As the Poppies Bloomed

As the Poppies Bloomed by Maral Boyadjian   282 pages

Anyone who is familiar with my musings on the books I have read knows that I often pick up a book based on its title and/or its dust jacket.  As the Poppies Bloomed is one such book. Based on the title, and to some degree the cover art, I thought I was going to be reading a book that took place in Germany or France during World War I.  The story takes place on the eve of the Great War but takes place in the Ottoman Empire. I was somewhat familiar with the Armenian Genocide from what I’ve learned by following author Chris Bohjalian’s career and reading his wonderful novels.

It’s 1913, somewhere in the Ottoman Empire that I couldn’t place. The landscape reminded me of the Middle East. It’s the story of a village, in particular one young girl, Anno.

Readers will learn about the Armenia customs, especially in regard to male-female relationships and marriage. I found it quite interesting and not unlike other cultures’ beliefs at the near-beginning of the 20^th century.

I had a hard time getting into the story, mainly because I was unfamiliar with how to pronounce the characters’ names and locations but also because many names began with the same letter and I couldn’t keep them straight. I kept having to flip back and make sure I know who each character was in relation to Anno.

Another flaw was not the inevitable ending. The story could only end one way to have an authentic feel, but the Epilogue takes place in 1976. It made me shake my head in disbelief.

Still there were times I was totally captivated by Anno and her village’s story. I even gasped a few times at the surprises that author Boyadjian provided that kept me reading. It took me almost two weeks to read this novel and that, plus the issues listed above forces me to give As the Poppies Bloomed gets 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Forty Days of Musa Dagh

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel, 817 pages

This is Franz Werfel's fictionalization of the true story of a community of Armenians who, facing deportation and almost certain death, fortified a mountain called Musa Dagh and resisted the Turks for 53 days.  The shortening of the siege to the more evocative forty days is only one of many liberties Werfel takes with history, most notably the transformation of the actual leader of the resistance into a fictional character.

Werfel (best known as the author of The Song of Bernadette) intended neither a history text nor a Tom Clancy-style military thriller, though it is easy to imagine either treatment of this story being effective.  Rather, the author slowly develops themes of loyalty, sacrifice, love, honor, jealousy, pride, hope, and faith, centered around the protagonist, Gabriel Bagradian, a wealthy Armenian recently returned to his people after long years abroad, his French wife Juliette, and their son Stephan, who simultaneously struggles to find his place both as a man and as an Armenian.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a long, slow novel.  Rather than providing a hollow sense of closure when even victory is a kind of defeat, the novel concludes with an anti-climax.  Instead of fast-paced action, Werfel delivers genuine surprises.  

History of the Armenian Genocide

"They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide by Ronald Grigor Suny, 374 pages

2015 marks the hundredth anniversary of the height of the mass slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman government, a horror which resulted in the first use of the term "crimes against humanity".  Not surprisingly, a number of books have been released to coincide with the anniversary, and Suny's is surely one of the best.  He relates in careful detail how modernity and its attendant ethnic nationalist factionalism turned Armenians from the best trusted and most loyal subjects of the Sultan into an oppressed, marginalized ethnic group.  The eventual genocide is revealed as the culmination of an escalating series of massacres and persecutions carried out despite, not because of, military necessity.

The book takes a middle course, concentrating on the narrative of how the genocide developed, rather than on extensive statistical analyses of the populations involved or the visceral personal experiences of victims and killers.  Perhaps no book could do all three well, and by making the choice he did, Suny is able to not only illuminate what happened in Anatolia a hundred years ago, but also to sketch the general process by which genocides are born.

Orhan's Inheritance

Orhan's Inheiritance by Aline Ohansesian
340 Pages


"They found him inside one of seventeen cauldrons in the courtyard, steeping in an indigo dye two shades darker than the summer sky. His arms and chin were propped over the copper edge, but the rest of Kemal Türkoglu, age ninety-three, had turned a pretty pale blue. When Orhan's brilliant and eccentric grandfather, who built a dynasty out of making kilim rugs, is found dead in a vat of dye, Orhan inherits the decades-old business. But his grandfather's will raises more questions than it answers. Kemal has left the family estate to a stranger thousands of miles away, an aging woman in a retirement home in Los Angeles. Her existence and secrecy about her past only deepen the mystery of why Orhan's grandfather would have left their home to this woman rather than to his own family. Intent on righting this injustice, Orhan boards a plane to Los Angeles. There, over many meetings, he will unearth the story that eighty-seven-year-old Seda so closely guards--the story that, if told, has the power to undo the legacy upon which Orhan's family is built, the story that could unravel Orhan's own future. "

A novel about the effects of the Armenian Genocide that took place during World War I, this book was good and you become invested in the characters.