Spinifex Press
My Grandmother - Fethiye Çetin
An urgent, passionate memoir of the author’s discovery of her Muslim grandmother’s true Armenian Christian identity.
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 Heranush; 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 genocide never happened, such talk can be dangerous. In her heartwrenching memoir, Fethiye Çetin breaks the silence.
Moving and unsentimental, My Grandmother offers a personal window on family, identity, the politics of history and the crises of passing.
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