examiner.net
July 24, 2004
Out of the cold
Armine Burutyan Fong overcomes Soviet opression to become top coach
By Bill Althaus
The Examiner
Jeff Stead/the Examiner
Armine Burutyan Fong works with young gymnasts at Great American
Gymnastics Express in Blue Springs. Burutyan Fong was a top gymnast in
Armenia as a child but now shows what she has learned to area gymnasts.
The tiny girl stands in two feet of snow, blowing into her hands in an
unsuccessful attempt to keep them warm. She has a school backpack slung over
her right shoulder and a gym bag hanging over the left.
It is hours before the sun will rise in the small community in Armenia, yet
she peers down the roadside at 5:30 a.m., hoping to catch a glimpse of the
bus that will take her to her gym.
This is a daily ritual for 9-year-old Armine Barutyan, who will one day
become one of the most celebrated gymnasts in her country.
She didn’t view the daily trip by bus as a hardship. Her father worked three
jobs, yet there wasn’t enough money in the budget to buy gasoline to drive
his daughter to her early-morning workouts.
Jeff Stead/the Examiner
Burutyan Fong works with Courtney McCool as she warms up for practice.
McCool and Terin Humphrey both train at GAGE and have both qualified for the
U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team that will compete in the Olympics next month in
Athens, Greece.
For six years, in sub-zero temperatures, driving rain or mind-numbing heat,
Barutyan would never miss the opportunity to fine tune her skills – skills
that were light years ahead of their time.
It was the early 1980s, and this petite dynamo was executing a triple back
off the bars or a double layout off the beam.
Judges were so stunned by the moves, they didn’t know how to judge the
Armenian gymnast who seemed destined for Olympic gold.
But her dreams were dashed because of the type of political skullduggery
that most of us only experience in a big-budget summertime movie.
While Barutyan was about to burst on the international scene, the former
Soviet Union was hand picking representatives for its gymnastics team.
The Soviets wanted a pure team, and that did not include anyone from
Armenia.
“They asked me to move to the Soviet Union,” she said, “but I did not want
to leave my family.”
Officials even asked her to change her last name from Barutyan to Barutyana,
thinking that the extra vowel at the end of her name would make the world
think she was the pride of the USSR.
Jeff Stead/the Examiner
Armine Burutyan Fong talks with young gymnasts at GAGE in Blue Springs.
She refused – and soon disappeared from the international gymnastics scene.
Eventually, she and her family moved to the United States where she became a
gymnastics coach in Los Angeles.
“It’s a tragedy,” said Al Fong, the owner and coach at Great American
Gymnastic Express in Blue Springs. “Armine could have been one of the most
respected and honored gymnasts in the world – but she was never given the
chance to perform, to show what she could do.”
Fong speaks with great passion.
He loves his sport, and will take two gymnasts to the Summer Games in
Athens – Courtney McCool and Terin Humphrey.
He will also be joined by Armine Barutyan Fong, his wife of nine years, who
along with her husband earned Coach of the Year honors by USGA (United
States of America Gymnastics).
Barutyan Fong’s story is one of great disappointment, tempered by courage
and a fiery determination that could not be extinguished by the Soviet
Union.
“Al talks about revenge, and how sweet it must be to be going to the
Olympics,” Armine said, sitting in a small office at the Great American
Gymnastic Express.
“But I don’t see it as revenge. I see it as a great opportunity to show the
world what we have accomplished here at GAGE.”
The Fongs have no children of their own, but Armine is quick to point out
that, “Every girl at GAGE is like our child. We love them all.”
Jeff Stead/the Examiner
Armine lines up a group of young gymnasts during practice at GAGE.
But oftentimes, that affection is tough love.
“I came to the gym a week after Al and Armine were married,” said Humphrey
of Bates City, Mo.
“I kind of feel like her kid. I know she loves me, but I know how strict she
can be. What Armine says, goes. And that’s all right with me because she’s
always right. She knows what she’s talking about.”
Lee’s Summit resident McCool, who has been at GAGE the past six years,
agrees.
“We know that Armine could have been in the Olympics, she was good enough,
but she never made it because of politics,” McCool said. “I think you pay
closer attention to someone who has experienced what you’re going through.
“There are days you don’t feel like spending eight hours in the gym, but you
look over at Armine and see how much it all means to her, and you get back
to work. She’s a real inspiration to all of us.”
Humphrey’s family moved from Albany, Mo., to Bates City to be close to the
Fongs’ Blue Springs club.
McCool’s family could select any club in the metro area to train and they
selected GAGE.
“We wanted to work with Al and Armine,” Terin said. “I mean, I was too young
to really know what was happening when I first came, but I’m sure glad my
folks made the decision to have me work and train here.”
While McCool and Humphrey have put in countless thousands of hours to
realize their dreams of going to the Olympics, Armine and Al Fong have
dedicated their lives to the young ladies who train there.
