I’ve been reading and enjoying some armenian writers in the past few weeks. From cookbooks to biographies, short stories, or academic writings.. can you recommend must-read books on armenian history and culture? Must be published in turkish or english though i prefer turkish. Thanks..
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Posted by Ceyya
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You **must must must** read “You Rejoice My Heart” by Kemal Yalcin. It’s an incredible book about a fascinating journey you get to go on, as a German Turk goes back to Turkey to find out what happened to the Armenians since the genocide, including the events of the 1950s, and finding crypto-Armenians deep in Anatolia.
It is available in Turkish, but I’m not sure how hard it is to get your hands on it.
Another slightly more academic but great book which similarly explores the Armenian Genocide only through interviews with survivors, nothing else. It’s well worth getting your hands on, though I don’t think it has a Turkish version – but I hope I’m wrong. The name is “Survivors: An Oral History Of The Armenian Genocide”.
Both books should be required reading in Turkish in my opinion. I think they’d do a lot to put a human face on an issue that for too many Turks is just too impersonal.
As for biographies, I think you’d find Vartan Gregorian’s autobiography quite interesting. Especially the first couple of chapters when he’s in Iran and then Lebanon (where he works for the last PM of the briefly post-WWI independent Armenia).
Maybe more interesting for you would be “My Brother’s Road”, about Monte Melkonian. How the Californian-Armenian became first a terrorist, then got out of that, and then became a commander in the first Karabakh war. A fascinating life no matter what you think of him.