Mémoires du génocide arménien. Héritage traumatique et travail analytique by Vahram, Janine Altounian (review)

identities, believe that violence against women is in no way a “private” affair, and that the government or the courts ought to step in to eliminate it. Moreover , Altınay and Arat draw a further intriguing corollary from this conclusion —that the feminist movement in Turkey has thus been quite successful in altering the general population’s attitude toward women’s agency in the household as well as more broadly defined. In short, therefore, Türkiye’de Kadına Yönelik Şiddet is not merely an analysis of survey results. It is also a powerful commentary on Turkish women’s interpretations of domestic violence, and on how these interpretations have changed in recent years. The book is a much-needed, concrete contribution to conversations about women’s subjectivity, about the rhetoric of domestic violence, and about feminism as a historical issue in Turkey. It upsets conventional wisdom both about how Turkish women interpret violence and about which Turkish women are, perhaps, most vulnerable to it. It also adds nuance to narratives of, among other themes, the relationship between education and domestic violence or the interaction between access to mainstream legal structures and vulnerability to such violence. This book is required reading for any scholar or policy maker concerned with women’s rights, agency, and empowerment in contemporary Turkey. Ruth Miller University of Massachusetts Boston doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.3.1.17 Vahram and Janine Altounian. Mémoires du génocide arménien. Héritage traumatique et travail analytique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009. 208 pp. €32.50. ISBN: 978-2130573272. Composed by Janine Altounian from the private journal of her father, Vahram Altounian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, the book Memories of the Armenian Genocide: Traumatic Legacy and Analytical Study offers a multidimensional reading of the genocide thanks to the fine translation of Kirkor Beledian, which accompanies the narrative with psychoanalytical, philological , and historical analyses. Born in Paris, Janine Altounian is the daughter of an Armenian couple who survived the 1915 genocide. She is the co-translator of the complete works of Freud into French and the author of various books on traumatism and survival. This book, which was published for the first time in April 2009, drew more attention from the public especially after its publication in Turkish in 2015 with the title Geri Dönüşü Yok, Bir Babanın Güncesinde 208 Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 3.1 ve Kızının Belleğinde Ermeni Soykırımı (Point of No Return: Armenian Genocide in a Father’s Journal and in the Memory of Her Daughter). Vahram Altounian tells the story of his family’s deportation from 1915 to 1919 as it was experienced by a young boy at the age of fourteen in a chapter titled “August 10 1915 Wednesday: Everything I endured between 1915 and 1919.” The text was written in 1919 after his deportation. The first thing noticed in the book is the traumatic effects that the genocide had on daily life. These effects were recorded in the spatio-temporality of the memory. The deportation’s trajectory is noted in an extremely fastidious manner, especially given the fact that the journal is written after everything happened. From Bursa to Deir ez-Zor, the cities in which Vahram and his family stopped, as well as the railway stations between Bahçe, a small town in Adana, and Aleppo are noted in detail. These descriptions of space can be considered a reaction against the loss of the author’s homeland. This feeling reappears in his description of time. In the first pages of the journal, the interval is marked with a note, “Turkish hour,” to call attention to a time change. At this point, one remembers Walter Benjamin who emphasizes violence’s effect on space and time by arguing/stating that violence destroys clock-calendars by creating a ground zero through total annihilation. We could interpret the fastidious work of Vahram Altounian as an attempt at resistance against the spatiotemporal destruction and the annihilating violence by means of a memorial struggle. Given that the control of time transforms with the transition to “Turkish hour,” space gains more importance...