“We spend a lot of time here,” Armine said, chuckling. “But we’re not
complaining. This is all so important to us. We want to build something
special, and I think we are.”
When asked about the hardships she had to endure, before leaving Armenia
with her family, Armine sighs and looks wistfully into the gym.
“Even though my father worked very, very hard at three jobs, we never had
much money,” she said. “Winters in Armenia are very cold, but I walked to
that bus stop every morning at 5:30 a.m.
“We’d get to the gym, and it wasn’t heated. We would keep our coats and
gloves on until it time to perform. We would do our routines, then put our
coats back on so we could get warm.
“Looking back on it, it was very difficult. But I was just a child. I
thought it was something that everyone went through and experienced.”
That’s why a recent conversation with GAGE parent didn’t sit very well with
Barutyan Fong.
“A mother said she didn’t want to drive 45 minutes to our gym,” Armine said.
“I thought, ‘I woke up at 5 a.m. I walked to the bus stop, made two changes
along the way and worked out at a gym with no heat.’
“Uh, I didn’t have much sympathy for that mother. She was talking to the
wrong person.”
Although she missed out on the glory and prestige that comes from being an
Olympic athlete, Armine can revel in the fact that she has been honored as
the top coach in the country.
She has no peers when it comes to choreography and she is about to live her
dream.
“We’re going to the Olympics,” she said, “we’re going to the Olympics.”

Aberdeen Press and Journal
July 23, 2004
Anne needs help to free musical spirit of azerbaijani youngsters
Impoverished and deprived children whose musical talents have lain
undiscovered in Azerbaijan schools are being given the chance to
shine. Ballater woman Anne Jack, 48, a music teacher and honorary
member of the London College of Music, has been teaching about 50
children at schools in the city of Sumgayit.
After moving to Azerbaijan because of her husband Bill’s work, Mrs
Jack found many children were taught traditional instruments by their
fathers but had no knowledge of theory.
“I found it very, very interesting, because these children are
extremely talented,” she said. “They are beautiful players, but they
don’t have a clue what they’re doing – it’s just natural talent. I
think their lives have been so repressed they haven’t had time for
anything else.” The country regained its independence after the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and, for the next three years,
was in armed conflict with Armenia.
Unemployment in Sumgayit is about 80%, while corruption is rife and
the promise of widespread wealth from Azerbaijan’s petroleum
resources remains largely unfulfilled.
Classrooms have no pianos or keyboards and musical instruments are
not readily available.
Mrs Jack started off by taking 100 recorders and moved on to the
guitar and woodwind instruments.
She is now hoping to receive donations of instruments “in any form”
to further the children’s education, but would particularly like a
drum kit.
Music even helps pupils with their arithmetic, Mrs Jack says, as they
count the beats.
Anyone wishing to donate an instrument or money should e-mail Mrs
Jack at annejack100 @hotmail.com Instruments can also be dropped off
at the Aberdeen offices of KCA Deutag, Minto Drive, Altens, Aberdeen.

JOHN ORDWAY: “ARMENIAN PEOPLE HAS GREAT POTENTIAL FOR BUILDING OF FREE,
INDEPENDENT AND ECONOMICALLY DEVELOPING COUNTRY”
YEREVAN, July 22 (Noyan Tapan). John Ordway, the Ambassador
Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the US to Armenia, who is
finishing his diplomatic mission in Armenia, had the last meeting with
representatives of Armenian mass media on July 22. In his opening
speech in Armenian he mentioned that in 3 years he had an opportunity
of being in all the regions of the Republic of Armenia, saw the beauty
of the country and the cultural values, got acquainted with many
interesting people. The Ambassador said that during his numerous
visits he was able to estimate the results of the American aid on the
spot and to get acquainted with the problems of people. According to
him, these 3 years were very efficient: “Jointly with the RA
government we tried to develop economy, establish supremacy of law and
form a civil society.” Ambassador Ordway mentioned that the US highly
estimates the assistance of the RA government in the issue of struggle
against terrorism. The US, in particular, wants the principles of
democracy to strengthen, poverty to reduce, economic reforms to go on
and investment field to improve in Armenia. According to him, security
and stability in the whole region should be strengthened. John Ordway
declared that the US will continue working with the co-chairmen of the
OSCE Minsk Group for the purpose of “fair and mutually admissible
solution” of the Artsakh problem. “Having the experience of these 3
years, I may say with confidence that the Armenian people has a great
potential for building of a free, independent, economically developed
and prospering country, being the US Ambassador to RA and having a
contribution to development of Armenian-American relations is an
honour for me,” the Ambassador declared. John Ordway expressed his
gratitude to Armenian journalists for efficient work and wished them
success.

