Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

“I came to realize that my grandmother’s stories were part of time and not part of time, part of place and not part of place, part of the stuff that is stored in the mind’s honeycomb.” 

Peter’s grandmother influenced him in ways that took years of reflection to fully understand and appreciate. Her stories seemed bizarre but were actually snippets of memories and articulations of her suffering in her past life. Peter particularly emphasizes her stories (for example, the story of the Black Dog of Fate) that were elusive in his youth but steeped him in Armenian culture and consciousness.

“My grandmother’s hands floated like wings of bone in the dark, then they were birds, then small disks of light and then bones again, and then it was dawn.” 

Peter delivers this poetic line to describe the uneasy night he spent after learning that his grandmother died. He had previously distinguished between the clinical realism and Americanness of his immediate family and the ethereal qualities of his grandmother. This moment in the narrative comes before Peter has any knowledge or understanding of the Armenian Genocide or his grandmother’s young life, but the writing echoes her style (she liked recounting dreams). Peter, in his journey throughout the book, bridges the divide between the old family history and his sheltered life in New Jersey, and this line is an early hint of how he can carry his departed refugee grandmother in his middle-class suburban life.

“‘You’re lost here,’ Auntie Anna said, and made it clear that we had sold our souls to a barbarous society that didn’t know the difference between Monet and Donald Duck, Mallarmé and Michener. We would become just like everybody else—a thin slice of yellow plastic cheese in the long, soft loaf of Velveeta that was America.” 

While the comforts and privileges of middle-class suburban life set the stage for Peter’s enjoyable childhood, he reflects on critiques of suburbia that he heard voiced most passionately by his father’s sister at family gatherings. He remembers wanting to conform to his friends’ families but feeling like an outsider as a rare Armenian in a neighborhood full of Jewish families. While the suburbs were unabashedly American in their composition and culture, Peter continually reckoned with his family’s elusive Armenian past that complicated their claim to the largely homogenous neighborhoods around them. 

“My mother went on to explain that Mt. Ararat was in Turkey and Armenia was in the Soviet Union. Then she looked at her watch and told me to change and brush my teeth and meet her in the car in two minutes for our trip to the A & P.” 

Peter gleaned insight into the history of Armenia only through periodic short conversations and family members’ brief and often impatient remarks. Details came one-at-a-time and shrouded in some mystery, devoid of full explanations or commentary. While Armenia was a tangible concept in the Balakian house and tendrils of Armenian culture structured family life, the actual country was entirely unknown to Peters generation. Peter’s memory highlights the distance between the family heritage and immediate circumstances, where Peter manages to wrest an actual fact about Armenia from his reluctant mother, who then shifts the conversation to a mundane marker of the suburbs—grocery shopping.

“In this cul-de-sac of American families whose parents seemed invisible and whose children owned the new macadam till after dark, my parents retreated.” 

The prevalent Jewish culture in Teaneck had made Peter feel like a cultural outsider because he was an Armenian Christian and all of his friends were Jewish. In Tenafly, the dominant culture was not based on ethnicity or religion but defined by modern habits and sterile appliances. The moneyed neighbors lacked character and diversity, which Peter suspected revved up his parents’ desires to embody their comparatively rich and elaborate Armenian culture and do more to remember their roots amid the impersonal conformity around them. 

“I didn’t know that eating also was a drama whose meaning was entwined in Armenia’s bitter history. In 1960 I hadn’t even heard the phrase ‘starving Armenians,’ nor did I know that my ancestors were among the more than two million Armenians who, if they weren’t killed outright, were marched into the deserts of Turkey in 1915 and left to starve as they picked the seeds out of feces or sucked the blood on their own clothes. In 1960 I was unaware of the morality play of the dinner table, but I was aware of how irritatingly intense my parents were becoming about the propriety and ritual of dining.” 

The most pronounced new family practice in the Crabtree Lane house was an emphasis on dining with traditional dishes or hybrid Armenian-American dishes so different than their neighbors’ packaged and frozen meals. Peter has already offered many descriptions and names of Armenian foods and emphasized the importance of these dishes in family gatherings, but this is the first moment in which the author links food directly to the Armenian Genocide, or indeed, describes the genocide in any real detail. Hitherto, he only alluded to it. Food has played a major role in keeping Armenian culture alive after Ottoman Turks murdered so many Armenian families and attempted to expel Armenian culture and influence from their homelands in the Near East.

