Not Even My Name: From a Death March in Turkey to a New Home in America, a Young Girl's True Story of Genocide and Sur [Kindle Edition]

Having lived a rather sheltered life myself, I often wonder about people's ability to overcome hardship or death of loved ones. This book provides an extreme answer: the unwilling hero moves swiftly from witnessing her family's and village's total destruction to making a new life and a large family in America; her world was shaped by hurricanes beyond her control, and she simply stayed afloat, largely by luck (if not miracle).

In addition to being a masterfully written personal saga, "Not Even My Name" has considerable historical value: indeed it is the first testimony in English about the destruction of Greek and Assyrian communities that stamped the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923; these episodes of massacre and expulsion are not as well known as the Armenian genocide of 1915, even though they share with it the ghastly concept of "death march", an ingeniously cruel way of annihilating unwanted minorities. While, unlike the Germans, the Turks do have some "legal defense" arguments based on invasions by Greece and Russia, their actions would undoubtly be classified as war crimes (if not genocide) by today's standards and principles.

Brilliantly, the book starts and ends with the authors' search for their destroyed village. In addition to adding suspense to the story, this search carries positive messages of hope, remembrance and reconciliation. Indeed it is only with the kind help of local Turks that Sano Halo manages to find the ruins of her village; her stay on its muddy slopes is as brief and rewarding as that of an alpinist on a tempestuous mountain top, complete with a simple potato meal offered by a local Turkish woman -- the same potatoes she and other children had cooked during a daring outing in the early, happy days in "Iondone" (Agios Antonios, Saint Antony).

The pace of those death marches was quick, fully in tune with Ataturk's frenzy to build modern Turkey. So quick that the victims were not allowed to stop in order to bury their dead, or at least carry them along and bury them at night. In one of the death march's most harrowing moments, Sano describes how they came across the copse of a girl from their village, "buried" under a book affectionately placed between her crossed hands and her chest. Such stories between absorbingly written tales of peaceful life, involving boar hunting, water-buffalo carts, necklaces of roasted chestnuts, and much more of considerable interest to the folklorist: life in Anatolia had not changed much over the centuries, and Sano did not know of "the magic light" (electricity) prior to her wedding night in an Aleppo hotel.

The dotted line on the inside cover map moves south rather than north, and yet the Black Sea, the sea that brought the Greeks to Pontus in Homer's times -- "pontos" is Homer's "sea" -- and took many of them back to Greece in the 1920's, was so close: instead of finding a new home in Greece, Sano was completely cut off from her Greek roots, to the point of forgetting her archaic Greek dialect. Indeed her isolation from the Greek community, even in New York City, appears to have been total. And that's what the book's title is about: "Sano" is not Greek, not even Assyrian (like "Halo"), just Kurdish; her real name is, or rather was, "Euthemia" ("Joyous").

In so many ways, I feel as though they allowed me to slip quietly inside their worlds, their relationship, their lives. I can see everything ... the village, the wildflowers, the calf, the family. I can feel the first experiences, the leaving, the remembering, and the returning, with heart racing, wondering, against all logic, whether her mother might be standing there at the door of the house. I can feel the fear of touching the little calf who was there tied to a tree, lest it might vanish as all others had.

A poem tells how the family's lives unraveled during the march-many left in the dust. I am glad, so glad, that the "God's knot" in Themia's life held ... that she endured ... that she chose to share this story.

May we build a world in which our knowledge of the contents of human hearts becomes so profound that we will be incapable of injury. May we all become, as the author did, self-appointed protectors of those of pure spirit. May we come to understand, as Thea did, that true unconditional love springs not from naivete, but from wisdom and respect for the "tentative hold" we have upon those we love. May we not wait until people are gone to realize how much we love them.

I would encourage professors of literature, social work, and history to incorporate this book into their curricula. The writing is outstanding. The history we need to know. So many have come to this country, leaving behind a world of unimaginable horrors. Often, they keep their stories wrapped up within their hearts as they build a new life. This book testifies to the healing power, for both the individual and those they love, of the telling of the tale. It is only as such narratives are shared that we will truly come to know ourselves as a nation and as a world ... a "mine rich in gems of inestimable value".

I could repeat the whole book, were I to tell you every word that stirred my heart ....