Atom's Bombshell

[Stormig]

The Jewish Exponent

(Published Weekly Since 1887 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

December 12, 2002

Volume 213, Number 11, Page 53

 

Atom's Bombshell

 

Director Atom Egoyan eyes chain reaction to his claim of Armenian genocide

by the Turks

 

By: Michael Elkin (melkin@jewishexponent.com)

 

It is an Atom bomb of an accusation: The Turks were responsible

for the genocide of more than a million Armenians in 1915,

turning their Ottoman Empire into a killing field of revenge

and refutation of Armenians' rights.

 

They unchained the devastating nuclear reaction that hate can

generate, claims director Atom Egoyan, who puts the horrors of

history under a microscope for a slide show of incredible impact

in "Ararat," now playing in the area.

 

Named after the mountain in East Turkey accessible to both the

Armenia and Turkish borders, it is also a story of mountainous

obstacles to overcome for Armenians, whose slaughter at the

hands of Turks in 1915 was in the millions - a genocide denied

to this day by the Turks.

 

Repulsed by revisionism, Egoyan, a Canadian-Armenian filmmaker

whose past credits include the acclaimed "The Sweet Hereafter,"

senses the bitter aftertaste of a history denied.

 

"Ararat," he hopes, will clear the air and unclog the arteries

to memories. After all, there is no such thing as a "genteel

genocide": Millions massacred, towns torn asunder, history

horribly upended, and peoples left to ponder fates of fear and

unfulfilled futures are the real byproducts of hate bypassed by

Turks who would rather sanitize the sensational, opting for the

bloodless over the bloodbath.

 

But there is no denying the degradation and damage genocide

inflicts on generations inheriting the legacy left behind by

murderous marauders.

 

It is a film and story, Egoyan knows, many Jews can relate to. "It

is uncanny the response I am getting from my Jewish friends,"

says Egoyan of those who recognize that the blood-splattered

story is grist for their own grisly memories.

 

Indeed, one of those friends - Robert Lantos - is also his

longtime co-producer on other projects as well as "Ararat" and

is the one who challenged Egoyan to take on such a difficult

subject so close to home.

 

"He made it possible," says Egoyan of the Hungarian-Jewish

producer whose films include the hard-hitting Holocaust saga,

"Sunshine."

 

Let the sun shine in on the truth, Lantos urged.

 

"He said there are so many films that have dealt with the

Holocaust, that if I am ready to do a film about the Armenian

massacre, about my people, then he will back it."

 

This film puts Turkish history's back to the wall: Turkish

denial - claiming that Armenians were killed not as a result of

a carefully engineered genocide but in skirmishes, for siding

with Turkish enemies - undeniably, is the linchpin of loss that

jump-starts the genocide issue in this most complex of movies.

 

Characters step in and out of "Ararat," and there is a

movie-within-the-movie in which the horrors are so graphically

depicted.

 

A yell of "cut!" from the film-within-a-film's director can

close a scene but not cut off the gruesome reality of a people

who perished at the hands of the Turks, says Egoyan.

 

"The film-within-a-film revisits the historic events in an

attempt to recreate the past, while the contemporary story and

its present-day characters reconstruct their own histories,

according to their own needs, memories and imaginations," writes

the director in a foreword to notes about his film.

 

Moving forward is impossible without paying heed to history,

says Egoyan in our interview. And it was a child-like chiding,

an innocuous query, that made Egoyan quake with the need for

setting things right. "My son - he was 6 at the time - asked me a

few years ago for help with this family tree he was making. And,

suddenly, on his grandfather's side, the tree stops. He wanted

to know why."

 

And when Egoyan told him the roots of the reason the family

tree was left out on a limb, the son just wanted to know,

"Did the Turks say that they were sorry?" It was a sorry state,

said the father, when he had to answer no.

 

But his film responds by righting the rift between fact and

fiction in a righteous and revolutionary way. Yet Egoyan is

aghast that he is put in a position where he has to fix the

fiction. Have the Turks applied a tourniquet to the world's

collective conscience? "It is what would have happened if the

Germans had not accepted responsibility for the Holocaust."

 

But the West acted irresponsibly, too, according to the

director. "At a trial after World War I, a number of Turks were

sentenced to death for their actions against the Armenians. But

the new Turkish government said to the West, erase the trial

[from history] and have access to our oil fields."

