Old Archive

The Memory of History:
An Interview with Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate

By Judith Bolton-Fasman

My grandfather, a Jew born in Turkey, never forgot the Armenians. What happened to them so frightened his father that the extended family dispersed. Some, like my grandfather, went west to Cuba. The rest went east to Palestine. Anywhere but Turkey, where as a young boy my grandfather witnessed a Turkish soldier decapitate a young Armenian man.

It was one of the defining moments of my grandfather's life. It did not just strengthen his Jewish identity, it made him a Jew--a Jew who, from that point on, believed that Jews and Armenians shared the same fate.

That memory is eerily familiar to Peter Balakian, who brilliantly charges his luminous memoir Black Dog of Fate (Broadway Books, 289 pp., $13.00) with personal and public histories that include a coming-of-age story illuminated by his ethnic awakening, as well as a family memoir marked by gaps of Armenian silence.

Now a poet and professor of humanities at Colgate University, Balakian looks back to his boyhood in an affluent New Jersey suburb as the time when his Armenian identity took root. Although he didn't realize it, his ethnicity was lovingly cultivated by his grandmother Nafina. Nafina told him stories that puzzled him as a child and haunted him as an adult. "My grandmother," Balakian writes, "was a strange shadow appearing now and then to remind me that there was something else I needed to know. She imploded my present at the strangest moments, without conscious provocation."

The fallout from those implosions was fragments of history and memory, pieces of a larger, unspoken trauma. It also marked the beginning of Balakian's life as a poet. In a recent interview he noted that in both poetry and prose he strives "to transmit the trauma of what I have come to call encoded ways because nobody could speak openly about the Armenian genocide."

That silence was never breached by his mother, a chemist turned fastidious housewife. It was permanently wedged between him and his father, a dedicated physician who once wrote to his son that "time and circumstance have not allowed me to talk about [the fate of our own people]." Among Balakian's aunts were Nona Balakian, the noted New York Times book critic, and Anna Balakian, a scholar of French symbolist poetry and Surrealism. It was a lively, boisterous family in which silence lurked in the background.

Like second generation writers whose parents survived the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide became a focal point in Balakian's life. And like second generation writers who did not experience genocide first hand, it nevertheless became a central experience. He writes, "I hadn't set out to write a book of social value or an "Armenian" book. I had little affection for nationalism, and I had been raised so outside of Armenian ethnic life that my life had become a hunt to find out about the past."

The search began in New Jersey but soon extended back to Turkey, Syria and Armenia. In predominantly Jewish Teaneck, Balakian "spent half of my early childhood wanting to be JewishŠMy Jewish friends had their own language and rituals they carried out each week that were bound up in thousands of years of history and stories and ideas. There was something secret and alluring about it all."

Balakian's early encounters with Jews set him on a trajectory towards his own activism. In his campaign to bring the Armenian genocide to public attention, he has forged alliances with Holocaust and genocide scholars. To that end he co-teaches a course on modern genocide at Colgate, the basis of which is the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. The course, which falls under the rubric of comparative genocide studies, is, according to Balakian, "the only way that these tragic episodes can play out into their fullest meaning."

Does that, however, diminish the unique horror of the Holocaust? For Balakian that is "the wrong question. It goes nowhere, it only leads to building fences and not bridges between events. All of the major scholars of genocide agree that it is destructive to the human enterprise of genocide scholarship for any one genocide victim group to claim that his event is worse or to claim territorial control of the field or to take the moral high ground. I know that scholars are mindful of these things. That's why I'm not worried about it all becoming soup given that we have those cultural, sociological, political, moral definitions to work with. It's important that comparative genocide studies involve the species, and I think the study of genocide is about species preservation, and memory is a moral act."

For Balakian memory is also "a tremor from the unconscious." Among the impressive moments recorded in Black Dog of Fate is the rush of memory Balakian shapes into a poem dedicated to the memory of his grandmother.

But poetry alone cannot set the historical record straight. In recent years Balakian has been actively combating Turkish denials of the Armenian genocide. In writing Black Dog of Fate he has amassed an arsenal of anguished stories and compelling testimonies. There is Dovey, a death march survivor who was beaten and raped by Turks and Kurds. There is his father's great uncle, a prelate in the Armenian church who survived the 1915 genocide of Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul. His compelling eyewitness account helped to acquit an Armenian accused of assassinating one of the Turkish masterminds of that massacre.

Balakian has also organized petitions protesting professorships endowed by the Turkish government at universities such as Princeton and Harvard. Balakian asserts that the sole purpose of the Turkish endowments is to promulgate an insidious version of history in which Armenians are portrayed as an imposing enemy rather than victims of war. "The distinguishing feature of Turkish denial in the Armenian genocide is that it is sponsored by the government rather than by eccentric hate groups of the kind that engage in Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism."

Although Balakian has enlisted the support of an impressive roster of scholars, government officials and others on behalf of the Armenian cause, it is Grandma Nafina who is still his greatest ally. Her courage resonates. While still a refugee from a death march, marooned in Aleppo, Syria, she sued the Turkish government and held it "responsible for the losses and injuries that happened to me, because I am a human being and citizen of U.S.A. (sic), I am under the support of human and international law."

The suit was quashed and the papers buried in a bureau for sixty years until Balakian found them. "My grandmother," he says, was ahead of her time in appealing to the world for human rights. I think it's one of our great triumphs as a culture in the 20th century that in the wake of rising Holocaust discourse, the African-American civil rights movement, feminism and the anti-Vietnam war movement, a powerful forum for human rights was created in the United States. Once that forum existed, Armenian Americans took their place on that platform."

On that platform Armenian-Americans began to assert a collective identity. Before then, an aunt tells Balakian, "we had a dream instead of a country." However, for Balakian there is more. His grandmother comes to personify "history knocking on the door of the heart, and when she came knocking, her message often was opaque, symbolic, evocative."

Her grandson decodes her messages, deciphering history in the immediate and intimate voice of the memoir. Those messages are also imbued with the realization that Grandma Nafina was his "beloved witness, and [he] the receiver of her story." In Black Dog of Fate Peter Balakian recoups Nafina's history for his family and memorializes her with simple and grateful acknowledgment.

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Judith Bolton-Fasman is a freelance writer based in Newton, MA. Her column, On The Shelf, appears biweekly on Jewishfamily.com and JBooks.com