There Was and There Was Not. By Meline Toumani. Metropolitan Books; 304 pages; $28. Buy from Amazon.comANNIVERSARIES have become the party theme of our time, especially over the past year, as the world was reminded of the start of the first world war. At least two further historic moments will be marked in 2015. One is the battle of Waterloo, which on June 18th will be accompanied by triumphal chest-beating (at least in Britain). Elsewhere, the centenary of the Armenian genocide is likely to arouse rage as well as recrimination.On April 24th 1915 scores of Armenian intellectuals and artists were rounded up in Istanbul, the capital of the collapsing Ottoman empire, and later killed. The killings marked the start of a protracted period of persecution of the empire’s Christian subjects, who were subjected to state-sanctioned murder, rape and huge forced deportations to the Syrian desert. At least 1m people—mostly Armenians—died.In an audacious first book, Meline Toumani, an Armenian-American journalist who grew up in suburban New Jersey, describes spending two weeks every year as a youngster in an Armenian summer camp in Massachusetts, where she and fellow schoolchildren were ordered never to forget what happened to the Armenians. She offers...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21637351-untangling-hatred-between-turks-and-armenians-seeing-through-fire?fsrc=rss%7Cbar
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