Tadem, My Father's Village

Tadem, My Father's Village

Kaloosdian, Robert Aram.
Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Peter E. Randall, 2015, First edition, 336 pages. ISBN 9781942155027.

"They fanned out across Anatolia, Armenia, and the rest of the Middle East, searching for, retrieving, and rescuing the lost children of the Armenians.They gathered them by the tens of thousands, washed and cleaned them, tended and cured them, clothed them, placed them in orphanages, and restarted their education."

Description:
Despite garnering the outrage of the world when it occurred, the Armenian Genocide, events for which the term “genocide” was originally coined, is largely forgotten. This forgetting is explained partially because it happened between 1915–1923 against the backdrop of World War I; partially because it took place in a remote, inaccessible nation where photographic evidence was rare and access was limited by the culpable Young Turk government. Another likely cause of the world’s amnesia, if not dismissal, of the events of 1915–1923 lies in German-Jewish satirist Kurt Tucholsky’s famous line, “The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!” In short, some horrors are too great to be readily comprehended unless we find a way to bring them back to a human scale.

Sample Chapters:

• The 1895 Plunder and Massacre
• Deportation of the Women of Tadem
• In Mezre Prison Once Again
• Through the Dersim Mountains and Out of the Turkish Grasp.
• Slaves in a Vanishing Village

Available online.