THE INTERNATIONAL FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
EXCHANGE (IFEX) CLEARING HOUSE
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IFEX – News from the international freedom of expression community
_________________________________________________________________
PRESS RELEASE/UPDATE – TURKEY
23 July 2004
IPA concerned about dangers threatening publishers in lead up to
consideration of Turkey’s membership in the EU
SOURCE: International Publishers’ Association (IPA), Geneva
**Updates IFEX alert of 15 June 2004**
(IPA/IFEX) – The following is a 19 July 2004 IPA press release:
NGOs meet Commissioner Verheugen on Turkey
The International Publishers Association (IPA) is deeply concerned
about the dangers that threaten Turkish publishers when pursuing their
profession. “We call upon the Turkish authorities to implement the
many reforms that were passed. Implementation is key and must not
surrender to bureaucratic conservatism or any other hurdle,” says
Ana-Maria Cabanellas, President of the IPA.
On 15 July 2004, eight international NGOs met with Enlargement
Commissioner Günter Verheugen in Brussels to discuss the progress made
by Turkey in the field of Human Rights.
The Commission will issue a recommendation this September on whether
EU member states should start membership negotiations with Turkey in
December 2004 or not. It is indeed in December that Heads of States
and Governments will decide on this. They have already indicated that
they would follow the recommendation issued by the Commission.
The IPA recalled that last year 43 books were banned and 37 writers
and 17 publishers were put on trial. To date in 2004, at least 15
books have been banned in Turkey.
While welcoming the legislative and constitutional changes in Turkey,
the IPA expressed its three main concerns: 1. the legal impediments to
the practice of the right to freedom of expression in Turkey; 2. the
current tendency of Turkish Security Courts to harass writers,
journalists and publishers by putting them on trial more and more
often, fining them or just postponing their trials indefinitely;
3. the lack of implementation of legal reforms regarding freedom of
expression.
Lars Grahn, Chairman of IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee, says, “The
six following taboos are obvious hurdles to freedom of expression and
to publishing in Turkey: Position of the Military, Kurdish Question,
Armenian Genocide, Kemalism, Women’s Liberation and Islamic
Law. Treating writers, journalists and publishers as potential
terrorists or criminals and judging them in the same courts as drug
traffickers and/or real terrorists is unacceptable.”
For further information, contact IPA, 3, avenue de Miremont, Ch-1206,
Geneva, Switzerland, tel: +41 22 346 30 18, fax: +41 22 347 57 17,
e-mail: [email protected], [email protected], Internet:
The information contained in this press release/update is the sole
responsibility of IPA. In citing this material for broadcast or
publication, please credit IPA.

New York Times, NY
July 24 2004
New Kids on the Block
By MARK KAMINE

THERE are first novels writers can’t seem to match — Ralph Ellison’s
”Invisible Man” is the archetype here. There’s the posthumous first
novel — John Kennedy Toole’s ”Confederacy of Dunces,” for example
— that makes you wonder what might have been. There are fireplace
firsts, books that young writers, sometimes wisely, push into the
flames instead of into print. Harry Crews had four novels rejected
before publishing ”The Gospel Singer.” (”Burn it, son,” one of
Crews’s writing teachers told him about an early manuscript. ”Fire’s
a great refiner.”) Contemporary first novels are tougher calls. You
weigh the chance of discovering a terrific new voice against the fear
of plunking down $24 for an apprentice work. It’s safer to wait a few
novels, for a reputation to grow. But there’s nothing like getting in
early.
No need to wait on Lucia Nevai. Her novel, SERIOUSLY (Little, Brown,
$23.95), is full of elements that might be found in any first novel:
a yearning young narrator who’s a bit at sea; a tragic family
history; a brush with romance; a discovery of vocation. Its
protagonist, Tamara Johanssen, has landed in Dustin, a small town in
upstate New York. She’s on the rebound from a life lived recklessly
and demolished early by her crazy mother, who burned down the
family’s house, killing herself and Tamara’s father and younger
sister. Tamara’s story unfolds episodically. Each chapter focuses on
one or two people she has known: the cranky couple who run the local
insurance agency; her older sister, Nora, who is a TV producer; her
gentlemanly lover, Boz; her trashy but proud neighbor, Glorine. The
novel skips back and forth in time, building cumulatively and almost
effortlessly, until we arrive at a moment that upends Fellini’s ”8
1/2,” placing Tamara at the center of a group of ex-lovers and
admirers. Along the way, Nevai delivers pleasures both large and
small in sly, lively prose. She has a neat ability to make her
descriptive sentences do double duty as jokes: ”There was Henry in
his hat out in back of both our stores, looking for something to take
apart and never put back together.” She has a sure sense of
metaphor. (Girls press themselves against a wall until they are
”flat as stickers”; an economy car sounds ”as if the same motor
were used in blenders.”) ”There was something sprightly in the
technique,” Tamara says of a drawing she admires. This assured novel
— the author has also published two previous story collections — is
sprightly and then some. Nevai’s voice has wisdom and charm, and with
”Seriously” she announces a large talent. It will be interesting to
see where it takes her.
Judith Claire Mitchell’s first novel, THE LAST DAY OF THE WAR
(Pantheon, $24.95), is set at the end of World War I and just after.
