Returning home, MacKeen ponders a century-worth of moral issues. Lucky for us that the author could travel where she did, when she did. “It was as if my grandfather had understood,” she writes, “what he couldn’t finish in his lifetime would be finished in the next.” Yet one wishes for more direct quotes from her grandfather’s notes, so we could read directly the cadence of his prose voice. With a health-care reporter’s deft touch, she manages to play down the utter pathos, but her dedication to baring gruesome facts is as unfailing as her loyalty to the mission thrust upon her. MacKeen doesn’t shirk from recounting the grisly details of genocide, describing brutal beatings, hunger to the point of cannibalism, and thirst to the point of urine-drinking. The reunion’s poignancy is heightened by the trepidation we feel for whatever fate those Syrians must now endure. MacKeen, too, finds welcome, encountering the protector’s descendants and partaking queasily of a goat slaughtered in her honor. He then perseveres to find sustenance, flea-infested shelter, and eventually a sympathetic host.
Hunted by the Turks, he eludes death at the point of a soldier’s rifle. Stepan’s escape leaves him destitute and at the mercy of the local population. But the irony of Stepan’s epiphany to present-day readers goes further, because the place where he learns the fate in store for him is Raqqa-a city that now hosts the headquarters of a new ethnic-cleansing regime, the so-called Islamic State. A scene in which Stepan finally grasps the ultimate nature of the genocide is hauntingly reminiscent of an incident in Elie Wiesel’s Night. Numerous passages bring to mind events of the Holocaust: gradual erosion of liberties willful blindness of the surrounding population deportations in cattle cars betrayals and fruitless attempts at resistance and, in the aftermath, hushed kitchen-table reminiscences half-reaching children’s ears. In those authoritarian countries, she has her share of uneasy moments while following her journalistic instincts, but it’s a pale shadow of what her grandfather went through. Soon, his life goes from grim to gruesome, but MacKeen lightens the otherwise depressing narrative with alternating chapters in which she describes, with self-effacing candor, her cautious foray into the hinterlands of Turkey and Syria. Slight of build, resourceful, and sharp-witted, he’s initially ensnared and jailed for transporting, legally, a shipment of firearms. We’re introduced to Stepan as a young, small-town peddler and commercial courier in western Turkey before World War I. “My grandfather had left a road map to his life,” she writes.
Most significantly, she makes a voyage of her own, in 2007, to retrace the steps of his ordeal. MacKeen brings Stepan to life with a terse style that echoes his writing, drawing also on carefully annotated historical research and on interviews with his still-living centenarian cousin and relatives of other victims. Stepan’s intention was clear: “Being a witness to that satanic pogrom, I vowed it as my duty to put on paper what I saw.” Now, MacKeen and her mother recover Stepan’s missing notebooks, which enable MacKean to write this book, a haunting journal of remembrance. Granddaughter Dawn MacKeen, who was three years old when Stepan died, forsakes a career as a health-care journalist in New York and returns home to Southern California, answering her mother’s longtime plea to “tell Baba’s story.” It’s history’s good fortune that a third-generation descendant has reconstructed this vivid, personal account at a hundred year’s distance.Ī partial account was published long before in the Armenian press.
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