Voyage Home

By Stefan Kanfer

PASSAGE TO ARARAT

by MICHAEL J. ARLEN

293 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95.

"They were not me and I could never be them." This wholly false conclusion is drawn by the author on his self-styled "voyage" backward through memory, history and time itself. "I" is Michael J. Arlen, the New Yorker critic and memoirist; "they" are Armenians, an obscure folk of Asia Minor who happen to be his blood relatives. For despite an elegant Anglo-American breeding, despite the aristocratic postures of his father, Michael Arlen is the son of Dikran Kouyoumjian, few generations removed from the peasant villages of Transcaucasia.

In an earlier volume, Exiles, Arlen was a prep school Telemachus, searching for the truth about his late parent, author of The Green Hat and other best-selling novels of the '20s, who had succumbed to writer's block, deprecation and obscurity. In that poignant volume the son could only compile small sorrows and acts of redemption. However acute, Exiles was the work of a miniaturist. In Passage to Ararat, Arlen set himself a near-Homeric task: the recovery of a forgotten people. To accomplish that mission he has performed a series of brilliancies: his research is irreproachable, his ear infallible. His writing retains a clarity and fury that animates each line. The tribes of the Bible leap from the page; the victims of mass murder speak out after decades of silence. Immigrants to the New World, exiles of the U.S.S.R., crack jokes at the devil and embrace the present with a gusto that belies their wretched past.

Armenia, Arlen notes, was a small nation placed by God and geography on the outskirts of the world's great central empires. Rising from the Human and Hittite tribes of the Euphrates, the Armenians enjoyed a brief spring as soldiers and artisans, then sank into the shadows of barbarian tribes and civilized conquerors from Darius the Great to the Young Turks of this century. The Armenians had made two crucial wagers: on Christianity and the growing power of Europe. But the gamblers, observes their chronicler, "had been in the wrong part of the world to make these bets--or at any rate to hope to collect on them."

Voyeuristic Shudder. Bad times became a way of life. The Muslim Ottoman Empire reduced Armenians to second-class citizens; then, as Asia Minor lurched toward "modernity," Turkey began its series of oppressions. They ended with lethal, unprovoked sweeps across the hills, torturing and killing no one knows how many millions. In 1910, a recent Oxford graduate named Arnold Toynbee meticulously described the "fiendish" mutilations and abasements. As late as 1918 Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, protested the mass killings of Armenian women and children. The Turkish Minister of the Interior gave a blanket reply to such plaintiffs: "Those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow."

There was something about these atrocities, confesses Arlen, "that bothered me where I had not been bothered before; something more complicated than moral nausea, more troubling than a voyeuristic shudder." To locate that "something," he flew to Soviet Armenia to walk the hallowed ground and converse with remnants of a country that was no longer a nation. The place was a reconciliation of opposites. Mount Ararat, where Noah had brought his ark to rest, hid the radar stations of NATO. The literate Armenians liked "Jerome Salinger" and refused to talk of Solzhenitsyn. They were grateful for a land free of the old oppressions; yet some had seen their sons taken away by the Russian secret police. These Armenians, too, were running from yesterday. On a summer night one told his guest, "It's too nice an evening for history." But there was never an evening too nice to block tragic recollections. There never would be.

Arlen seizes upon the collective memory of his people and enlivens it with merciless self-examination. His account of genocide has none of Hannah Ahrendt's lofty mandarinism. With tenebrous force he comes to realize that evil's best accomplice is guilt; if the victim can be made to feel culpable, any crime is possible. Like millions of other historical mourners of every persuasion, Arlen once preferred to ignore his roots, at exorbitant cost. For silence can be a plague, and the most chilling question in the book remains the one that Hitler asked two generations ago: "Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

Long Shot. It has taken all this time to find a true talker. Arlen might easily have fixed his face in a harsh attitude. It would have been facile for him to sentimentalize the Armenians, Saroyan style, or to hold them at arm's length, as his father did. Instead, after the atrocious accounts and the sense of humanity's dreadful fragility, Arlen realizes that the "I" has become part of "them," that "to be an Armenian has meant that one has been compelled by circumstance to rise above or fall below --or, anyway, to skirt--these so-called imperatives of nationhood and property, and thus has been free to attempt the struggle of an ordinary life, and to dream more modern dreams, and to try to deal with one's dreams as best one could." It is a faith without dogma, a final belief that "there is a good chance now the clearheaded, impatient young will set their fathers free."

The "good chance" may seem a very modest resurrection for so much suffering. Like the old Armenians, Arlen is making another wager: on stoicism as the proper response to despair. It is both an honorable bet and a long shot -- the only arguable portion of a unique and grieving book.

Stefan Kanfer

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