My Grandmother: An Armenian-Turkish Memoir
This was a brief but very affecting memoir written by a Turkish lawyer and activist about discovering her Grandmother's origins. It's only in recent years that the Armenian Genocide is coming to be recognized as the atrocity it was. Turkey has done it's best to erase this part of it's history. But as Fetihye Cetin and others like her come to learn about and embrace their heritage, that denial is slipping away. This book is as much about Cetin's journey to process her grandmother's story as it is about that story itself. As such, it jumps around a little in an attempt to lay all the groundwork for the story. This mostly worked, though it was occasionally jarring to jump between Cetin's present and her grandmother's childhood. By the end it all comes together, and it makes sense why she explains the things she does. Cetin doesn't linger over the horrors her grandmother experienced on the death march to Aleppo, but she doesn't shy away from them...