msjamgochian'sinfinitebooklist

A sweeping, gut-wrenching, intergenerational, epic story of love, war, and the Armenian genocide that moves between modern day Bronxville, New York, and Aleppo, Syria, in 1915. After receiving a call from a friend informing her that a photo of her grandmother has appeared in a local newspaper advertising an exhibit about "the Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About," middle-aged novelist Laura Petrosian begins to explore her Armenian roots, uncovering a history that is unsettling and complex. Flash back to 1915, and we meet Laura's grandparents, fresh out of college Elizabeth Endicott, who has accompanied her father to Aleppo as a volunteer for the Friends of Armenia, and Armen Petrosian, an Armenian engineer who has recently lost his family to the genocide. When the two meet, sparks collide, and a relationship builds against the backdrop of WWI and the decimation of one and a half million Armenians at the hands of the Turks. Stunned by the painful reality of her famil...

Austrian writer Franz Werfel's epic historical account, written in 1933, of the heroic battle of Musa Dagh that took place during the Armenian Genocide is not to be missed. The story begins in 1915, when, after several months of pillaging, raping, and burning Armenian villages, the ruthless Turks embarked on an unprovoked systematic government led campaign to completely exterminate the Armenians and their culture. Gabriel Bagradian has just returned to his native village in Musa Dagh after living in Paris for 23 years with his French wife Juliette and their son Stephan, and he isn't sure where he belongs, or if he has made the right decision in uprooting his essentially European family. When he re-enlists but isn't called up to serve in the Ottoman artillery (he was an officer in the 1912 Balkan war), he begins to suspect that the profoundly disturbing rumors are true and that the Turks are indeed planning on 'deporting' the Armenians of Musa Dagh: rounding up ever...