Goodbye Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide by Karnig Panian (review)

publications in Kurdish. Serfiraz’s work and the goal of the Peywend Publisher address this essential requirement. More work of this kind will certainly contribute to the development of the Kurdish language on an academic ground. Metin Yüksel Hacettepe University doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.2.2.14 Karnig Panian. Goodbye Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 216 pp. Cloth, $25.00. ISBN: 9780804795432. April 24, 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. Coverage of the genocide and its history was at an all-time high: mainstream media outlets and newsmakers from The New York Times and the Pope to the Kardashian family raised public consciousness of the centennial throughout the spring, and academic institutions around the world held events and conferences for varied audiences. Stanford University Press and the Panian family marked the anniversary by translating and publishing an insightful and poignant memoir of a survivor, Goodbye, Antoura. Written by Karnig Panian (1910–89) a longtime vice principal at Djemaran, the Armenian Lyceum in Beirut, Lebanon, the memoir depicts the childhood experience of a victim of genocide. Born in Gurin (Turkish: Gürün), a town in east central Anatolia, Panian was a child in a relatively well-off family. His memories of his pre-genocide life comprise mainly of family, food, play, and nature—visceral memories, typical of childhood. He vividly recalled, for example, sleeping on the roof of the family home on warm summer nights, staring up at the “sky with its canopy of winking stars” (p. 21). Sadly, Panian’s childhood was cut off as starkly as the turn from Chapter 1, “Childhood” to Chapter 2, “Deportation.” In 1915, young Panian, his extended family, and the rest of the town of Gurin were deported southward by the Ottoman state, and ultimately deposited at a refugee camp in Hama, in present-day Syria. Here, his mother and siblings died of disease and starvation; “My loneliness [at this time] was suffocating me,” Panian wrote (p. 57). The deaths and deprivations endemic to this camp eventually compelled Panian’s grandparents to send their grandchild , now an orphan, to an orphanage in Hama—what was, compared to the camp, a welcoming and nourishing environment. All too soon, however, the orphans at Hama were relocated to the orphanage at Antoura in present-day Lebanon, some twenty km north of Beirut. Book Reviews 435 As the memoir’s title suggests, Panian’s time at Antoura was definitive and devastating. The “brainchild” (p. xii) of Jemal Pasha, one of three military rulers of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and Halide Edip, an eminent Turkish feminist, the orphanage at Antoura was designed to serve as an institution of forced Turkification. Panian describes genuine acts of terror and brutalization carried out by the Turkish authorities at Antoura, including detailed accounts of starvation and severe punishment. As Panian wrote, “Clearly, Jemal Pasha’s plan was to Turkify us, but we were determined to resist—not out of rabid nationalism, for which we were too young, but simply because we wanted to hold on to our identities, which were all we had left” (p. 83). When the orphanage at Antoura was liberated at the end of World War I, the boys rejoiced at being able to be and speak Armenian openly once again. They savored the promise of returning to Cilicia to resume life as Armenians. Panian’s “homecoming” to an orphanage in Aintab, however, was inevitably caught up in the crossfire of the Turkish War of Independence (1919–23). When the allied French forces withdrew from the Cilician territory they had occupied, Panian and his fellow orphans were transferred by Near East Relief to an orphanage at Jbeil, Lebanon, where they were finally able to put down roots, of a sort. Written in Western Armenian, Panian’s memoir was first published in its original language in 1992, after the author’s death. It has since been edited and translated into English by Simon Beugekian for Stanford University Press. Goodbye, Antoura joins a growing number of memoirs originally written in Armenian that have been translated into English and published in recent years, such...