Yael Weiss is 18 and looking for adventure. She finds it when she
meets Dub Hagopian, an American soldier with an unlikely name who
secretly works for an underground group of Armenian exiles intent on
avenging the Turkish massacres of 1915. Yael falls instantly in love
with Dub, and in quick succession she falsifies her age, changes her
name to Yale White, denies her Jewish heritage and heads overseas,
ostensibly as an aid worker but actually in pursuit of Dub.
Mitchell’s novel tracks Yale, Dub and their associates from St. Louis
and Providence to Paris and Berlin, convincingly modulating among
characters as various as the dying leader of the Armenian
underground, a 13-year-old victim of Turkish abuse and a young German
soldier in the formative days of the Nazi Party, all the while
keeping her focus on Yale and Dub and the intermingling of their
romance with history.
The blistering conclusion feels both satisfying and inevitable,
thanks to the skill with which Mitchell assembles the pieces of her
story and the light touch with which she incorporates thorny issues
of prejudice and national identity into what is essentially a
historical spy novel. It’s a bravura performance, Alan Furst with a
dash of Tintin, and Mitchell may have pulled off in her first try
that greatest of oxymorons, the intelligent beach book.
Adam Langer lacks Nevai’s consummate craft and Mitchell’s pleasing
dramatic flair. Yet his ambitious first novel, CROSSING CALIFORNIA
(Riverhead, $24.95), hits high points of comic empathy. The
geographic and symbolic center of Langer’s novel is Chicago’s
California Avenue, which neatly divides the wealthy Jewish
professionals on its west side from the struggling Jews and blacks
across the way. The action is bracketed by the Iranian hostage crisis
of 1979-81, though only Jill Wasserstrom, an eighth grader, is
actively political (she wears a ”Better Red Than Dead” button to
her bat mitzvah). Langer’s other characters are enmeshed in personal
struggles. Jill’s classmate Muley Wills, brilliant and resourceful,
spends his time working on animated movies made to impress Jill, with
whom he’s in love. Jill’s sister, Michelle, wants to dominate her
high school drama program, and her sometime boyfriend, Larry Rovner,
is trying to land a recording contract for his Jewish rock band,
Rovner! (One song title: ”It’s Not the Meat, It’s the Moshe.”)
These characters cross paths regularly as they cross and recross
California Avenue. More often than not, however, they fail to
connect. Langer connects sometimes. His depiction of the ubiquitous
and casual racism of the era feels on the money. His portrayal of the
Jewish loser Charlie Wasserstrom, no match for his brilliant
daughters, is funny and complex. Yet the novel often feels forced and
slack — Langer has an unsteady hand on the rudder. He thoroughly and
elaborately exposes the narrow goals and narcissistic motivations of
his middle-class Midwestern characters. He now needs to find a more
fluent method of bringing them to life.
When he does, he might ship his recipe south to Mindy Friddle, whose
novel, THE GARDEN ANGEL (St. Martin’s, $23.95), will please only
those who like their soap operas typed out instead of broadcast.
Friddle’s story of Southern sisters squabbling over a family legacy
is sunk both by cliched moments (a desk-clearing sex scene) and
cliched writing: ”For once, I imagined a different kind of place in
life, from which I could look around and enjoy the view.” Things are
not quite as dire in Mary Helen Stefaniak’s novel, THE TURK AND MY
MOTHER (Norton, $24.95). This multigenerational story tracks the
paths of a handful of Croatians forced by war and other hardships
from their Balkan village to Siberia and Milwaukee. Early on,
Stefaniak invokes the movie ”Doctor Zhivago,” and her novel is a
folksier, jokier, more down-to-earth version of that
historical/literary bodice-ripper. Stefaniak’s novel reads, at times,
like a not-quite-confident translation: ”It was as if she had
dissolved into the air, as if a cloud of her filled the room.”
Seth Kantner’s first novel, ORDINARY WOLVES (Milkweed, $22), is a
magnificently realized story about a boy’s coming-of-age in a
difficult, distant place. Cutuk Hawcly, along with his brother and
his sister, has been dragged to Alaska by his dropout dad, Abe, an
artistic Luddite; he mixes Eskimo ethos and ecology as he raises his
children in a bunkerlike house miles from civilization. Mail-order
textbooks are small hurdles for kids schooled in surviving subzero
winters on a diet of caribou pelvis and other local meats eaten
”dried, cooked, raw or frozen” in the midst of mice, moose, shrews,
hungry wolves and rabid foxes. During periodic visits (by dogsled) to
the Inupiaq village of Takunak, Cutuk learns what it’s like to be an
outsider as Eskimo children taunt and fight with him for being
”dumb” and ”white,” lessons he’ll learn all over again when he
grows up and moves for a time to Anchorage. There, backwoods smarts
can’t help him with malls and town girls. There are some hilarious
moments. A cute Eskimo girl named Dawna asks Cutuk, ”You ever try
Pralines ‘n’ Cream?” Cutuk doesn’t reply, ”in case it was a common
narcotic or some kind of bent-over sex everyone else had had.”