“Still, I had hope that one day I would come home from school and find my mother sitting on the patio in white slacks, a turquoise blouse, white flats, her hair in a bubble-cut. She’d be smoking a Salem and sipping a cocktail. ‘Hon,’ she’d say casually, ‘I’m meeting your father at the club for dinner. There are some Swansons in the freezer, just pop one in the oven. They take twenty minutes.’”

The hypothetical scene Peter describes is the opposite of his mother in nearly every way. Arax would likely find everyday suburban leisure clothes tacky and tasteless; she is strict and far from casual in most senses; she would certainly take offense to the thin, cheap Swanson steaks that were so easily and quickly prepared without spices, care, or time. Peter derives this image from the mothers in his Tenafly neighborhood, whom, though he interacts with occasionally, are often absent from their children’s lives. Autonomy of that extent did not exist for Peter, whose own parents remained regimented and seemingly omnipresent in comparison. He wishes for the cultural uniformity and normalcy he observes around him.

“At thirteen I was in awe of my father’s access to the secret world of disease and death, to the human places of hurt and pain and suffering. I always wanted him to talk about his work when he came home at the end of the day. But he never said a word about any of it.” 

Peter knows his father has several selves, but is privy only to a formal, strict, and predictable version of Gerard Balakian that he displays within their household. Peter gets glimpses of and hears mentions of his father’s life as a well-respected, friendly physician who helps people in medical and emotional need, but Peter can’t access that type of depth within their own relationship. When Peter tries to coax details of Gerard’s professional and public life out of him, he is withholding. Peter noticed these tendencies before he understood much about his father’s past with intensely personal and extreme “hurt and pain and suffering” on another continent.

“My anger was smoldering into the grief of a fourteen-year-old who believed his life had been snatched, just as it was blooming, by his father’s inscrutable Armenian elitist views.” 

Peter and his father experience their worst bout of tension before Peter’s first year of high school, when he desperately wants to attend public school with his friends, but his father is adamant about sending him to private school. When Gerard announces Peter’s enrollment in a local private school and will not relent under any circumstances, Peter grows to despise his father. Peter has already situated American suburban public life as a stark contrast to his formal, Armenian parents, and he has long disliked the intellectualism that so much of his extended family displays at gatherings when he would rather be playing baseball or lifting weights with his friends. These contrasts leave Peter caught between the private and the public, and what he imagines as being Armenian versus what he imagines to be American.

“After a long, silent period, Armenia had been dropped in my lap again. I was forced to remember that I belonged to this thing called Armenia, and that my father—the good doctor, the inventor, the team physician, the man of ideas—was still an enigma to me.” 

Gerard’s letter with a casual but direct reference to Armenian history and sovereignty jars the author, who had learned to tread lightly around the subject and not hope for much information from his family or textbooks. Peter talks about Armenia as an abstract concept that flits in and out of his life, not yet an ethnic identity that he can embrace or even understand. On the brink of adulthood, Peter starts critically thinking about Armenia after a hiatus, and he will finally piece together his family’s story in more detail. 

“I hung up the phone feeling ambivalent. I did not want the poem, the evening, Ginsberg, to be a bridge between us, not just then, because I was sunk in my own spite. I did not tell my mother that I had wept listening to ‘Kaddish’ in Larison Dining Hall, did not want her to know how much the poem affected me. But I was also sorry I could not talk to her just then.” 

When Allen Ginsberg reads his poem, “Kaddish,” during his visit to Bucknell, Peter and his mother both have silent, personal, and profound reactions to it. Arax recognizes a subtext that is as much about Armenia as it is about the poet’s mother who inspired the poem. Peter, as a college student, finally starts to hear his parents articulate the Armenian struggle—something they would never do in his youth—but adolescent struggles still breech his relationship with both parents. He wishes he could engage with this rare invitation to a sentimental conversation, but he is mad that his mother dislikes his girlfriend on what he presumes to be strict Armenian concepts of proper womanhood. 

“The journey into history, into the Armenian Genocide, was for me inseparable from poetry. Poetry was part of the journey and the excavation.” 

Peter’s embrace of poetry, and his efforts and successes in producing his own largely mark his maturation. As he transitions away from social life in high school defined by football, he becomes a man of intellect with an affinity for effusion. Armored in this new passion for intellectual expression, he sets out to discover the dark secrets of his family history and the broader story of the Armenian Genocide. He continually processes the information by translating the horrific moments of the past into poetic images and connects with his lost and tormented ancestors through these poetic reflections.

