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Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past, by Peter Balakian (BasicBooks, revised edition, 2009). This wonderful, beautifully written, and sometimes humorous memoir appears on nearly every recommended reading list for Armenian studies, and with good reason. As I’ve recounted above, the older members of the Balakian family strongly believed in the rituals of dining as primary expressions of cultural continuity. One day, shortly after moving from Teaneck to Tenafly, New Jersey, Peter asked his mother why they couldn’t just have casseroles for dinner. “My mother said ‘Casseroles?’ and then snapped back, ‘If the Americans want to eat that way, let them.’ ” Later, when he was bullied by two neighborhood boys, his mother said, “ ‘What do you expect if they eat casseroles and minute steaks? What kind of people are these?’ ”

Food aside, other Armenian quirks are lovingly revealed in this story of one family in suburban New Jersey in the late 1950s and ’60s. Balakian’s relationship with his grandmother Nafina is really the centerpiece of the story, and I was teary-eyed more than once when reading about her. It was in high school that Balakian discovered poetry, and he writes, “I’ve come to see poetry as the chain of language linking lands and events, people and places that make up our family story. Poetry has been a deep well of thought and feeling and language lushness that the Balakians have lived by.” It might seem strange, but in the Balakian family Armenia, Turkey, death marches, massacres, and survival were not discussed, ever. Balakian’s self-education began with the classic memoir Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (Doubleday, 1919), and he’s been on a crash course ever since, devouring every book, oral history, and historical document he can get his hands on. As I only recently discovered, he edited a newly issued edition of Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (Wayne State, 2003). And happily, he continues to write poems. I particularly enjoyed June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000 (HarperPerennial, 2004), which includes his notable poems “The History of Armenia,” “The Claim,” and “The Oriental Rug.”

The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, by Peter Balakian (HarperCollins, 2003). If you’re interested in reading a single volume on the Armenian issue from the late 1800s to the present day that’s both detailed enough and fast-paced, this is it. In addition to the succinct history Balakian provides, he also reveals a rather lost chapter in American history that featured, among others, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Stephen Crane, and Ezra Pound.

The similarities between the Armenian massacres and the Holocaust are chilling; there seems little doubt that Hitler learned a great deal, and, according to Balakian, he remarked, on August 22, 1939, “Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter—with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees him solely as the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

The epilogue brings everything up-to-date, including the votes in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the French National Assembly (this latter did pass, in 2000).

National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, Belmont, Massachusetts (617 489 1610 / naasr.org)

Zoryan Institute for Contemporary Armenian Research and Documentation (781 646 6713 U.S. / 416 250 9807 Canada / zoryaninstitute.org)

Through the Back Door

CHRISTIANE BIRD

IN CRESCENT & Star, Stephen Kinzer compares the Basque and Northern Ireland conflicts to the Kurdish conflict in Turkey, noting that in both Spain and Ireland people on both sides realized that even if they believed their fight to have been entirely just, the cost of continuing it was too high to inflict on their children. In Turkey, he notes that by one count the