”Ordinary Wolves” has scope and a style to match its subjects, the
wide-open spaces of Alaska and youth, and Kantner, who was born and
raised in the Alaska wilderness, manages along the way to touch on
the dissolution and devastation visited upon the state’s native
population, the youthful yearning for experience and guidance and the
abiding love of an odd, isolated frontier family. His novel comes
across as smart and authentic. It’s hard to imagine a better start.
Mark Kamine is a critic whose reviews have appeared in The Times
Literary Supplement in London, among other publications. He is the
assistant production manager for the television series ”The
Sopranos.”

The Globe and Mail, Canada
July 24 2004
An Ottoman epic

By CAMILLA GIBB

Birds Without Wings
By Louis de Bernières
Knopf Canada, 625 pages, $36.95
It’s been 10 years since Louis de Bernières’s much-loved Captain
Corelli’s Mandolin was published, nine since it was honoured with the
Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, and three since Hollywood
stripped it of all its charm and fervour — the very things that made
the book so glorious — and offered it up as a politically castrated
piece of wooden sentimentality. Trust Hollywood to take Kobe beef —
beer- and music-fed and massaged by loving hands — and grind it into
meat loaf.
For this, Corelli’s author and architect cannot in any way be blamed
(he neither wrote the screenplay nor cast its grossly miscast crew).
“It would be impossible for a parent to be happy about its baby’s
ears being put on backwards,” is the extent of de Bernières’s public
comment on the subject of film adaptation.
The movie, and sales of the book (on the order of 2.5 million),
parachuted him into the international spotlight, from which he
quickly averted his gaze. He bought a large Georgian rectory in
Norfolk, where he indulges his hobby of restoring and puttering about
the countryside in antique cars, has developed proficiency on several
musical instruments, and enjoys the leisure of being able to write
only if and when he feels like it.
There’s been much of the “most anticipated novel” promotional
preamble that accompanies the subsequent work of any hugely
successful author, along with a predictable tension nurtured by
critics posing the question of whether his new work can possibly
measure up. The fact is, de Bernières was already a highly successful
author by the time the world caught up with him, having written,
among other things, a much celebrated and wildly passionate trilogy
before Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. He is to be understood not as a
one-hit wonder who arrived from nowhere one year and then
disappeared, generating whispers of writer’s block for the next 10,
but as a prolific and ambitious writer with a rather astonishing body
of work, notable for its dense lyricism, fierce wisdom, soaring
passion and remarkable wit. In this tradition, Birds Without Wings is
pure de Bernières.
It may well be the case that Birds will have less mass-market appeal
than its predecessor — any novel of more than 600 pages requires the
attention and surrender of its reader, and the setting, Anatolia
rather than Greece, in the First rather than Second World War, is
less known and less familiar — but this is again a rich and
passionate story of love and war, and in many ways a much more
ambitious and important one.
Set in the small and out-of-the-way town of Eskibahce in southwestern
Anatolia, de Bernières’s novel paints an idyllic portrait of an
Ottoman town at the beginning of the 20th century. As in many other
places in the empire, Muslims and Christians have lived here together
for centuries, calling each other infidels in the same breath as they
call each other best friends and betroth their sons and daughters to
one another. Muslims pay homage to the image of the Virgin in the
church; Christians are always to be found among the Muslims stoning
to death some criminal of their faith in the public square; and the
imam and the priest engage in debate throughout the night.
De Bernières may well “do character” better than any writer alive
today: Even cats and horses and birds in his world are bestowed with
full and endearing personalities. There are the children we come to
know — the innocents who will grow up to be soldiers and war brides
and exiles and madmen — and their parents, including an imam, a
drunkard, a potter and a goatherd. Everyone has his place in this
town, as well as a voice in this book, from an Armenian apothecary to
a poor snow-bringer, an Orthodox priest, a resentful Greek
schoolteacher fighting the futile fight against the barbarism of the
Turkish tongue, a leech-gatherer, a couple of idle gendarmes, a
bird-seller and, most powerful of all, in both economic terms and in
terms of this narrative, a distinguished gentleman and wealthy
landowner named Rustem Bey.
Rustem Bey might be singled out as the closest thing to a protagonist
here. He’s a formal man, his emotional expression trapped by the
demands of his station, and one whose wife has never loved him. When
Rustem Bey discovers his wife with a lover, he promptly kills him,
then escorts her to the public square where she is stoned to
near-death by those who, in any other context, are called friends and
neighbours. Later, and with much humiliation, he buys himself a
mistress from a house of ill-repute in Istanbul. The love that
develops between them is genuine and touching, though tainted both by
Rustem Bey’s guilt about his wife, now resident and syphilitic in the
local whorehouse, and his mistress’s secret that she is actually a
Christian.
