Black Dog of Fate
A Memoir
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"His visions are burning -- his poetry heartbreaking," wrote Elie Wiesel of American poet Peter Balakian. Now, in elegant prose, the prize-winning poet who James Dickey called "an extraordinary talent" has written a compelling memoir about growing up American in a family that was haunted by a past too fraught with terror to be spoken of openly. Black Dog of Fate is set in the affluent New Jersey suburbs where Balakian -- the firstborn son of his generation -- grew up in a close, extended family. At the center of what was a quintessential American baby boom childhood lay the dark specter of a trauma his forebears had experienced -- the Ottoman Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians in 1915, the century's first genocide. In a story that climaxes to powerful personal and moral revelations, Balakian traces the complex process of discovering the facts of his people's history and the horrifying aftermath of the Turkish government's campaign to cover up one of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity. In describing his awakening to the facts of history, Balakian introduces us to a remarkable family of matriarchs and merchants, physicians, a bishop, and his aunts, two well-known figures in the world of literature. The unforgettable central figure of the story is Balakian's grandmother, a survivor and widow of the Genocide who speaks in fragments of metaphor and myth as she cooks up Armenian delicacies, plays the stock market, and keeps track of the baseball stats of her beloved Yankees. The book is infused with the intense and often comic collision between this family's ancient Near Eastern traditions and the American pop culture of the '50s and '60s.Balakian moves with ease from childhood memory, to history, to his ancestors' lives, to the story of a poet's coming of age. Written with power and grace, Black Dog of Fate unfolds like a tapestry its tale of survival against enormous odds. Through the eyes of a poet, here is the arresting story of a family's journey from its haunted past to a new life in a new world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Some memoirs are compelling for the private dramas they make public, others for the historic events to which they give witness and still others for the quality of their prose and its structuring. Precious few excel at all three--Nabokov's Speak, Memory remains the standard. Now Balakian, a 45-year-old poet (Dyer's Thistle) and biographer of Roethke, ups the ante a bit, writing a memoir that not only compels in all three areas but that carries within it an urgent and timely appeal that a dark moment in world history not be revised out of existence. Balakian is of Armenian descent. His mother and father and their mothers and fathers immigrated to America shortly after surviving the 1915 genocide by the Ottoman Turks, an event still disputed by some Turkish apologists who on occasion find sympathetic ears in Washington and American academia. At issue are the million or so Armenian Christians raped, murdered, tortured or left to die on a forced march into the desert. Ironically, the young Balakian, growing up in a comfortable New Jersey neighborhood, was sheltered from knowlege of the disaster:. "The word `Armenia' was synonymous with the rooms of my house.... I had never even thought to ask: Where is it?" But spending Friday afternoons as a boy with his oddly magical maternal grandmother, helping her bake choereg, he felt he had "access to some other world... something ancient, something connected to earth and words and blood and sky." This connection, particularly to words, is a notion that Balakian pursues as only a word-loving poet can. The mystical tales and dreams of his grandmother transform over time into body counts, government documents, eyewitness reports quoted at length and family narratives at last given to the curious Balakian. In the book's crowning structural feat, they become the property of Balakian himself. At last, the horrid story is in the words of the poet, and, in this quarter, the genocide becomes real and permanent. Black Dog of Fate is neither a grim book nor a polemic, however. It is a memoir about growing up in a wonderfully colorful family filled with artists and scholars. Balakian's evocation of growing up in the New York metropolitan area of the 1950s and '60s will, for many, ring fond bells (Whip 'n' Chill, pajamas with plastic feet, Woodstock, the drone of Allen Ginsberg's harmonium). This story of daring and triumph is at once warm and chilling, a testament to lives lived and lives tragically lost. FYI: Balakian's aunt Nona Balakian was a longtime editor at the New York Times Book Review; Nona's sister Anna is a renowned scholar of surrealism. Both figure prominently in his memoir as figures of encouragement to the young poet-to-be.
