“Memoirs of Karabekian are absolutely wonderful. Without anger or regret, he tells about his life: his childhood, his father, who, according to Circe Berman, suffered “survivor syndrome” – he was tormented by his conscience for having survived when all his friends and relatives were killed.”
-- Mariam Hovnanyan
American writer Kurt Vonnegut hasn’t done less than the Armenian diaspora in the United States while spotlighting the fact of the Armenian Genocide. His novel “Bluebeard” is written on behalf of the artist Rabo Karabekian, whose family had survived the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. Here is an exceprt:
…My mother’s and father’s families there, in the Old World, were bigger than the ones here, and everyone in their families were in kinship relationships. They lost their relatives during the massacre, when the Turkish Empire destroyed about one million of its Armenian subjects, whom it had declared traitors for two reasons: firstly, they were smart and literate, and secondly, many people had relatives across the border with the enemy, with the Russian Empire.
Now we all know what a genocide is: it is a carefully thought-out operation to destroy each and every representative of a particular subfamily of the human race, whether man, woman or a child.
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