Stories of grand passions move the novel: conjugal, fraternal,
interspecies. Many are delivered in an episodic, fragmentary and
provocative manner, interspersing voices in first and third person to
create a rich, mottled chorus, an amalgam of subplots that weave and
complement each other in such a way that the town itself might be
better called the central character. One principal thread runs like a
taut current throughout: that documenting the evolution of Mustafa
Kemal, who will one day be known as Ataturk, Turkey’s great liberator
and modernizer, the founder and first president of the Republic of
Turkey.
Long before Kemal’s vision can be realized, however, Balkan wars will
be fought, during which the Russians will exterminate millions of
Muslims and drive millions more as refugees into Ottoman lands, and a
world war will occur, in which the Ottomans will naturally side with
the Germans against the Russians, but in so doing will drive out the
Armenians, who have lived among them for centuries. Ultimately, the
Ottomans and their allies will lose, the war will end, and the empire
will erupt in civil war now that the rhetoric of nationhood and
self-determination has become an intractable part of the vernacular.
The town’s people are already torn apart both by the loss of their
Muslim sons to the war effort, and the realization that their
Armenian friends and neighbours have been driven out and massacred
only several miles from home. But with Mustafa Kemal’s ascendance, a
whole new world order is about to shape their destinies. Much to
everyone’s amazement, then horror, half the town — the Christians
who have lived here for centuries — are rounded up to be relocated
to Greece, a country they have never known.
“When the committee came to value our property, none of us was very
concerned. We didn’t think we would be deported, anyway, because we
didn’t speak Greek,” says the beautiful and broken-hearted Philotei,
whose lover Ibrahim, to whom she has been betrothed since childhood,
has lost his mind to the effects of war.
“And we said, ‘We aren’t Greek, we are Ottomans,’ and the committee
said, ‘There’s no such thing as Ottoman any more. If you’re a Muslim
you’re a Turk. If you’re Christian and you’re not Armenian, and
you’re from around here, you’re Greek.’ ”
This is the story of individual fates determined by the bigger
political forces of a succession of wars, the combined effect of
which set in motion the determination and shape of borders, the
constitution of populations and the consequent civil wars and
xenophobic campaigns waged throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle
East into the present day.
Where de Bernières is critical of all sides in equal measure, his
stance on nationalism is unequivocal. It’s a “miserable stupidity”;
combine nationalism with religion, and you’ve got “unholy spouses
from whose fetid conjugal bed nothing but evil can crawl forth.” To
read de Bernières’s portrait of the town before it becomes a pawn in
this bigger play is to feel the acute devastation wrought by agendas
that lead to young men “shitting out” their entrails in trenches and
women and children being forced from their homes, only to be robbed,
raped and bludgeoned to death with rifle butts. A miserable
stupidity, indeed.
For those who do not devour it immediately, Birds Without Wings will
sit as great epics sit, on one’s shelf demanding to be read, making
one feel irresponsible and guilty, provoking resolutions of “must
read this before death.” Do read it before you die. It would be a
terrible thing to have missed a work of such importance, beauty and
compassion.
Camilla Gibb’s third novel, Sweetness in the Belly, largely set in
revolutionary Ethiopia, is forthcoming in March, 2005.

The Globe and Mail, Canada
July 24 2004
Persian prose

Iran is far from the Islamic monolith it appears to be, REZA BARAHENI
says, when it is seen through the eyes of three very different
writers
By REZA BARAHENI

The Russian literary theorist Michael Bakhtin once said that all
great narratives had come into existence on the borders of two
neighbouring countries. In fact, for him it was “dialogical
imagination,” the fruit of many years or even centuries of cultural,
social and linguistic barter across the borders of identities that
moulded the form and content of both historical and literary
narrative. The writer of such a narrative was branded by the burning
rod of hybridity — a kind of psychological, social or historical
schizophrenia — and a vision that required more than one pair of
eyes, surveying the universe in a multilayered mirror designed for
simultaneous reflections of both identity and difference.
The three books chosen for reflection on Iran here were born, each in
its own way, under the sign of hybridity, and as such reflect not
one, but numerous aspects of the reality and mentality, not only of
their own times, but also of the past and future of many others who
came after them. The three are: The Histories of Herodotus, The
Thousand and One Nights, as narrated to the woman-killer Shahriyar by
Scheherazade, and The Blind Owl , by Sadegh Hedayat. They were
written in different historical periods, but new associations link
them together within the semantic context of our contemporary world.
Herodotus (c. 485-425 BC) was a Persian subject in Iran’s Greek
colonies in Asia Minor for almost half of his life. He was originally
Greek, and although he travelled a great deal in the ancient world,
it is not precisely known whether he travelled into the heart of
ancient Persia itself. However, he speaks of all the events
concerning the history and geography and people of the ancient
kingdom with such plausibility that, in spite of many obvious flaws,
one seldom doubts that he knew the country first hand. He made Greece
his home after all these trips, and wrote his history in nine books,
with hundreds of pages dealing with the origins of ancient Persia.
