AUTHOR WITH LOCAL TIES TO LAUNCH BOOK TOUR AT ESU
by Dan Berrett
Pocono Record Writer
Pocono Record, PA
April 26 2007
A 15-year-old girl named Ester Minerajian Ahronian Ajemian was walking
home from school through the village of Amasia in Armenia one afternoon
in 1915.
She saw a man, whom Ester thought was no older than 17, with his
hands bound behind him. A group of Turkish soldiers walked with him,
their guns jabbed into his back.
As they passed, Ester heard the man whispering the Lord’s Prayer
in Armenian.
They took him to a large wooden platform in the town square where a
crowd quickly formed.
"I sucked in my breath," Ester recalled. "I was about to witness a
hanging and my blood was racing."
The soldiers tied a noose around the boy’s neck.
"He shouted one word – Asvadzeem – Armenian for "my God" before
the trap door under him snapped open," Ester said.
He jerked and kicked his legs before the life drained from his body.
"His eyes were staring wide open when another soldier near the platform
sliced open the boy’s stomach. His insides hit the ground in a bloody
clump and splashed in all directions."
Ester turned to the wall and vomited, then ran home to tell her
grandmother what she had just seen.
"Grandmom smacked me hard," Ester recounted. "’Tell no one what
you saw’."
The passage appears about one-third of the way through "A Knock at
the Door," a new memoir written by Ester’s daughter, Margaret Ajemian
Ahnert. The scene marks the beginning of three years of hell in
Ester’s life – spanning a death march, her rape and being essentially
enslaved by a Turkish family – all of which Ahnert recounts in her
mother’s voice. The narrative gives readers an intimate view of
the Armenian genocide, which was carried out by the Ottoman Empire
between 1915-1918.
The book was released by Beaufort Press on Tuesday to coincide with
the 92nd anniversary of the deportations of Armenian intellectuals
and leaders in Constantinople. On Monday, Ahnert will be kicking off
her national book tour with a free public lecture at East Stroudsburg
University.
Ahnert is beginning her tour in the Poconos because of her family ties
to the area. She is the widow of Robert Ahnert, the former co-owner,
with his brother Harry, of Fernwood Resorts. Her late husband was
an ESU graduate; the university’s alumni center was named after her
brother-in-law. She lived here for 21 years.
She grew up in New York hearing her mother’s stories of the old
country. They were fairly benign, for the most part, and filled with
folk wisdom, though there were hints of the brutality her mother
had endured.
"I think when you’re young, you don’t realize the impact of what
you’re hearing," Ahnert said. "I thought they were painful stories
my mother lived through."
It wasn’t until she was 17, when Ahnert read Franz Werfel’s "The Forty
Days of Musa Dagh," that the full weight of her family’s history and
its connection to the larger genocide – the first of the bloody 20th
century – became clear.
"When I read that book, I suddenly realized this was something my
mother lived through," Ahnert said Wednesday from her home in Ft.
Lauderdale, Fla. "Then I started asking her questions and she’d tell
me more things. I’d always write her story down and it’d be amazing
to me."
Ahnert collected notebooks full of stories from her mother. Over the
years, her mother’s recollection of the details remained constant.
Ahnert assembled the memories into the memoir’s narrative of her
mother’s traumas, which she alternates with an account 83 years later,
as she visits her mother in an Armenian home for the aged.
"It’s been brewing all my life," Ahnert said of the book, which
she wrote as her master’s of fine arts thesis at Goucher College in
Baltimore, Md.
Her motives for writing were personal at first. "It started out as
a family memoir," she said. "So that my children and grandchildren
would know what my mother lived through."
But the history itself remains bitterly contested. Turkey continues
to deny or downplay what happened, often depicting the genocide as
happening in the fog of war as the Ottoman Empire crumbled, and saying
that both sides suffered.
A measure scheduled to come to the floor of the U.S. House
of Representatives, which would have joined 15 other nations in
classifying the event as genocide, has brought the issue back to center
stage. The issue has tied the U.S. government in knots because Turkey
is a key ally in the Middle East and a source of oil.
Historians say that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died in the
genocide, with many more deported, driven from their homes, tortured,
massacred and starved.
Ironically, Armenians themselves were part of the process of burying
history. Ahnert writes that her father often urged her to mortseer,
or forget.
"The Armenians came here and tried to forget," she said. "By forcing
themselves to forget, the world forgot. It’s still denied and the
world didn’t even know about it."
She said she often gives readings and asks those in attendance if
they have heard about the Armenian genocide. She’s lucky if one raises
her hand.
Ahnert hopes her book will raise awareness. "On a broader scale, if
my neighbors and other non-Armenians now know something they didn’t
know, that would please me very much."
IF YOU GO…
What: Lecture by Margaret Ajemian Ahnert, author of "A Knock at
the Door," a memoir of her mother’s experience during the Armenian
genocide.
When: Monday at 5:15 p.m.
Where: Beers Lecture Hall, East Stroudsburg University How much:
Free and open to the public For more information: Call 570 422-3532
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