sensibilities it makes even better. Have you tried to read any of his poetry? Try a collection of his works called June-Tree. A great read as well.

  2. red says:

    Artyom – no, I haven’t read any of his poetry – thanks so much for the tip!

  3. red says:

    I also have his latest book – The Burning Tigris – but haven’t read it yet.

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