Four Years in the Mountains of Kurdistan

In 1915, when Haigaz was 15, Turkish soldiers attacked his home town of Shabin Karahisar, (today known as Sebinkarahisar, in Turkey), in an effort to wipe out the Christian Armenian population. In this sometimes poignant but often tedious and colorless memoir (translated by his daughter, Chekenian), Haigaz chronicles his coming of age in a world he finds alien. After a month-long siege in which his father and brothers are killed, Haigaz and his mother are forced to march across the Syrian deserts. The young boy survives by converting to Islam, becoming the servant of a Turkish officer, Ali Bey, and taking a new name, Abdullah oghlu Musleim. He works for Bey as a shepherd and learns to churn milk into butter and care for oxen. Haigaz participates in the killing of a Turk, falls in love, moves from place to place as circumstance dictates, and eventually escapes to Constantinople and then to America. Though he hints now and then that he misses his family, he recalls his adopted tribes with some fondness: “When I think of the people who were good to me during those days in Kurdistan, there are more than I can count on my ten fingers.” (Mar.)