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‘My Grandmother’ to Appear in English
NEW YORK (A.W.)—Fehiye Cetin’s celebrated memoir Anneannem, which became a bestseller in Turkey and was subsequently translated to Armenian, will be published in English in March 2008 by Verso books. The book is translated by Maureen Freely, the translator of several books by Orhan Pamuk. Elif Shafak, author of The Bastard of Istanbul, has written the introduction to the book.
Verso describes the book as “an urgent, passionate memoir of the author’s discovery of her Muslim grandmother’s true Armenian Christian identity.”
When Fethiye Cetin 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 Armenianl that her name was not Seher but Heranushl that most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915l 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 genocide never happened, such talk can be dangerous. In her heart wrenching memoir, Cetin breaks the silence.
Cetin is a Turkish human rights lawyer who has represented, among others, Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist assassinated in Istanbul in January 2007.
NEW YORK (A.W.)—Fehiye Cetin’s celebrated memoir Anneannem, which became a bestseller in Turkey and was subsequently translated to Armenian, will be published in English in March 2008 by Verso books. The book is translated by Maureen Freely, the translator of several books by Orhan Pamuk. Elif Shafak, author of The Bastard of Istanbul, has written the introduction to the book.
Verso describes the book as “an urgent, passionate memoir of the author’s discovery of her Muslim grandmother’s true Armenian Christian identity.”
When Fethiye Cetin 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 Armenianl that her name was not Seher but Heranushl that most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915l 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 genocide never happened, such talk can be dangerous. In her heart wrenching memoir, Cetin breaks the silence.
Cetin is a Turkish human rights lawyer who has represented, among others, Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist assassinated in Istanbul in January 2007.
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