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Black Dog Of Fate
A Memoir
Description
“His visions are burning — his poetry heartbreaking,” wrote Elie Wiesel of American poet Peter Balakian. Now, in elegant prose, the prize-winning poet who James Dickey called “an extraordinary talent” has written a compelling memoir about growing up American in a family that was haunted by a past too fraught with terror to be spoken of openly. Black Dog of Fate is set in the affluent New Jersey suburbs where Balakian — the firstborn son of his generation — grew up in a close, extended family. At the center of what was a quintessential American baby boom childhood lay the dark specter of a trauma his forebears had experienced — the Ottoman Turkish government’s extermination of more than a million Armenians in 1915, the century’s first genocide. In a story that climaxes to powerful personal and moral revelations, Balakian traces the complex process of discovering the facts of his people’s history and the horrifying aftermath of the Turkish government’s campaign to cover up one of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity. In describing his awakening to the facts of history, Balakian introduces us to a remarkable family of matriarchs and merchants, physicians, a bishop, and his aunts, two well-known figures in the world of literature. The unforgettable central figure of the story is Balakian’s grandmother, a survivor and widow of the Genocide who speaks in fragments of metaphor and myth as she cooks up Armenian delicacies, plays the stock market, and keeps track of the baseball stats of her beloved Yankees. The book is infused with the intense and often comic collision between this family’s ancient Near Eastern traditions and the American pop culture of the ’50s and ’60s.Balakian moves with ease from childhood memory, to history, to his ancestors’ lives, to the story of a poet’s coming of age. Written with power and grace, Black Dog of Fate unfolds like a tapestry its tale of survival against enormous odds. Through the eyes of a poet, here is the arresting story of a family’s journey from its haunted past to a new life in a new world.
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Praise
“A fascinating and affecting memoir….Written with great sensitivity, Black Dog of Fate is at once a family memoir, a history of the extermination of the Armenians in Turkey, and the story of a young man’s passage into adulthood.”
—New York Times Book Review
“An engrossing and poignant memoir.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A prose masterpiece by an acclaimed poet…. Some memoirs are compelling for the private dramas they make public, others for the historic events to which they give witness and still others for the quality of their prose and structuring. Precious few excel at all three—Nabakov’s Speak, Memory remains the standard. Now Balakian ups the ante a bit, writing a memoir that not only compels in all three areas but that carries within it an urgent and timely appeal that a dark moment in world history not be revised out of existence.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“It starts as a graceful Holden Caulfield-like memoir of youth…and ends as…a cry from the heart, transcribed with enormous literary skill that directly penetrates the reader’s emotions and uniquely conveys how and why the [Armenian Genocide] still grips the Armenian diaspora so ferociously.”
—Foreign Affairs
“Balakian has written a sort of Armenian Roots…. He offers a picture of a suburbia with a secret…. In the retrieved testimony of [his ancestors] we can feel a stinging reproach that the 1919 promise of international law—to say nothing of international justice—remains unkept.”
—Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A landmark chapter in the literature of witness…. It is one of the book’s many triumphs that the incredible suffering endured by Balakian’s ancestors…finds a redeeming correlative in the touching lyricism of his style…. Out of silence he has crafted something new.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer Book Review
“[One of the] best memoirs of the summer….Leaps from the babybooming suburbs of the ‘50s and ‘60s to the killing field of Armenia.”
—USA Today
“All the best memoirs belong to the literature of quest. They are tales of discovery, stories of finding one’s way back as well as forward. Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate is such a book.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Balakian writes with power and poignancy, confronting his past with justified outrage and transforming that outrange into art. An exceptional work.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“An essential American story of the author’s upbringing as the child of Armenian immigrants—and of his gradual discovery of an entire culture’s genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915…. A rare work of seasoned introspection, haunting beauty, and high moral seriousness. Includes a chilling genealogy of Balakian’s parents’ families.”
—Kirkus (starred)
“His book alternately amuses, charms, and horrifies…intimate, funny, sad, and very serious.”
—Providence Journal
“Balakian weaves the dark horros of the Armenian past into his story of middle class America…a beautiful book….Balakian has given voice to a people who were nearly destroyed and told a story that all should read.”
—Fresno Bee
“Only once in a generation a work of literary accomplishment appears that poses the difficult questions so forcefully and succeeds in answering them with clarity and eloquence.”
—Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“The eldest grandson of one survivor remembers. And it honors the memory of Nafina Aroosian that Peter Balakian tells her story and his with passion and with grace.”
—Orange County Register
“This will be a classic among memoirs for what it tells us about the Armenian-American story, about the reclaiming of unspeakable personal and family truths, and about the emergence of a powerful poetic voice.”
—Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctor
“A deeply moving account of a modern American poet’s discovery of genocide—that of his own people, the Armenians. Balakian’s elegant style does not mask a burning anger over a holocaust the world has chosen to ignore.”
—D.M. Thomas, author of Dreaming in Bronze
“Balakian, a gifted poet, knows exactly how to bring the pain of the past into the landscape of the present. Passionate and endearingly personal…an extraordinary book.”
—Alfred Kazin, author of A Walker in the City
“This is a profound and eloquent book that traces the transmutation of a painful history into the stuff of literature and moral engagement.”
—Mary Catherine Bateson, author of With a Daughter's Eye