Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide

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Description

When World War I began, Karnig Panian was once only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was once among nearly 1,000 Armenian and 400 Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to continue to exist at the orphanage without adult care.

This memoir offers the odd story of what he endured in those years―as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage. The Antoura orphanage was once another project of the Armenian genocide: its administrators, some benign and some cruel, sought to grow to be the children into Turks by changing their Armenian names, forcing them to speak Turkish, and erasing their history.

Panian’s memoir is a full-throated story of loss, resistance, and survival, but told without bitterness or sentimentality. His story shows us how even young children recognize injustice and can organize against it, how they are able to form a sense of identity that they are going to fight to deal with. He paints a painfully rich and detailed picture of the lives and agency of Armenian orphans all through the darkest days of World War I. In the end, Karnig Panian survived the Armenian genocide and the deprivations that followed. Goodbye, Antoura assures us of how humanity, once denied, may also be again reclaimed.

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