The hundred year walk an armenian odyssey

After that, my uncle searched his garage and unearthed two more.

Just to be flippant and to state the impossible, I blurted out: вЂњI cannot help you unless you raise your father from the dead, and have him tell me what happened to him.вЂќ Two days later, my mother found two of his notebooks. My mother and I had a huge fight about me quitting. Suddenly, I was living at home at age 35, and feeling like a complete loser. Of course, this is a genocide and most people didnвЂ™t survive, and even if they did, itвЂ™s a century later. I had the journals from the small press, but they only told part of the story. 'I had just moved back to Los Angeles from New York and was quickly finding out how difficult it was to report on this subject. How did you discover more of his journals? I have long ago decided that I wouldnвЂ™t have lived.' And, of course, thereвЂ™s the luck factor he was extremely fortunate, too, to have been able to escape so many times when others didnвЂ™t have that opportunity.Д«ut if I am honest with myself, I know IвЂ™m not as clever or as strong as him. He was also a kind man, which ingratiated strangers to assist him. This was a man who only had a third grade education, but the survival skills he picked up as a child after his father died helped him to persevere. Later in the war, he became a translator to a German officer later, using his basic French. He donned the uniform of a Turkish soldier, dressed like Lawrence of Arabia, and became part of a clan to escape the Turkish gendarmes who were trying to kill him. He was level-headed, and always tried to plot his next step, escaping from one of the worst killing fields of the genocide. At each turn, what would I have done when faced with the same near-impossible odds? Would I have made the same decisions as my grandfather? Or would I have given up? My grandfather did everything to reunite with his family again, transforming himself constantly, and pushing his own physical and emotional limits. I inherited this story, along with it the responsibility of retelling it. My grandfather Stepan believed he lived in order to tell the world what happened, and shared his ordeal with my mother throughout her childhood. (This was thanks to a relative who translated his account, which was published in the sixties by a small press, from Armenian into English.) After reading it, I couldnвЂ™t believe that he survived, and the ripple effect that my entire family was alive. Still, the story was relayed in fragments, and I couldnвЂ™t grasp how extraordinary it was until I could finally read it for myself as an adult. 'Ever since I can remember, my mother has been telling me about what happened to her father. Why did you feel compelled to write this book? Their shared story is a testament to family, to home, and to the power of the human spirit to transcend the barriers of religion, ethnicity, and even time itself.' Read an excerpt of The Hundred Year Walk.

With his journals guiding her, she grows ever closer to the man she barely knew as a child. Inspired to retrace his steps, she sets out alone to Turkey and Syria, shadowing her resourceful, resilient grandfather across a landscape still rife with tension. Reading this rare firsthand account, his granddaughter Dawn MacKeen finds herself first drawn into the colorful bazaars before the war and then into the horrors Stepan later endured. The Hundred-Year Walk alternates between StepanвЂ™s saga and another journey that takes place a century later, after his family discovers his long-lost journals. In his desperate bid for survival, Stepan dons disguises, outmaneuvers gendarmes, and, when he least expects it, encounters the miraculous kindness of strangers. Just before killing squads slaughter his caravan during a forced desert march, Stepan manages to escape, making a perilous six-day trek to the Euphrates River carrying nothing more than two cups of water and one gold coin.

Gradually realizing the unthinkable-that they are all being driven to their deaths-he fights, through starvation and thirst, not to lose hope. He is separated from his family as they are swept up in the governmentвЂ™s mass deportation of Armenians into internment camps.

In the heart of the Ottoman Empire as World War I rages, Stepan MiskjianвЂ™s world becomes undone. 'An epic tale of one manвЂ™s courage in the face of genocide and his granddaughterвЂ™s quest to tell his story The Hundred Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey by Dawn Anahid MacKeen.ДЇrom the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: I've got an amazing book to giveaway today.

The hundred year walk an armenian odyssey