Home / National

Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Genocide memoir Armenian Golgotha to appear in English April 2

Published: Wednesday March 25, 2009

Cover of Armenian Golgotha..

New York - "Of all the Christian minorities of the East, we Armenians are to blame for our fate. For although we are an alert nation, we believed in the Europeans' professed struggle for justice and rights, in their false words and deceptions. Our exemplary stupidity was a simplemindedness peculiar to peasants: we did not realize that on the scales of justice, the oil deposits of Mosul would weigh more than the lives of millions of Christians."

On April 24, 1915, the author of these words, Fr. Grigoris Balakian, was arrested along with some 250 other intellectuals and leaders of Constantinople's Armenian community. During the next four years, he bore witness to the countless deportation caravans of Armenians, tortured, raped, or slaughtered and subsequently mutilated on their way to death in the Syrian deserts; heard the testimony of many survivors, foreign witnesses, and Turkish officials involved in the extermination campaign; and also came to know of some brave, righteous Turks and their German allies who resisted secret extermination orders.  

Miraculously, Balakian managed to escape – through forest and over mountain, disguised as, among other things, a railroad worker and then a German soldier. By September 1918, determined to testify to the "great crime," he was already at work on a dramatic and comprehensive memoir. "One after another the bloody episodes of the thorny Armenian Golgotha moved across my mind," he wrote. "We were still living in a time of annihilation and terror."

The first volume of Armenian Golgotha was published in 1922 by the Armenian Mekhitarist press of Vienna; the second, found among his sister's papers after her death in 1956, was published in Paris three years later with the aid of the Armenian General Benevolent Union.

Searing in its detail, Balakian's analysis of the Turkish government's organized plan to annihilate the Armenians spurred the young Vahakn Dadrian to devote himself to research on the Armenian Genocide. Armenian Golgotha "shook me to the foundations of my being," he recalled in a 2005 interview with the Armenian Reporter. "The graphic description of the fiendish atrocities overwhelmed me. That became a turning point in my academic career," added Prof. Dadrian, now Director of Genocide Research at the Zoryan Institute.

Grigoris Balakian, who became bishop of the Armenian Apostolic Church in southern France, died in Marseilles in 1934. His great nephew, the poet and memoirist Peter Balakian, first learned about Armenian Golgotha in 1991 through a chain of circumstances he describes in his prize-winning memoir Black Dog of Fate (now reissued in a 10th anniversary edition).

After a ten-year project of translating and editing this memoir with former Armenian Reporter managing editor Aris Sevag, Peter Balakian has brought Armenian Golgotha into an English edition to be published by Knopf on April 2. "It has been a particularly poignant and rich experience for me to bring [Grigoris Balakian's] book into print in English, eighty-seven years after its initial publication," Peter Balakian writes in the preface.

Elie Wiesel found Armenian Golgotha a "heartbreaking book"; Sir Martin Gilbert calls it "a story that needs to be known."

"The translation and publication of Armenian Golgotha in English is long overdue," states Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust. "It constitutes a thundering historical proof that those who deny the Armenian Genocide are engaged in a massive deception."

"This book will become a classic," predicts Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors,"both for its depiction of a much denied genocide and for its humane and brilliant witness to what human beings can endure and overcome."

connect:
randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307262882
1-212-572-2151