 

Moral amnesia? "It is there, but not there," claims the director

of the trials having taken place but not acknowledged.

 

Luckily, he hints, Germany had no oil to offer after World War II.

 

But there have been a number of unctuous moments for Egoyan, who

must deal with Turks' denials and attempts to discredit his film.

 

"If not for Harvey Weinstein and Robert Lantos," he says of the

Miramax mahaf responsible for distributing "Ararat" and of the

film's producer, "this film would never be. It is because of

the gesture of these two powerful Jewish individuals that this

story can come out."

 

The Ottomans couched their need to rid the region of Armenians

with a "logic" well-familiar to Jews who recall what it means

to be scapegoated and scraped off the heels of hell. "There is

an extraordinary link between the two peoples.

 

"Obviously, the Holocaust had a different aspect to it,

with anti-Semitism at its root. And it was an international

phenomenon. The anti-Armenian feelings were very specific to

that part of the world."

 

And the director who has trafficked in "Exotica" - one of Egoyan's

works - exults in the sense that those who see this movie can

rethink history, placing it in a new frame of reference.

 

Holocaust films have kept the horrors of Nazism alive even as

survivors - the eyewitnesses to history - die off. And now,

Egoyan hopes, "Ararat" will moisten memories that have been left

arid among Armenians.

 

"Both our peoples are able to feel and understand what it was

like to live surrounded by people outside our own cultures. We

both have faced suffering."

 

Suffer in silence? Never again. "It is not a question of simple

remembrance," says Egoyan, "but how to remember in a way to

prevent it from happening again."

 

Egoyan remembers how startled he felt seeing such watershed

Holocaust films as Claude Lanzmann's epic "Shoah" and Steven

Spielberg's "Schindler's List." And how he felt the ashen

attraction of "The Grey Zone," Tim Blake Nelson's masterful new

release on moral quandaries in the camps.

 

Truth cannot be denied - especially by the revisionists, says

Egoyan. And, truth be told, filmmakers have an obligation to

infuse their films with fact. "We have to be responsible to

the fact that young people absorb [their sense of history]

through films.

 

"['Ararat'] is the first film to offer the Armenian point of

view," says Egoyan. But he hopes it won't be the last - a wish

countered by the Turkish government, where Atom's bombshell has

reverberated. "It is vilified in Turkey, discredited; there were

attempts to block it from being made," says Egoyan.

 

What did Egoyan make of his own people's history when he

was young? "I was raised in an assimilated home," says the

director. "I had a sense of the history, but you are raised with

a certain fear, and the knowledge that no one else cares about

what happened, that the world doesn't care."

 

It took his breath away: "It was suffocating."

 

Breathing life into the lurid story has reclaimed his faith

and focused attention on the art of Arshile Gorky, an Armenian

painter whose own story of survival frames the movie.

 

But the picture that evolves from the film provides no textbook

answers, only a vision that veracity is a see-through color,

a clear alternative to the opaqueness of lies and propaganda.

 

Egoyan is not ego-driven to think he can provide definitive

answers; otherwise, he would have taken on a massive and mystical

project offered him before this one. "Somebody had proposed

that I a do a film on Dawn," Elie Wiesel's autobiographical

Holocaust-oriented book. Egoyan turned down the opportunity.

 

"It is doubtful that any film can engage like this piece of

literature can."

 

Yet isn't Egoyan's novel effort actually creating a filmic

literature? Isn't "Ararat" a cinéaste's novelistic approach

to history?

 

"I have tried to use some devices of literature," he concedes.

 

With "Ararat," Egoyan has made book on a promise to himself and

his son as well as his community. While admitting writing "Ararat"

"was very intimidating - which is why the script languished in

the drawer for so long" - he now longs for the day when others

will comb through the pages of the past and climb the mountain

he has rappelled with "Ararat."

 

Is Egoyan sure it will happen? History, he says, is on his side.

 

You may contact Michael Elkin via Email:

(melkin@jewishexponent.com)

 

http://www.jewishexponent.com/Zoom.asp?Sto...gead=&holdval=0

[Stormig]

http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et-a...rax9dec09.story

 

A witness rests

Most who lived through the Armenian genocide are dead, but "Ararat" ensures they will not be forgotten.

 

By Mark Arax, Times Staff Writer

 

Times review of "Ararat"

 

FRESNO--She had lived long enough to bury her husband and bury her son and watch the family's 40-acre vineyard, planted with grapes from the old country, give way to housing tracts.

