Fethiye Cetin

A Memoir

My Grandmother

Recounts the author's shocked discovery of the true identity of her grandmother, a Christian Armenian with American ties whose parents had been killed in the Armenian genocide before she was adopted by a Muslim Turkish gendarme captain.

My Grandmother: An Armenian-Turkish Memoir

Growing up in the small town of Maden in Turkey, Fethiye Çetin 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. Çetin’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.

An Armenian-Turkish Memoir

Ayse Gul Altinay

The Grandchildren is a collection of intimate, harrowing testimonies by grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Turkey’s "forgotten Armenians"—the orphans adopted and Islamized by Muslims after the Armenian genocide. Through them we learn of the tortuous routes by which they came to terms with the painful stories of their grandparents and their own identity. The postscript offers a historical overview of the silence about Islamized Armenians in most histories of the genocide. When Fethiye Çetin first published her groundbreaking memoir in Turkey, My Grandmother, she spoke of her grandmother’s hidden Armenian identity. The book sparked a conversation among Turks about the fate of the Ottoman Armenians in Anatolia in 1915. This resulted in an explosion of debate on Islamized Armenians and their legacy in contemporary Muslim families. The Grandchildren (translated from Turkish) is a follow-up to My Grandmother, and is an important contribution to understanding survival during atrocity. As witnesses to a dark chapter of history, the grandchildren of these survivors cast new light on the workings of memory in coming to terms with difficult pasts.

Fethiye Cetin

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