My Grandmother (Cetin)

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My Grandmother (Cetin)
Book-cover-my grandmother-cetin.jpg
Author Fethiye Cetin
Translator Maureen Freely
Publication Year 2012
ISBN ISBN 978-1844678679, 978-1844671694
Format Hardbound, Softbound
Language English, Turkish
Category Genocide, Biographies & Memoirs


Originally printed in Turkish.

As a child in Turkey, Fethiye Cetin knew her grandmother as a happy and well-respected Muslim housewife. Decades later, her grandmother revealed the truth: she was by birth a Christian Armenian, and most of the men in the village where she grew up were slaughtered in 1915. In this heartwrenching memoir, Cetin tells a powerful story that breaks the silence surrounding the Armenian genocide.

Growing up in the small town of Maden in Turkey, Fethiye Cetin knew her grandmother as a happy and respected Muslim housewife called Seher. Only decades later did she discover the truth. Her grandmother's name was not Seher but Heranus. She was born a Christian Armenian. Most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915. A Turkish gendarme had stolen her from her mother and adopted her. Cetin's family history tied her directly to the terrible origins of modern Turkey and the organized denial of its Ottoman past as the shared home of many faiths and ways of life. A deeply affecting memoir, My Grandmother is also a step towards another kind of Turkey, one that is finally at peace with its past.