Although the main concentration of The Histories is on the wars
between the Greeks and Persians, in the dawn of the history of both
nations, his work provides perhaps the clearest image existing of
ancient Persia in the eyes of the Western world. Many commentators
have noted that Herodotus used only travellers as his informants on
ancient Iran, and many Iranian historians have provided their own
versions of the beginnings of their history. Recent books written in
Iran on the origins of Persians and other ethnic groups and their
languages in Iran contradict many entries by Herodotus. But
Herodotus’s book should be studied only within the context of the
hybridity of historical images and narration; as such, The Histories
holds a fundamental place in the writing of history.
There are many editions of The Thousand and One Nights, the most
famous of which is the 1850 translation by Richard Burton. This is a
completely different genre from Herodotus’s work. At the heart of the
book lies the patriarchal history of people from India to Greece.
Shahriyar, the king, kills his unfaithful wife, and then each night
kills the girl he has taken to bed that night, until Scheherazade
arrives with her great stories and saves a thousand and one women by
telling stories to the king every night.
Who was Scheherazade? It is important to know the roots of the two
words that combine to make the name. The first part of the name has
its roots in sheher, or chaitre, meaning carving, engraving, which is
also the root of the word character in Greek, meaning engraving, or
what is written inside. Azade means free or original or liberated. So
Scheherazade, a Persian name, means “a free or original character.”
Four women are supposed to have been at the heart of the telling of
the stories. The first is Scheherazade herself; the second is Esther,
who told stories to King Darius to save the lives of Jews in the
king’s court; the third is Shirin, of Armenian origin, who supposedly
became the wife of the Persian king Khosrow-Parviz to save the lives
of her own people; and the fourth is Zobeideh, wife of the Arab
Caliph Haroun-al-Rashid. We see the same kind of hybridity at the
root of the name, which extends itself to the telling of the stories
not only of the Indo-Europeans in India and Iran, but also the
stories of the Arabs and the Jews. The book is not only the stories
of these tribes and nations, but also stories from China, Greece and
Africa. It is a woman with four heads, telling stories to a man to
stop the killing of women, including her. Hybridity lies at the heart
of this book, too.
The Blind Owl, by Sadegh Hedayat, is a modern, even a postmodern,
novel of about 150 pages, written in 1935 and first circulated in
mimeographed form in the author’s own handwriting. It was published
after the Second World War, first in Persian, in Iran, then in French
and, years later, in English (translated by D. P. Costello, Grove
Press, 1957) and other languages. Hedayat studied in France and was
influenced by Western literature, but wrote the book in self-imposed
exile in India. Fifteen years later, he killed himself in Paris.
Schizophrenic hybridity led him to write the book in two sections,
the first dealing with the narrator’s encounter with an angelic,
ethereal woman, and second in his encounter with a beautiful but
unfaithful woman. Hedayat, split between the absurdity of life in the
20th century and love of the ancient ways of life, takes a deep dive
into the archaic, pre-Herodotian world of Iran, and when he emerges,
the archaic and the modern hold hands. The narrator of this short
novel of fragmentation dismembers both the ideal woman and the bitch.
This is the prince killing both Scheherazade and the unfaithful wife
within the framework of modernism and postmodernism. One can see the
endurance of the patriarchal vision of the world and its cruelty
toward women in this novel, which only a technique or a vision of
hybridity could have produced.
In Herodotus, the Greeks were the neighbours; in The Thousand and One
Nights, it was the Indians, the Turks, the Chinese, the Arabs and the
Jews; in The Blind Owl, it was the entire West in the name of
modernity with the fragmented world of contemporary Iran. We see in
these books, which present both past and present Iranian worlds, the
Iranian Self through the Other, and the Other through the Self.
Reza Baraheni is an exiled Iranian-Canadian writer, poet and human
rights activist.

Baku Today, Azerbaijan
July 24 2004
One More Asylum-Seeking Armenian Appears in Baku
Baku Today 24/07/2004 12:32
One more ethnic-Armenian appeared in the capital of the arch foe
neighbor, Azerbaijan, on Friday, seeking to find an asylum in a third
country, ANS reported.
Ispek Sumbatovich, 65, who was detained in Baku’s main airport named
after Heydar Aliyev, claimed that he fled from Armenia in order to
get rid of the hard economic and political situation in his home
country.
Sumbatovich, who confessed that he had fought against Azerbaijan in
1991-94 war, said he would inform the people of Azerbaijan about the
hard conditions in Armenia.
It was the second case of Armenians’ fleeing to Baku to find refugee
in a third country. Two Armenians, Roman Teryan and Artur Apresyan,
surprisingly appeared in Baku’s private ANS television early April of
this year, also claiming that they had left Armenia because of what
they called intolerable conditions in their country.
