LOVE AND WAR: THE STORY OF A GIRL IN OCCUPIED FRANCE
By Nanore Barsoumian // September 18, 2013 in Books & Art, Featured, Headline
All The Light There Was
By Nancy Kricorian
Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2013)
279 pages, $24.00
Anarchists, communists, liberals, Jews, emigres-Frenchmen from all
walks of life resisted the Nazi occupation in France and the Vichy
regime during World War II. They collectively made up what is referred
to as the French Resistance. Armenians also joined the struggle, in
defense of the France they had come to love. History often belongs
to the boldest, the “great men”-and a handful of women-who defined
their time. From the ranks of the Armenian fighters, a few names
stand out, chief among them the poet Missak Manouchian, a Communist
who commanded the Manouchian Group. But there were others whose
stories, acts of heroism, and contributions to the Resistance went by
unnoticed. Nancy Kricorian’s recent novel, All The Light There Was,
peers into the everyday struggle on the domestic front, and offers
an unlikely heroine-an Armenian girl who comes of age during the Nazi
occupation of France.
All the Light There Was is a story of loss, love, and finding the
guiding light when darkness prevails.
Kricorian paints a palpable reality, ushering in the tribulations,
uncertainties, and fears that her characters had to face. The story
unfolds from the perspective of the 14-year-old Maral Pegorian. Time
passes through a different stream-often in fragments marked by
different pronunciations of love-for the pubescent Maral. For instance,
when she meets Andon, a suitor, time seems to pass in weekly increments
as she sees him only on Sundays. “This is the story of how we lived
the war, and how I found my husband,” offers Maral early in the
book. It is also about the smaller ways in which war affects those
condemned to live it (like the meals made of bulgur and turnips),
the sacrifices, and the bonds and love that nudge survivors on.
Through her narrator, Kricorian offers us a commentary on women’s
roles, and on the demands and expectations an Armenian girl grapples
with. Had the story been narrated by Maral’s “mule-headed” brother
Missak or his friend Zaven-both aiding the resistance-a decidedly
revolutionary narrative would have emerged. Had it been written by
Maral’s father, a shoe-cobbler with an affinity for lengthy political
discussions, or her mother Azniv, the story may have turned to the
politics and events of the time, or about motherly love and grief. But
with Maral, the story is told from the physical confines of a young
woman living under her parents’ roof. Her home, school, friends’
homes, the Armenian Cathedral, and the parks near her house outline
the boundaries of her physical world. Envious of her brother and
his friends who are allowed to flirt with fate, Maral often finds
herself rebelling against the gender mold she is stuffed into, and
being treated “like a hen in a coop.”
Even though the predominant setting is the household-replete with
activities such as knitting, cooking, and washing-Maral attempts to
burst out of that narrow world. At times she succeeds, running through
the streets of Paris as authorities crack down on marchers. Other
times, her escape is through her brother and his stories.
Hers is a story of resilience, emotional and physical. Maral is also
a “hero”-allowing compassion to lead her actions-as she takes the
initiative to save the life of her Jewish neighbors’ three-year-old
daughter, Claire. The fate the Jews seemed to face reminded the older
Armenians of the horrors they experienced only two decades before.
“The child is an orphan. The same as we were. Except we saw it all.
Our parents dead before our eyes. Bodies in the dirt. Children with big
bellies and heads, arms and legs skinny like spiders. It is the same
thing again, Azniv, the way they sent us to die in the desert,” says
Aunt Shakeh to her sister, Azniv, in a rare reference to the genocide.
The narrative of the past-the deportations, killings, separations,
orphanages-dictates how Armenians see and respond to the events
unfolding around them. However, Maral observes that the topic of
Armenian Genocide rarely surfaces in conversation. She explains: “It
was strange that I knew so little about what they had gone through,
especially as it seemed to loom like a vast, amorphous shadow over our
lives. My mother and my aunt referred vaguely and ominously to what
they called the Massacres or the Deportations. If I asked a question
about that period in the Old Country, my mother would say darkly,
‘It’s better not to talk about those times.’ Auntie Shakeh would go
pale and invoke God. So after a while, I stopped asking, and it was
all I could do to keep from rolling my eyes when they made their dire,
cryptic references.”
All The Light There Was is a powerful story of how ethnic bonds can
blur allegiances. We encounter Armenians among Nazi collaborators,
Allied soldiers, and resistance fighters. We meet Andon the
collaborator, whose family hailed from Moush. Andon joined the
Wehrmacht after he was recruited from a German camp, where he was
being held as a Soviet prisoner of war. We meet Zeitountsi Hrant, the
American soldier from New York. And there are the Armenian Resistance
fighters like the Kacherian brothers, Zaven and Barkev.
They all have a bond that connects them: They are the children of
genocide survivors dispersed across the globe. And so, the Armenian
identity comes first before the other, hyphenated identity. In one
revealing moment, Maral’s friend Jacqueline, upon meeting Andon,
says, “I know that under that German uniform, there beats an Armenian
heart.” Maral is at the intersection of all these identities, and it
appears she is tasked with reaffirming these bonds, sometimes with
as little as a symbolic kiss.
War emerges as a miasma of dead romances, dead boys, POWs, food
shortages, tuberculosis, hunger, betrayal, and the hellholes they
called work camps. Following news of the death of a loved one, Maral
sees her loss and pain not as uniquely hers but as an affliction that
indiscriminately targets victims everywhere: “I didn’t know what to
feel or think. I observed the three of us from above, small people in a
small apartment, bent with grief. This scene was playing itself out in
apartments and houses all across the city, all across the continent,
and all around the world. The war was a great factory of suffering,
all of it fashioned by human hands.” All the Light There Was is a story
of loss, love, and finding the guiding light when darkness prevails. As
Maral’s father says, “This world is made of dark and light, my girl,
and in the darkest times you have to believe the sun will come again,
even if you yourself don’t live to see it.”
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2013/09/18/love-and-war-the-story-of-a-girl-in-occupied-france/