Skylark Farm

Skylark Farm\ \ By Antonia Arslan \ Knopf\ Copyright © 2007 Antonia Arslan\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 1400044359 \ \ \ FIRST PART\ \ Uncle Sempad\ \ \ Uncle Sempad is only a legend, for us--but a legend that has made us all cry. He was my grandfather's younger brother, his only uterine brother; their mother, Iskuhi, the little princess, died at nineteen giving birth to him. My great-grandfather then remarried an "evil stepmother," who bore him many other children; my grandfather couldn't stand her, and so, at the age of thirteen, he requested and was granted permission to leave the little city and go to Venice, to study at Moorat-Raphael, the boarding school for Armenian children.\ \ But Uncle Sempad was much sweeter and more easygoing than his brother, and he loved his little city, his lazy, sleepy province, the café chats with his friends, the fierce games of backgammon, the hunting. He went off to Constantinople to become a pharmacist, but always knew he would return home. At the university, he read the papers, joined a political party, dreamed like others of the rebirth of the ancient Armenian homeland, kicked up his heels a little, and kidded himself. Back home, he made his peace with the stepmother, amused himself by coddling his little brothers and pulling his sisters' braids, and began to think of marriage.\ \ Every so often he went riding, with a friend from the Laz country. Together they felt like crusaders and knights, imagined heading off to battle in the direction of the sun, like Alexander,free men with swords at their sides. Goodbye to exhausting negotiations for every permission, to imperial bureaucracy, to the necessarily servile deference of the Armenian, of the merchant, of those who make requests that are easily denied and have no weapon but the vassal's tricks. And yet: to be riding toward the East, the conquered, but to be men of the West, the conquering. To speak French, to subscribe to the Revue des deux mondes, to visit Paris . . .\ \ They often spoke of Paris, or of Italy, a friendly country, where Yerwant was making his fortune. But Sempad had no desire, his promises notwithstanding, to go visit his brother: he was timid and Eastern. If only his brother would come home, if only he would bring his Frankish* wife with him, and their children Yetwart and Khayël, and introduce them to their family. He had left with honor, and with honor he would be welcomed back. But in his heart of hearts, Sempad feared that this would never happen; Yerwant had gone away for good, and his sons--despite their names--did not speak the ancestral language and had been educated in German or Italian schools. Anatolia, for them, was a far-off fairy tale.\ \ "Perhaps," thought Sempad, "one of my sons will find his way to Yerwant, and perhaps we will all trade this place, a few at a time, for places where we'll no longer be afraid." But he didn't really want that. Many were leaving, it was true. From the most dangerous regions, the boldest youths, the brightest, the most intrepid, those who couldn't bear the strict confines of the Ermeni Millet--the Armenian administrative unit--within the Empire, were flowing out in a continuous stream.\ \ For Europe, for the coveted culture: to become doctors, dentists, architects, poets--or for America, to become utterly new, to forget. His half brother, Rupen, lived in Boston and was quite content. But Sempad, in his simple heart, understood Rupen's solitude and sent him a fine wooden backgammon set, with a decidedly affectionate inscription engraved all around it in Armenian characters, the same set he had at home. He never would have imagined that that set--relic or icon from a terrible shipwreck--would for two of his children be the only sign, aside from a solemn ceremonial photograph, of their father's lively existence.\ \ Sempad loved his pharmacy. He was a slow-moving man, not particularly witty, and profoundly good. As a boy he protected his younger sisters, Veron and Azniv, from their tumultuous, harassing brothers, Rupen and Zareh. And he loved to send telegrams.\ \ "The pharmacist," he used to say, "ought to be equipped to send and receive telegrams. There could be an urgency."\ \ Everyone teased Sempad, both at home and at the pharmacy, for the elaborate way the word urgency rolled off his tongue. How it resounded in his mouth, that Westernism: symptom of progress, symbol of haste, of the shaking off of Eastern indolence.\ \ "People," he used to say, "are not going to put off death so that we can finish our card game. We intellec- tual Armenians need to set an example, of precision, of modernity, of punctuality: for both the average Armenian and the average Turk. Why else did we bother studying?"\ \ But he himself no longer studied anything; he observed the holidays and stroked his mustache--counting his seven children. He barely glanced at the paper with the news from Constantinople, though he was proud that the Armenians up there were beginning to gain respect; some had even become delegates, and Krikor Zohrab, poet and delegate, played tavli--the Turkish version of backgammon--with the supremely powerful minister of the interior, Talat Pasha.