 

Vera Gajarian had seen almost everything life had to show in her 92 years. Too much good had happened, she said, to dwell on the bad. She was old and gnarled now and, like the vineyard, ready to go. One thing, though, still tugged at her.

 

As a child in what is now eastern Turkey, she had witnessed the murder of her father and mother and four brothers and sisters in the death marches of a forgotten genocide. She had waited decades for Turkey to admit its guilt. She had waited for a reckoning that never came.

 

Now, more than 85 years later, her history was being acknowledged in a way she never imagined. As she sat in a movie theater a few days ago, her grandson on one side and her granddaughter on the other, images of the Armenian massacres flickered in her face. A new motion picture, "Ararat," the major feature film about the genocide to make the big screen, had come to her hometown.

 

There was only one problem. Gajarian was 20 years blind. "My eyes don't work so well, honey," she said, leaning in on her cane. "I will hear what I can no longer see."

 

As far back as the 1930s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was set to make a movie depicting the 1915-18 massacres that killed more than half the Armenian people and drove the rest from their ancient homeland near Mt. Ararat. But the Turkish government, refusing to admit to the genocide, pressured the U.S. State Department. MGM killed the movie.

 

There it languished until an Armenian Canadian director named Atom Egoyan, whose brilliant but quirky work had earned him an Oscar nomination, decided to fulfill a promise he had made to himself as a kid.

 

In the three weeks since its release, his $15-million movie has received critical acclaim. But "Ararat" is no epic. Although Miramax is billing it as "the movie they don't want you to see," the company has released it in only a handful of big cities.

 

Fresno, deemed too small and middlebrow, cried foul. Letters asking "How can you leave out Fresno?" were sent to Miramax President Harvey Weinstein. No city in America, after all, has been shaped more by the survivors of the genocide. The refugees who arrived here by the tens of thousands in the 1920s and '30s built the raisin industry and became this valley's judges and poets.

 

Like Vera Gajarian, most were too busy raising new families to pass along any memories of the atrocities they left behind. Their children often grew up without knowing the reasons why a silly Armenian song, "Lie, Lie, All the World Is a Lie," would incite a mad dance. Or why a simple pomegranate would be hoarded like a jewel.

 

Now nearly all of those old-timers were gone. Only Gajarian and a handful of survivors were left to see a film woven around the themes of memory and denial. "I have met some Turks who are the nicest people. I don't feel resentment," she said. "But for their government not to admit this for how many years -- 80, 90? They can deny, but I'm here to tell them that I saw it with my own eyes."

 

Without pity

 

A week before the film's premiere here, she sat in her ranch house now ringed by suburbia and talked about the obligation to tell her story. As one of the last living witnesses, she said she wanted to tell it without pity or embellishment.

 

Gajarian landed on Ellis Island on the Fourth of July, 1920. She boarded the train to Fresno, where her uncle had a farm on the outskirts of town. When it came time to attend church, she joined not the Armenian parish, but the First Baptist Church of Clovis. She read Twain and Steinbeck and Hemingway and every word of Upton Sinclair.

 

But at night, when she took a deep breath, all she could smell was the village of Keghi, its goats and grain fields, and all she could taste was the flat cracker bread, the lahvosh, that came out warm and sweet from her mother's clay oven.

 

Keghi had been carved into the side of a mountain along a river. The 2,500 Armenians lived in four neighborhoods, each with its own church. Below, beside the small valley planted with wheat and walnuts, lived 1,000 Turks.

 

It was a strange give and take.

 

The Armenians, who arrived 800 years before the Turks, were barred from the Ottoman government. The Turks ran the jail, court and City Hall. No Armenian could possess a firearm, but the town's shops and banks were firmly in Armenian hands. The men, Turks and Armenians, mingled in the central bazaar, where they threw back shots of licorice-flavored moonshine and jousted in endless duels of backgammon.

 

"If there were any problems between the Armenians and Turks, I didn't see it. I was just a little girl."

 

Her father, Khoran, was a cobbler who owned a dry goods store. She doesn't remember her mother, Alem, ever sitting. She had auburn hair and fair skin and kept her slim figure even after five children.

