The Grandchildren: The Hidden Legacy of ‘Lost’ Armenians in Turkey

The Grandchildren: The Hidden Legacy of ‘Lost’ Armenians in Turkey
By Ayse Gül Altınay and Fethiye Çetin
ISBN: 978-1-4128-5391-0 (hardcover) 978-1-4128-5439-9 (eBook)
2014; 270 pp; $49.95

The Grandchildren is a collection of intimate, harrowing testimonies by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Turkey’s “forgotten Armenians”—the orphans adopted and Islamized by Muslims after the Armenian Genocide. Through them we learn of the tortuous routes by which they came to terms with the painful stories of their grandparents and their own identity. The postscript offers a historical overview of the silence about Islamized Armenians in most histories of the genocide.

The cover of 'The Grandchildren'
The cover of ‘The Grandchildren’

When Fethiye Çetin first published her groundbreaking memoir, My Grandmother, she spoke of her grandmother’s hidden Armenian identity. The book sparked a conversation among Turks about the fate of the Ottoman Armenians in Anatolia in 1915. This resulted in an explosion of debate on Islamized Armenians and their legacy in contemporary Muslim families.

With an introduction by Gerard Libaridian and translated by Maureen Freely, The Grandchildren (translated from Turkish) is a follow-up to My Grandmother, and is an important contribution to understanding survival during atrocity. As witnesses to a dark chapter of history, the grandchildren of these survivors cast new light on the workings of memory in coming to terms with difficult pasts.

Ayse Gül Altınay teaches anthropology, cultural studies, and gender studies at Sabancı University in Istanbul. With Yesim Arat, she won the PEN Turkey’s Duygu Asena Award in 2008 for their book Gender Based Violence in Turkey. Fethiye Çetin is a human rights activist and attorney in Turkey. Her bestselling book, My Grandmother, received Prix Armenia 2006 in France. Gerard Libaridian is the editor of Transaction’s Armenian studies series.

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Guest Contributor

Guest contributions to the Armenian Weekly are informative articles or press releases written and submitted by members of the community.

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