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A review by liralen
My Grandmother: A Memoir by Fethiye Çetin
3.0
Çetin's grandmother was, as far as Çetin knew for most of her life, a Turkish Muslim. It was only when Çetin was an adult and her grandmother nearing her last years that Çetin learned the truth: her grandmother had once had another name, another religion, another family—Armenian Christians. She'd been kidnapped during a death march and raised by her captors as a combination of daughter and servant. As Çetin tells it, her grandmother had more or less come to peace with this, had viewed her captor-father as a good man. What her grandmother still wondered about, though, was the family that had escaped to America.
This is one of those things that...the story is in parts fascinating and definitely important, but, knowing little about Turkey and less about Armenia, I would have needed a lot more context to really understand. This is a translation, and I suspect that most of those capable of reading the original would have at the very least a slightly better chance than I did of understanding all the nuance, but I think I'd have done better starting with a history book and then moving on to this. A lot of this is a secondhand story, which I suppose adds to the disconnected sense I had. Çetin was working only with what she had, though, but it sounds like there's...so much room to unpack so much more. How do you move on from having your entire life and family ripped away from you? How do you move on from the family you can find again not helping you get in contact with the others? These might not be questions Çetin could reasonably answer, but oof.
This is one of those things that...the story is in parts fascinating and definitely important, but, knowing little about Turkey and less about Armenia, I would have needed a lot more context to really understand. This is a translation, and I suspect that most of those capable of reading the original would have at the very least a slightly better chance than I did of understanding all the nuance, but I think I'd have done better starting with a history book and then moving on to this. A lot of this is a secondhand story, which I suppose adds to the disconnected sense I had. Çetin was working only with what she had, though, but it sounds like there's...so much room to unpack so much more. How do you move on from having your entire life and family ripped away from you? How do you move on from the family you can find again not helping you get in contact with the others? These might not be questions Çetin could reasonably answer, but oof.