Selected Reviews
www.dorasakayan.com > selected reviews > The Gazette (1997)
Grandfather honoured in act of remembrance
By
Eyewitness account of massacre recorded
The Gazette, Montreal, Saturday, October 4, 1997: Books i3
Smyrna, a coastal city on the Aegean as old Troy, has been one of the
major centres of Asia Minor for millennia. Today, under the name of
Izmir, it belongs to Turkey, but at various times in its 5,000-year
history it has had Greek, Macedonian and Roman masters. According to
local tradition, Homer was born in its environs; it was also one of
the earliest seats of Christianity.
More recently, a tragedy of vast proportions has strained the city's
name. In her book, an Armenian Doctor in Turkey, Dora Sakayan
presents an eyewitness account of the 75-year-old catastrophe in
which several members of her family perished along with 30,000 Greek
and Armenian Christians at the hands of Turkish nationalist forces,
Sakayan, a professor of Germanic studies at McGill, was born 9 years
after the Smyrna massacre. For the past four years, she has been
toiling on an eye-witness account of the event recorded in a diary
written in beautiful Armenian script by her grandfather. An
Armenian Doctor in Turkey, subtitled Garabed Hatcherian:; My Smyrna
Ordeal of 1922, is a fine example example of survivor literature and
family history contextualized with scholarly notes, family trees,
maps and photographs.
Dora Sakayan has a passionate sense of mission. When, five years
ago, she learned of the diary's existence in Argentina, she
immediately expressed an interest in transcribing it. "At first I
could not read the journal except through a veil of tears, with my
heart aching at the suffering of my grandfather, my mother and the
other members of my mother's family had endured," she writes in the
book's introduction.
Neither could she contain her tears when she and I conversed on her
flower-filled downtown balcony about the labour of love that she
lavished on the diary. For once she had read the carefully-prepared
document that her grandfather wrote shortly after he fled with his
family to Greece in September 1922, she realized that it had a
historical value far beyond its preciousness as a family relic.
Forming her own company, Arod Books, she self-published the book in
Armenian in 1995, then translated an expanded version of it into
English that she has recently released.
Apologizing for her emotionalism, Sakayan dashed the tears from her
eyes as she explained the special bitterness that is a legacy of the
descendants of the Armenian survivors of the Turkish massacres that
occurred between 1895 and 1923. "Each of us carries a burden.... My
mother was sick all her life. Till her last day she would remember
her grandmother, her uncles..... Each time the Turks were denying
what happened, she would say, 'where is my grandmother? Where is my
uncle? Where are my cousins? Who killed them if it never
happened?'"
The Smyrna massacre took place seven years after the great disaster
of 1915 when more than 1,5 million Armenians were murdered or starved
as they were expelled from Turkey. That event is now viewed as the
first genocide of the 20th century. Adolf Hitler is said to have
taken the world's silence in the face of the attrocity as an
auspicious sign for success of his projected Final Solution for the
Jews.
Sakayan's grandfather would bear the emotional scars of survivor
guilt for the rest of his life. He escaped from Smyrna with his wife
and five children while it was still possible to get out, but the
rest of his family was not so lucky. "Ten people from his family
were left behind (in Smyrna) and were massacred. (My grandfather's)
father, his brother and his family. (My grandmother's) mother, her
brother and the family. Ten people."
Sakayan's reason for including a wide assortment of family pictures
as well as some photographs of Armenian public life in Smyrna was to
refute "the perpetual denial on the part of the Turks. They will
never acknowledge what they did to us. If we had an opponent who
would acknowledge and somehow try to rectify - even though there is
no rectification - what they had done, it wouldn't be so hard to
take. I put all the pictures in to show the world that this is a
real family story. Here we are, we still exist." Not just exist,
but achieve. For in many respects Sakayan's is also an extraordinary
success story.
"Every Armenian can tell you a long story," she smiled as she served
coffee and delicious Armenian butter and nut cookies.
Born in Salonica, Greece, in 1931, she was educated in german both
there and in Vienna where her family moved when she was 12. In 1946
they went to Armenia, which then belonged to the USSR ("I cannot say
we went back, even my parents cannot say "back". My parents were
born in Asia Minor, which was Turkey.") She obtained her doctorate
in Moscow and subsequently returned to Armenia where she taught at
the University of Yerevan for 20 years, 10 of them as head of a huge
department of foreign languages.
She speaks English with a Middle-European accent that is hard to
place, for good reason. "I speak German, modern Greek, Armenian,
Russian, French, Turkish, of course. And of course I learned
Bulgarian and some Swedish and some Spanish. After two, three
languages (the facility) comes."
Since her arrival to Montreal in 1975 she has taught at McGIll.
She has written many scholarly books, but nothing has given her as
much satisfaction as has An Armenian Doctor in Turkey. She laughs
heartily as she says, "it became for me perhaps the culmination of my
intellectual activity." But then she became serious again. "I had
to work on it nights... and when I was deciphering my grandfather's
handwriting, writing about these things, I was thinking (How could a
nation let itself be so ravaged and mistreated, and how could another
nation get away with genocide? How could we continue, how could we
survive after all this?" It is a miracle.)
The strength of her book lies in its understatement and simplicity.
Like all survivor accounts, it stands in for thousands of unwritten
stories. By resurrecting Dr. Hatcherian's diary, Sakayan evokes not
only a world of suffering and loss, but a struggle and rebirth. She
has crafted a loving tribute to her cherished grandfather and to her
people.
Photo Insets: Garabed Hatcherian; Sakayan - labour of love.
Letters to the editor are welcome and can be sent by writing to:
letters@thegazette.southam.ca
NOTE: This article followed a book launching at Chapter's
Books in Montreal's downtown location (1171 Ste. Catherine Street
West, Montreal, Quebec, H3B 1K4) on Friday October 3, 1997; The
book may be purchased by calling the store at (514) 849-8825 or by emailing lilitohan@hotmail.com