The World Motivation
The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.
“The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.”
The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.
As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.
It's inevitable we wind up together. It's simply because we all work together. I'm sure ad people marry ad people, and lawyers marry lawyers. All professions have office romances.
My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.
My family was very open. My grandfather was German and a Protestant. My father, a lawyer, was Greek-Catholic and played the violin. My mother was very religious and went to church twice a day. My grandmother was Armenian. So I was raised with three different faiths - that's why I am so open.
My forebears were fantastically wealthy Armenians who came to England from India in the 19th century and did what foreign types do - they married into a penniless but well-bred local family.
In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state.
I bow down in memory of the victims, and I come to tell my Armenian friends that we will never forget the tragedies that your people has endured.