“The paradox of dependency and power that existed between Armenians and Turks was a tinderbox.” 

When Peter first encounters a comprehensive written account of Turkish policy before and during the Turkish slaughter of Armenians, he views it through the lens of the Jewish Holocaust and identifies striking similarities. The main difference is that people in the United States and even across the Western world learn about Nazis and the Holocaust in school and popular culture. The story of the Armenian Genocide rarely shows up in these places. He calls the Armenian plight a “tinderbox” because it foreshadowed the sweeping genocides still to come amidst modernity in the 20th century.

“I pictured those wind-bitten stone churches built out of the Armenian highlands of Anatolia, with their wooden belfries prescribed by Ottoman law so that no bell could be heard. I could hear those wooden clappers making a thump like a muffled throat. Then I thought of St. Thomas’s Armenian Church in Tenafly, where women in coiffed hair and mink coats sat in mahogany pews, their perfume mingling with the incense, as the morning light came through the pale colors of the flat, modern images of Jesus, the Virgin, and the Apostles in the stained-glass windows. The store-bough carpet glowed with the colored light, and the large windows in the Sunday School rooms looked out to the split-level and ranch houses with swimming pools and tennis courts on Tenafly’s east hill.” 

Learning the intense, oppressed history of Armenians under Turkish rule put into sharper relief the privileges and simplicity of certain aspects of the author’s Armenian-American upbringing that he did not previously understand. In his youth, Peter valued suburbia because its simple culture defined his boyhood and the youths of his peers. Finally connecting to a multi-generational history of pain and struggle recasts suburbia in a new light of bland consumerism. The US became a safe haven for so many Armenian refugees in and beyond his family, but it does not possess the depths of history and meaning that the homeland does. 

“If the Young Turks displayed greater ingenuity than their predecessor, Abdul Hamid, in killing Armenians, they did not have the Zyklon gas and large ovens the Nazis would, and so the business of genocide was carried out by hand.” 

The author provides this historical observation to contextualize the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915. Abdul Hamid II, former sultan of the Ottoman Empire, ordered the murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians at the end of the 19th century by way of a secret police force and motivated by xenophobic and political fears. The Young Turks greatly expanded the killing spree. A half-century later, Hitler ordered the mass-extermination of Jews across Europe by way of modern industrial capacities that mechanized slaughter. Turks did not have the industrial capacity that the Nazis did, but they undertook a race war in the modern era. It was no longer a century in which a robust slave trade supplied the labor for nearly an entire hemisphere, but the very same century during which Peter would collect these stories.

“Remember the starving Armenians was a disturbing phrase that had floated in a gray zone of my mind where rhetoric drifts without cognition. I didn’t realize it was a snippet of a popular culture during World War I. I had heard older people use it, a friend’s uncle at a bar mitzvah, a social studies teacher as I pushed through the cafeteria line, my friend’s grandmother the first time she met me. It made me uncomfortable. Others used it, but I never recalled it uttered at home or among my family. No one ever told me that the image of Armenians starving to death was, for Americans, a slogan for the most dramatic human rights issue of its day.” 

Peter’s self-education on Armenia leads him to reinterpret small details of his past and appreciate both Armenia and the US in a new light. American parents told their children to remember the starving Armenians to entice them to finish suppers or try new foods, and yet the phrase stemmed from one of the darkest corners of history in the modern era. That flippant usage demonstrates the removed and peripheral knowledge of the Armenian experience across the globe. Peter himself grew up with the merest peripheral knowledge despite his family’s intimate relationship to the events of 1915.

“As I’m thinking about it now, I imagine that most of those people had been silent for all those years. They were proud new citizens of FDR’s America. They just wanted to be left alone to raise families, do business in peace. The events of the past were not only too painful, they were beyond words.” 

Aunt Gladys makes this reflection once she starts to share details of the family’s history with Peter. In his youth, the silence and taboo surrounding Armenian history was frustrating for him and didn’t make sense. The reader sympathized with Peter’s frustration. Aunt Gladys’s words remind Peter and the reader alike that in the real world of human lives and suffering, some events are so traumatic that speaking openly about them is nearly impossible. Once she provides the details of several personal stories, it becomes clear why relaying the history to a child would have presented such a painful challenge. The details are severely bloody and disturbing. Peter is not outwardly forgiving of the sustained silence and its sudden breach, but he can contextualize it better upon reflection. 

“Deportation: a concentration camp in perpetual movement, caravan of death, the Turkish government’s term, Orwellian double-speak.” 