The two still are kept in the prison of Azerbaijan’s National
Security Ministry. Local media has cited former National Security
Minister Namiq Abbasov as saying that Teryan and Apresyan would be
moved to a third country by late July.
Azerbaijan and Armenia, two former Soviet republics in the southern
Caucasus, are at a state of no war no peace since the latter occupied
one-fifth of Azerbaijan’s territories during the war.
Azerbaijan’s occupied territories include Nagorno-Karabakh, a western
region that was home to nearly 100,000 ethnic-Armenians in late
1980s, and also seven administrative districts around
Nagorno-Karabakh; Lachin, Kelbejar, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jebrail, Zengilan
and Qubadli.
Armenian troops continue occupying the Azerbaijani territories since
a cease-fire agreement signed in 1994 despite four UN Security
Council resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal from the
administrative districts.

Contra Costa Times, CA
July 24 2004
Helping Armenians fulfills a family
RELATIVES TRAVEL TO ARMENIA WITH DONATIONS – Alamo resident Mary Kate
Tengler; her mother, Nancy Tengler, and grandmother Lorraine Caven
recently returned home from a trip to Armenia, where they delivered
school supplies to Norashen Michnagarg School, which had recently
been built thanks in large part to Lorraine.
The Tengler family and Lorraine are members of the Bay Area Friends
of Armenia. It turns out that Lorraine, 80-plus years young and young
at heart, works in the copy room at Walnut Creek Intermediate School
and has been sending her entire paycheck to BAFA with the expressed
purpose of funding the rebuilding of this school, destroyed in a 1988
earthquake.
“The school needed to raise 10 percent of the construction cost to be
eligible for government funding. My mother’s contribution comprised
virtually all of the 10 percent, and through her efforts the school
rebuilding was accomplished,” said Nancy.
Mary Kate, 13, began her project of helping the students of this
school last year. It started when the pastor of Community
Presbyterian Church in Danville, Scott Farmer, distributed $100 bills
to the congregation with the intent that the money be used to help
others. A member of the church donated a total of $10,000.
Mary Kate took the $100 and used it to buy supplies to make Salvation
Bracelets, which she sold to other children at her school. Together
with her sales and other donations, Mary Kate collected $700, which
she in turn used to purchase New Testament bibles and school supplies
for two Armenian schools. During this time, Mary Kate, Nancy and
Lorraine collected stuffed animals, refurbished and cleaned them and
had them sent to a soup kitchen in Armenia.
This year, Mary Kate’s eighth-grade class at San Ramon Valley
Christian Academy and the junior high student council raised money
and collected school supplies and more stuffed animals, which are
being shipped this month to more schools in Armenia.
Even though the Norashen Michnagarg School has been open for a year
now, this is the first trip the three women have taken to Armenia,
and they missed the school’s official opening ceremony. During this
recent trip, the Norashen officials decided Lorraine should have a
special ceremony during the visit.
A dedication plaque was hung outside the gymnasium and a ceremony was
conducted thanking Lorraine for her contribution. Children sang songs
and recited poems, and even though they don’t speak the language,
Lorraine and her family appreciated the heartfelt performance. A
translator helped them to understand some of the wonderful messages
of thanks the children were conveying.
“It was an experience of a lifetime; each day I recall a special
memory,” Lorraine said. “All of the kids shouted out ‘thank you’ in
Armenian. I could cry thinking about it now.”
This time, Mary Kate hand-delivered the school supplies and bibles to
the children and had the opportunity to meet them; some of them are
her age.
And Lorraine finally got to see the school she helped build.
“One of the kids thanked me and asked if there was something nice
they could do for me in return, and I told my mom they already did,”
added Mary Kate.
Nancy agreed it was a rewarding trip for the three ladies — “It is
one of the most fulfilling things I can think of to help people who
are so eager to join in and help themselves,” she said. “They simply
need a little something to work with.”
The end of the trip left the three exhilarated and with lots of
memories.
Driving away from the schools and soup kitchens, Nancy reflected on
the similarities of Mt. Ararat and the people of Armenia. In an
excerpt from an article she wrote for the BAFA newsletter, she
reflected on their experience. “At each twist and turn in the road,
Mt. Ararat loomed in the background. It is magnificent to behold and
the ease with which it rises to its height of almost 17,000 feet
gives off a surreal image that is impossible to erase from your mind.
Much like the Armenian people, I mused. Strong, magnificent and
rugged,” she wrote.
For more information on BAFA contact the Tenglers by email at
[email protected].
Have a great week!
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Azerbaijan sends Armenian defector back to Moscow
ANS TV, Baku
24 Jul 04
Armenian citizen Ispirt Kazaryan, who arrived in Azerbaijan by a
Moscow-Baku flight yesterday, was immediately sent back to
Russia. Cabrayil Aliyev, head of the moral and psychological
preparedness department of the Azerbaijani State Border Service, told
us that Kazaryan’s return to Moscow was possible because he arrived in
Baku legally.