Author explores Armenian genocide through fiction
A fat packet of letters, written by a friend’s great-aunt during World War I, inspired Judith Claire Mitchell, assistant professor of English at UW–Madison, to write “The Last Day of the War” (Pantheon Books, 2004), her first novel. To Mitchell, those letters exemplified a key aspect of human nature; fiction, she thought, would be an ideal medium to explore it.
“Clearly the aunt had gone to France in 1919 as a YMCA Girl because that was where the boys were, but every now and then the frivolous tone was interrupted by a startling description of war-ravaged France,” Mitchell says. “In one letter, a single sentence about an encounter with an Armenian rug merchant who lost his entire family in the genocide (in 1915-16) caught my attention, particularly because the very next sentence was all about a dance that the aunt had attended. I was reminded of the way we can come face to face with unfathomable human suffering, acknowledge it for a moment and then fix our hair and dance the night away. I was struck by how human this kind of behavior is, and I wanted to see if I could create a character that embodied it.”
That character is Yale White, who goes to France hoping to “run into” the Armenian-American soldier she lusts after. She finds him, and through him becomes enmeshed in the covert organization he belongs to (based on the factual Operation Nemesis) whose members are intent on violently avenging the genocide.
Mitchell adds that one surprising offshoot of the novel has been the flurry of invitations to speak about the Armenian atrocity. This past month, for example, she spoke to Rhode Island high school educators interested in using literature to teach about genocide. She also was the first novelist invited to lecture at the Armenian Library and Museum in Watertown, Mass.
Still denied by many Turks, the massacre of 1915-16 accounted for the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Early in 1915, Armenians in the army were disarmed, placed into labor battalion and finally killed. In April, intellectual and political leaders were rounded up and murdered. Remaining Armenians were arrested in their houses. Many were shot immediately. Others were told they would be relocated, and ultimately were: To the concentration camps of Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor.
However, Mitchell says that current events also had their hand in shaping the book.
“While I was researching the Armenian genocide, similar slaughters were taking place in Bosnia and Rwanda. So, in addition to writing about the human condition, I wanted to call readers’ attention to the first genocide of the 20th century while commenting indirectly on the century’s final genocides,” she says.
Mitchell is on leave to work on her second novel, again a historical exploration of ethnic identity. This fall she will be teaching two graduate-level courses, a pedagogy class and a fiction workshop for students in the English department’s relatively new Master of Fine Arts program. She says that being a writer herself gives her a great deal in common with her students.
“It’s critical that teachers of creative writing courses be writers who have struggled with the writing process,” she says. “You need someone who realizes how hard it is to write.”
Mitchell will read from “The Last Day of the War” at the Armenian National Committee of Wisconsin’s commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. The event will be held at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, April 26, in the State Capitol. For more information on that event, contact Zohrab Khaligian at khaligian@netzero.net.