Arts& Literature six months of the Second World War. That novel is, in part, about a fictional family’s complicity in the Holocaust. Often as I toured on behalf of the book in 2008 and 2009, readers would ask me the following: When was I going to write about the <strong>Armenian</strong> Genocide? After all, from my last name it’s clear that I am at least part <strong>Armenian</strong>. (I am, in fact, half-<strong>Armenian</strong>; my mother was Swedish.) I had contemplated the subject often, even after failing in my first attempt to build a novel around the Meds Yeghern. The Great Calamity. Three of my four <strong>Armenian</strong> greatgrandparents died in the poisonous miasma of the genocide and the First World War. Moreover, some of my best—and from a novelist’s perspective most interesting—childhood memories occurred while I was visiting my <strong>Armenian</strong> grandparents at their massive brick monolith of a home in a suburb of New York City. Occasionally, my Mid- Western, Swedish mother would refer to their house as the “Ottoman annex of the Metropolitan,” because it was—at least by the standards of Westchester County in the middle third of the twentieth century—so exotic. In 2010, my father’s health began to deteriorate badly. He lived in Florida at the time, while I lived in Vermont. I remember how on one of my visits, when he was newly home after yet another long stay in the hospital, together we looked at old family photographs. I was trying to take his mind off his pain, but I also found the exercise incredibly interesting. In some cases, these were images I had seen on the walls of my grandparents’ or my parents’ house since I was a child, but they had become little more than white noise: I knew them so well that I barely noticed them and they had grown as invisible to me as old wallpaper. Now, however, they took on a new life. I recall one in particular that fascinated me: a formal portrait of my father when he was five years old, his parents behind him. All of them are impeccably coiffed. My grandfather is seated in an elegant wooden chair in the sort of suit and tie and vest that he seemed always to be wearing when I was a boy, and my grandmother is standing beside him in a beautiful black dress with a white collar and a corsage. I can see bits of my daughter—their great-granddaughter—in my grandmother’s beautiful, almond-shaped eyes. My father, a kindergartener at the time, is wearing shorts, a white shirt, and a Perhaps in no case has the relationship between reflection and construction— between the ethereal wisps of imagination and the concrete words of creation— been more evident than in the novel I have arriving this summer, The Sandcastle Girls. rather badly knotted necktie with a cross on it. I knew almost nothing about my grandparents’ story. But that picture reminded me of those moments when, as a child myself, I would sit on my grandfather’s lap or listen to him, enrapt, as he played his beloved oud. I recalled the wondrous aroma of lamb and mint that always wafted from their front door when I would arrive, and my grandmother’s magnificent cheese boregs. I thought of their library filled with books in a language—an alphabet—I could not begin to decipher, even as I was learning to read English. And at some point, the seeds of my family’s own personal diaspora began to take root. I had no interest in revisiting the disastrous manuscript that was gathering dust in my college archives. But I knew that I wanted to try once again to write about the <strong>Armenian</strong> Genocide. A good friend of mine, a journalist and genocide scholar, urged me on. Ironically, I was about 90 pages into my new book when Mark Mustian published his beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking novel, The Gendarme. I felt a bit as I had in 1994 when I read Carol Edgarian’s Rise the Euphrates. Did the world really need my book when it had Mark’s—or, for that matter, the stories and memoirs that Peter Balakian, Nancy Kricorian, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and Franz Werfel had given us? It might have been my father’s failing health, or it might have been the fact that I was older now; it might have been the reality that already I cared deeply for the fictional women and men in my new novel. But this time I soldiered on. I think The Sandcastle Girls may be the most important book I’ve written. It is certainly the most personal. It’s a big, broad, sweeping historical love story. The novel moves back and forth in time between the present and 1915; between the narrative of an <strong>Armenian</strong>-American novelist at mid-life and her grandparents’ nightmarish stories of survival in Aleppo, Van, and Gallipoli in 1915. Those fictional grandparents are not by any stretch my grandparents, but the novel would not exist without their courage and charisma. Is the novel among my best work? The book opens with memories from my childhood in my grandparents’ home, what my mother referred to as the Ottoman Annex. In other words, it has been gestating almost my entire life. a This page is sponsored by Margaret Stepanian (Providence, R.I.) 10 | THE ARMENIAN WEEKLY | <strong>April</strong> <strong>2012</strong>
Arts& Literature ‘ THE MAKING OF De orted a dream play’ Bobbie Steinbach as Victoria and Jeanine Kane as Varter, in ‘Deported / a dream play’ By Joyce Van Dyke Joyce Van Dyke’s “Deported / a dream play” tells the story of two women deported together from Mezireh in 1915: the playwright’s grandmother, and her best friend, Varter, the mother of Dr. H. Martin Deranian. “Deported” just received its first professional production, playing to sold-out houses at the Modern Theatre in Boston from March 8 to <strong>April</strong> 1, <strong>2012</strong>. The play was directed by Judy Braha and produced by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in association with Suffolk University. <strong>April</strong> <strong>2012</strong> | THE ARMENIAN WEEKLY | 11
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