I read through this book almost without putting it down. It is the beautiful but sad memoir by Turkish human rights lawyer Fethiye Çetin on her grandmother.
Here is the description from the cover:
When Fethiye Çetin was growing up in the small Turkish town of Maden, she knew her grandmother as a happy and universally respected Muslim housewife. It would be decades before her grandmother told her the truth: that she was by birth a Christian and an Armenian, that her name was not Seher but Heranuş, that most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915, that she, along with most of the women and children, had been sent on a death march. She had been saved (and torn from her mother’s arms) by the Turkish gendarme captain who went on to adopt her. But she knew she still had family in America. Could Fethiye help her find her lost relations before she died?
There are an estimated two million Turks whose grandparents could tell them similar stories. But in a country that maintains the Armenian massacres never happened, such talk can be dangerous. In her heart-wrenching memoir, Fethiye Çetin breaks the silence.