BOOK REVIEW: NOVEL DETAILS HORRORS OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Jenna Sauber
Columbus Dispatch, OH
April 4 2007
FOR THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
In her debut novel, Skylark Farm, Antonia Arslan brings to light the
devastating events of what many consider to be the first genocide of
the 20th century — the killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire’s
Young Turks at the outbreak of World War I.
Arslan, an Armenian who has lived in Italy and taught at a university
there, has fictionalized her family’s story while using their real
names.
Yerwant Arslanian, the author’s grandfather, left home at 13
and traveled to Italy to study. His older brother Sempad, who has
remained in a small western Turkish town to raise his large family,
is well-known and loved throughout the community. Sempad tries to
catch up with Western fancies and is oblivious to the approaching war.
When the brothers’ father dies, Yerwant makes plans to visit Sempad
and his family at Skylark Farm, a family estate in the country. But
days before Yerwant is to depart with carloads of gifts, Sempad and
the other Armenian males of the village are murdered by a renegade
band of Turkish soldiers at the farm and buried in the freshly dug
ground of a tennis court.
With the men gone, the women have no choice but to leave in a
deportation caravan through the Syrian desert, led by Turkish guides
who pillage and rape the defenseless and starving group all the way
to Aleppo.
Yerwant and his half-brother Zareh breathlessly wait for news regarding
their remaining family members, aided by a distant relative who is
a Greek Gypsy, and a lame beggar who is torn between helping his
friends and the government in its plan to eliminate the Armenians.
Arslan’s heartbreaking tale, like the Holocaust, is horrific, a
chronicling of man’s inhumanity to man. But it is ultimately a story
of survival.
Simply written, Skylark Farm is told from the perspective of several
people on both sides of the genocide, including government officials,
the Arslan family, and even the accommodating wife of the French
consul in Aleppo.
Graphic and often horrifying, the details of the massacre and
death march through the desert make this novel much more than a
granddaughter’s re-imagining of her family history — it captures
a moment in time that changed the lives of tens of thousands of
people forever.