\ \ Zohrab's tavli! His friendship with Talat had become, for the gentle, daydreaming Armenian people, an omen of good fortune, a symbol of the new day of prosperity and progress that was about to dawn with the political collaboration between the Young Turks and the Armenian millet. A powerful, disarming symbol: "He goes to his home, he's received like family, they drink tea together." For Sempad, and all the others like him, it was literally inconceivable that a man could deceive--much less kill--someone with whom he drank tea in his own home: a guest!\ \ For Sempad and those like him, worldliness included neither duplicity or deception; it was grounded, rather, in the application of a careful mercantile etiquette of earnings, profits, and losses, calculated generously and with due respect to the community's poor. And moreover, the pharmacist had a moral code to uphold. He was practically a doctor and practically a man of letters: the guardian of health, the keeper of poisons, the bearer of newspapers, the telegram man--a pillar of the community.\ \ Everyone knew that Shushanig, his boisterous and fertile wife, though she professed to have nothing to do with her husband's affairs, happily controlled him down to his last whisker, as the proverb says. And he happily allowed himself to be controlled, even when, with her tacit consent, he ran off in a wretched pair of leather pants with his Lazian friend, rifle over his shoulder, proudly returning with a couple of hares. Sometimes one of his sons accompanied him.\ \ The eldest, the tight-lipped Suren, dreamed of Europe, and was on the verge of departure. But he adored his simple father and had no desire to leave him. His preference would be perversely respected by destiny.\ \ Suren read a lot, and thought a lot. He smelled blood in the air, caught the scent of evil. But who pays attention to a boy of fourteen, who speaks rarely and grudgingly, who cries alone at night, dreaming of a woman's lap, a maternal refuge in which to disappear and hide?\ \ Garo, the second son, also spoke little and thought even less. He acted out of a loving instinct, without reflecting, with a perfect economy of gestures. He could calm any crying, whining, or shrieking baby; his fleeting presence alone lulled and soothed a helpless, insecure community, for which each day might take a bad turn, where the elders tell stories not of witches and ogres but of the slaughters of twenty years before, or ten, counting as a kind of rosary the list of massacred or vanished relatives.\ \ The third son was Leslie the Brit, who was "conceived on a stormy night," according to Sempad; it was "a calm night with a full moon," joked Shushanig. His parents claimed not to know why he had always been called the Brit. "Did the name come first, or the nickname?" their friends would slyly ask, recalling Sempad's epic binge. He was typically a very restrained drinker--at most, alcohol made him a bit sad--but once an American missionary gave the pharmacy a bottle of medicinal Scotch, resulting in Shushanig's being chased around the courtyard and winding up, indecorously, in the henhouse, the outcome being, of course, Leslie.\ \ It was pleasing, that liquid, sibilant, exotic name, written in white letters on the bottle that the contrite parents kept as a souvenir. (An old soldier, a veteran of the Balkan wars, later built a magnificent sailing ship inside it, even providing it with a nostalgic cartouche that recalled Nelson's battles and his own dream of sailing the open seas; but he would be among the first to die, in May 1915, surrounded by his smashed ships.)\ \ The bottle on top of the cupboard--that beautiful Italian walnut that Yerwant sent from Italy on the birth of his first nephew--and Leslie beneath the cupboard. Leslie grew up alone: fought over at first like a doll by his two older brothers, he was quickly forgotten at the birth, ten months later, of a cute, sweet, and very normal baby girl, Aunt Nevart, who would later live in Fresno, who did not care for children. Leslie laughed all the time, asked if he could play with the others, was not offended when the answer was no: he just went under his cupboard, back to his secret lair.\ \ Then the rest: Arussiag, Henriette, and Nubar, two girls and a little boy dressed as a girl. Along with Nevart they are the numb survivors who will, after escaping Aleppo, come to the West. These children now look out at me from a snapshot taken in Aleppo in 1916, one year after their rescue, just before they embarked for Italy: their grave, childish eyes are turned mysteriously inward, opaque and glacial, having accepted--after too many unanswered questions--the blind selection that has allowed them to survive. They are wearing decent orphan clothes, but they seem dressed in uniforms of rags, and at a quick glance the eye sees prison stripes. Their dark Eastern eyes, with their thick brows tracing a single line across their foreheads, repeat four times, wordlessly, the fear of a future that will be inexorable and the hidden nucleus of a secret guilt.\ \ * From the country of the "Franks"--a typical term for Westerners. \ \ Continues... \ \ \ \ Excerpted from Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan Copyright © 2007 by Antonia Arslan. Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