Under the name “deportation,” the Turkish government killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians by walking them into the desert, starving them, raping them, slashing them, and shooting them. Just to see the term would not transmit the true details of the history, yet it comes up so much because it was the organizing mechanism by which the Turkish government carried out the genocide. In this passage, Peter provides a more detailed and accurate description of what the deportations were really like.  

“Usually, the gendarmes would just shoot a man in the back of the head while he walked. It was as if the men’s heads were just there for target practice, and as we walked we would hear a shot and watch a man drop to the ground. We didn’t stop to look. Everyone just kept marching.” 

There are many passages in this chapter (the story of Dovey’s deportation march) that convey these central themes: gendarmes carried out indiscriminate and extreme violence on the Armenians they marched through the desert; atrocities were daily occurrences to such an extent that they became as normalized as such inhumane activities ever could; there was never any stopping or time for grieving. This passage described the patterns of violence committed against men. Dovey also talks about women suffering rape and bleeding to death while the caravan continues moving, and about leaving her mother behind to die when she falls to the ground and can’t get up. The experience encompassed both constant murder and constant movement. 

“How can one deny the cemetery of one’s ancestors?” 

Peter poses this rhetorical question after he talks to his aunt about the family’s long silence on the Armenian Genocide. She had quoted the Futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in saying “we cannot carry the cemetery of our ancestors on our backs” to justify her interest in surrealism and universal imagery over Peter’s interest in realism and historical fact. Peter knows that her generation of the family does not like to dwell on the past, but Peter feels the need to discover the family secrets and come to terms with them. He does not understand how the family can close the door on the past when there is so much that needs unpacking.

“The past is ruptured, but one excavates the shards, brushes them off, handles them, finds a way to see the broken picture, the navigate the lacunae between a solid image that leads to another solid image. And the solid images begin to add up. Images of the place then and now. Words, the texture of paper, the hand that wrote the words on the paper. The sensory densities becoming parts of a memory.” 

Peter feels himself connecting so intimately to the past through the few material remains of his grandmother’s early life, particularly the critical years she spend in Aleppo, Syria, just having survived the death marches but yet to begin a new life with prosperity and family. Her life becomes less abstract when Peter travels to Aleppo, sees her old flat there, and revisits the few hand-written notes she wrote from there that withstood about nine decades. He comes to understand both her suffering and her survival more acutely, and in so doing, grows close to his grandmother even though she has been dead for many years. Peter’s journey to learn from the shreds of history left behind by his grandmother keeps her story alive.

“As we sped by al-Raqqah, the river appeared and then disappeared. I was startled by how fresh and flowing and teal green the water was, not brown and sluggish as I had imagined it, and certainly not red with blood and clogged with the corpses of thousands of Armenian bodies as was recorded by eyewitnesses during the worst killing sprees in 1915 and 1916. How distant the past seemed as the Euphrates churned through a terrain of high grasses and irrigated farmland.” 

Peter spots the Euphrates River when he leaves Aleppo and marvels at its apparent health and beauty. The Euphrates and its neighbor-river, the Tigris, are famous for traversing the valleys in which the earliest known human civilizations flourished. Once the sites of such human ingenuity and advancement, they were sites of bloodshed and death at the outset of the 20th century. Almost another century later, river water once again appears to support life rather than host death. Peter’s journey through his family history has made him feel more connected to the past but also keenly aware of his great fortune to not have experienced the horror that even some relatives a single generation beforehand did. 

“Then I began, without thinking, picking up handfuls of dirt, sifting out the bones and stuffing them in my pockets. I felt the porous, chalky, dirt-saturated, hard, infrangible stuff in my hands. A piece of hip-socket, part of a skull, a femur fragment? I thought of the intricate puzzle of the body—bone and tendon, ligament, nerve lines, fiber, muscle. Nine decades later. Chunks and bits and pieces in the ground.” 

Peter visits a memorial Armenian church in northern Syria, built on a site covered in remains of Armenian Genocide victims. He collects the bones, closer than ever to the history that brutalized so many of his ancestors. At times, the past feels distant because the world has changed so much since the genocide. At other times, the history is ongoing, and the pain of the genocide is still alive. In front of this church, both feelings surface. Enough time has passed to reduce the remains to small, scattered, almost innocuous fragments covering the earth. Peter recognizes that they are also human remains from individuals, perhaps even family members, murdered by a xenophobic government, and governments still send people to their doom.