 

The oldest child, Vasken, 12, had polio and couldn't walk. Gajarian was the third child, after Stella and before Harry. Then came the baby boy, Onig. He had been born just two months before that night her father walked through the door with terrible news: World War I had edged closer. The Turkish soldiers said they needed to move the Armenians to a safe area. A convoy was leaving in 24 hours.

 

The next morning, they set out on foot as soldiers led the way on horseback. It was late May 1915. Her father carried crippled Vasken, her mother clutched little Onig. They walked day and night, through mountains and high desert, heading south toward the Euphrates River. She said the Turks stayed poker faced all the way to the town of Palu, 75 miles into the deportation.

 

"We were sitting down, finally resting, and on a hill there were 50 Armenian men tied together and marching. The next thing we heard were gunshots. We knew then they were trying to get rid of the men."

 

As they marched toward the city of Diyarbekir, she saw her father talking to a friendly soldier. That night, her father handed the coins from his belt to the soldier. He was going to rescue her father and a few male friends.

 

"I remember my dad leaving. He told us to be good and mind Mother and always to pray. He said he would meet us soon in a safe area. That's the last time I saw him. The next day, the soldier came back. He was wearing my daddy's jacket."

 

Diyarbekir had become an open pit of torture, rape and murder. Historian Christopher Walker, in his 1980 book, "Armenia: Survival of a Nation," wrote that 570,000 Armenians had been killed there in a spasm of ethnic cleansing.

 

So many dead Armenians were floating in the Euphrates that the river had changed course. Vasken couldn't hold on to a cousin's shoulders and was swept away. "Thank God, I didn't see him drowning."

 

The family trudged on with no food or water in the desert sun. The skin on baby Onig's face was burned. His tongue had turned charcoal. He was already dead. Their mother just didn't know it. "He died in her arms. She was so weak that she wrapped him in a blanket and handed him to me and my sister Stella. 'Go bury him,' " she said.

 

A few days later, they were herded to a railway station, where 3-year old Harry died in Gajarian's lap. The soldiers packed the remaining Armenians from Keghi -- fewer than 100 -- into railway cars. Gajarian didn't know it, but they were headed to a concentration camp at the edge of the Ottoman Empire. Her older sister Stella died on the way there.

 

At some point the soldiers at the camp disappeared, and she and her mother were left to wander like beggars. She remembers being on the second floor of a bombed-out hotel with four or five families. Her mother was lying on the floor and Gajarian was trying to talk to her, but Alem wasn't answering. "They sewed her up in a white sheet like a mummy. The wagon came and two men picked her up and I followed them to the stairway. When they got to the bottom, they just threw my mother into the wagon. Like a block of wood."

 

She said she was crying when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was her father's sister, Aunt Derouhi. She remembers the words like it was yesterday.

 

"Mother died. I've got no one."

 

"I'll take care of you now," her aunt said.

 

Derouhi was jarbig, a hustler. She took the leftover wool from a shearing house and crocheted little girls' dresses that they sold to the Arabs. It was those dresses that bought their train fare to Constantinople. Her father's brother and his English wife had made it to Fresno. She would set sail on an ocean liner and join them. She would marry their son, her cousin Sarkis. They would have a child named Stanley, who would become a fruit broker, like her husband.

 

In Fresno, there were two rival Armenian churches, two competing picnics to bless the grapes and two ceremonies to remember the genocide. There was one cemetery, Ararat.

 

Last week, Gajarian's two grandchildren took her to see the movie "Ararat." She was joined by a congressman, a state senator and Fresno's mayor, Alan Autry, a B-movie actor. She listened to the haunting flute made from the wood of the Armenian apricot tree. She heard the gunshots, the cries of marchers and the word "genocide" uttered without equivocation.

 

"What happened to my people angers me, but I hold no bitterness against the Turks," she said, leaving the theater. "We have our books and finally we have our movie. I pray that the Armenians will now put this away. What's done is done."

[Rubo]

Hi Stormy,welcome

“It is an Atom bomb of an accusation: The Turks were responsible

for the genocide of more than a million Armenians in 1915,

turning their Ottoman Empire into a killing field of revenge

and refutation of Armenians' rights.”

It is sad that after all these years fighting for recognition internationally and in United States some journalists still find the Armenian Genocide “as a Atom bomb of an accusation”

I thought naively perhaps that those educated would already passed the stage of accusation to that stage of a historical fact.

[Stormig]

Had to start somewhere, at some point. Better late than never.