\ Publishers WeeklyThis bleak, unsparing debut novel traces one Armenian family's experience during the Armenian genocide of 1915. Yerwant, 53, is a 40-year expatriate living in Venice in the months before WWI. He hopes to reunite with his family on their idyllic farm estate in Turkey-his brother, Sempad (a successful pharmacist); Sempad's wife and children; and the men's little sisters, Azniv and Veron-but WWI ignites, and the ruling Young Turks party closes the border. Yerwant's family in Turkey is rounded up, their fates hastened by a star-crossed love affair between Azniv and a Turkish soldier. The town's men are brutally exterminated, and Yerwant's remaining family suffers concentration camps, forced marches, physical torture and starvation. The kindness of neighboring Turks and Greeks helps them survive as they try to reach Yerwant in Italy. Arslan, a onetime University of Padua professor of Italian literature, depicts the family (based on her own) with broad, epic strokes. The bluntly omniscient narration dampens the characters, but Arslan delivers vivid, powerful testimony of horrific cruelty and immeasurable loss. (Jan. 24) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ KLIATT\ - Lorie Johnson Paldino\ With the Armenian genocide still a controversy in 21st-century headlines, readers will find Antonia Arslan's Skylark Farm a compelling read. Arslan gives voice to the untold number of Armenians killed during the 1915 expulsion of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire. In Turkey, the Armenian population had endured an "ethnic cleansing" in the form of massacres in 1894—1896, and those who had survived quietly lived in the confines of the Ermeni Millet, the Armenian administrative unit set up in the Ottoman Empire. Many Armenians, however, had family members leave for Europe and America in search of freedom and a better life. The Arslanian family is no different. Hamparzum, the patriarch, has seen two of his sons off. Of his remaining children, only Sempad stays close, taking over the role of patriarch on Hamparzum's death. Yet it is Sempad's great niece, living in Italy, who chronicles the events of 1915 as Yerwant, the eldest brother, becomes nostalgic and desires to return to his native land. As he begins to shape his plans, WW I breaks out and the Italian border closes. Yerwant struggles to keep informed about his extended family's welfare. Meanwhile, the round up and deportation of his family and all other Armenians begins. Sempad, his sons, and all other males are murdered. Shushanig, his wife, his stepmother, his sisters, and his daughters (along with one remaining son who is disguised as a girl to ensure his survival) are forced to march across the desert to Aleppo. Graciously and courageously, a few devoted friends of Shushanig follow the deportation march and reach Aleppo, contact a brother living there, and successfully rescue the few of the family who survive themarch. The story affirms the existence of miracles. Skylark Farm is a heart-wrenching testimony to a gruesome atrocity. It is understandable why the time period is still a current source of pain for the Armenian population. Reviewer: Lorie Johnson Paldino\ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsOne family's heartbreaking experience during the 1915 Armenian genocide. In a small Anatolian hill town, Turks and Armenians live together in relative harmony for generations. But when, in 1915, the Ottoman Empire allies itself with Germany in the brewing world war, Turkish citizens are forced to take sides. Sempad Arslanian, however, remains oblivious to political change. Head of his large, wealthy clan and benefactor to his neighbors-Turk, Greek and Armenian alike-he spends the Spring of 1915 joyfully preparing for a reunion with his brother Yerwant, who, at 13, left Skylark Farm, the family's country estate, to study in Italy. Preparations by both brothers rival ceremonial planning for royal visits: Sempad orders stained glass windows from England and levels a pasture for a tennis court; Yerwant outfits a red Isotta Fraschini for his road trip south, his monogram in silver on the doors, and stocks it with a great number of small gold and silver gifts to give away on his arrival. On May 24, days before Yerwant is to leave, Italy closes its borders and joins the War. And in Sempad's village, as throughout the Empire, all Armenian heads of household are arrested. Sempad flees from his house in town to Skylark Farm. What happens there-later that night the freshly dug tennis court is used as a mass grave for all the Arslanian men-is only the first of countless horrors the Arslanian women (and one boy disguised as a girl) endure on their forced death-march across the Syrian desert, where they are raided periodically by the Kurds, raped by their Young Turk "guides" and starved. The story of survival that follows is the unexpected solace of this fearless tale. An Armenian Schindler's List.\ \