The Road from Home

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The Road from Home

by David Kherdian

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Turkey during World War I; published in 1979.

SYNOPSIS

A young Armenian girl and her family become part of the mass deportation of Armenians to the deserts of Syria, where most of her family dies. She escapes to Greece and then to the United States, as the bride of an Armenian American.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

In 1931 Veron Dumehjian Kherdian gave birth to David Kherdian in Racine, Illinois. Her son grew to be a popular author of children’s stories and poetry before he resolved to tell the story of his mother’s escape from Armenia during World War I. The Road from Home, which tells this story, won the resounding acclaim of critics, and was followed in 1981 by Finding Home, an account of Veron’s life in America.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Pre-World War I prejudice

The modern Republic of Armenia is situated just northeast of Turkey, atop the high plateaus between the Black Sea to the northwest and the Caspian Sea to the northeast. Although Armenians have at various times inhabited land beyond their current holdings (within modern-day Turkey, the Republic of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran), the efforts of the Byzantine Greeks, Islamic Turks, and nomadic Kurds to disperse or destroy the Armenian population have reduced Armenia to its present size.

Lying at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Arabia, Armenia was the battleground of the struggles between the Roman and Persian empires, the Mongol invasions, and the European Crusades before falling under the rule of the Ottoman Turks from the 1300s to the 1500s. The Ottoman Turks, followers of the Muslim religion, ruled an empire that at its height stretched from the city of Budapest in the west to Baghdad in the east.

As members of a Christian minority in this empire, Armenians suffered official discrimination under Ottoman rule. They paid outrageous taxes and could neither bear arms nor give legal testimony. Many Armenians reacted by fleeing the Muslim empire for Europe. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble in the face of European threats, Christian victories in other Ottoman territories encouraged an outcry for reform by Armenians who had remained in their homeland.

Instead, the Turks used the Armenians as scapegoats for the fiascoes of Turkish tyranny and misrule. Claims from Europe—like those of Czar Nicholas I, who asserted himself as the guardian of Christians within the Ottoman Empire—excited Turkish paranoia and aggravated the violent repression of vocal Armenian groups. In 1894 an Armenian attempt to defy local authority sparked the killings of Armenians in the area. Great Britain, France, and Russia sent a memorandum urging reforms in Turkish Armenia, and Armenians organized a protest in the capital, Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). Sultan ’Abdul Hamid responded by instituting a reign of terror throughout the Armenian provinces. Armenians were herded into their churches and burned alive, or driven into the sea to drown.

Outraged by the violence, Armenians began to resist. Armenian terrorists threatened to destroy the financial institution of the Ottoman Bank if their demands for reform (in the areas of taxation, protection from abusive authorities, and so on) were ignored. This challenge to his authority infuriated ’Abdul Hamid, who ordered the massacre of the Armenians in Constantinople. Again Turks decimated helpless Armenians, and again the rest of Europe failed to respond effectively. Between 1894 and 1896 an estimated 300,000 Armenians died in the government-organized slaughter.

In 1908 the victorious Young Turk revolution against the despotic sultan awakened hopes for Armenian autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. Both Armenians and Turks had fought to depose the sultan and restore a constitutional government to the land. But between 1908 and 1914 the supposedly egalitarian Young Turks degenerated into extreme nationalists. Their ambitions to create a new Turkish state, stretching beyond the Armenian homeland to include the Turanian peoples living in what is now Turkestan, raised ethnic tensions. In 1909, discussion among Armenians about the creation of an independent state provoked the massacre of 30,000 Armenians in the city of Adana.

World War I

By 1914, three Turkish extremists—Enver, Jemal, and Talaat—jointly ruled the Ottoman Empire. The outbreak of World War I provided an excuse to deport or kill the Armenian people, who lived on both sides of the fragile Turkish-Russian border, on the grounds that they might aid the advancing Russian armies. The executive secretary of the Ottoman Empire maintained:

We are now at war; there is no more auspicious occasion than this; the intervention of the Great Powers and the protests of the newspapers will not even be considered; and even if they are, the matter will have become an accomplished fact, and thus be closed forever.
(Lang, p. 23)

Another official recommended an easy method of extermination.

We can send those young Armenians who can bear arms to the front lines. There, coupled between fire by the Russians facing them and by special forces in the rear dispatched by us for that purpose, we can trap and annihilate them. In the meantime, we can order our faithful adherents to plunder and to liquidate the old and infirm, women and children, who remain behind.
(Lang, pp. 23-4)

The Armenians had no reason to suspect this Turkish treachery. Although they had resisted assimilation, clinging to their church and language, Armenians themselves had been conscripted to fight in the Turkish armies and had pledged their support to the war effort.

Entire Armenian military units were disarmed and turned into labor groups. At first overworked and starved, they were later simply shot down. The senseless slaughter of useful soldiers and workmen frustrated the Germans, Turkey’s strongest allies, who declared “these measures ... create the impression that the Turkish government itself is intent on losing the war” (Lang, p. 27). For the Young Turk party the extermination of the Armenians seemed to be more important than the war effort.

To save money and ammunition, and to lend their actions some semblance of legality (the argument being that the Armenians were an internal threat), Talaat Pasha, the Minister of the Interior, ordered the deportation of the Armenians to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Few survived the two- or three-hundred-mile march across the rugged mountains. Many Armenians killed both their children and themselves rather than prolong the torture. Those who survived were herded into concentration camps in the Arabian deserts, where they were beaten, starved, and killed. The most dreadful of these camps was Deir el Zor in Syria, where typhus and cholera ravaged not only the Armenian refugees, but also Arab civilians and Turkish troops. Rotting bodies attracted hyenas from the deserts, and the roads between Turkey and Syria were strewn with the corpses of refugees.

When Turkey surrendered to the Allied powers in 1918, a military tribunal sentenced the leaders of the fallen Ottoman Empire to death. Talaat, who had fled to Germany, was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 by an Armenian student, who was then acquitted by the German courts. Enver, living among Turkish tribes in the Soviet Union, was killed in 1922 leading a revolt against Soviet authorities.

Post-World War I events

The treaty of Sevres, signed by Turkey in 1920, provided for the creation of an Armenian republic, the boundaries of which would be determined by the United States. But the U.S. government showed a reluctance to become involved in international postwar conflicts, and this left a void; meanwhile, Turkish nationalists, enraged by the demands of the Allies, marched into western Armenia. Only an invasion by the Russian Bolsheviks and the establishment in 1920 of a Soviet Republic of Armenia halted the Turkish advance.

The fighting in Turkey was far from over, however. Overeager Greeks, who had gained the coastal city of Smyrna (now called Izmar) from the Turks after World War I, invaded territories stretching far beyond Smyrna into the heart of Turkey. Although at first victorious, they were driven back by Turkish nationalists and eventually expelled from Smyrna itself. Many Armenians were killed in the fighting, but some were able to flee Turkey with the retreating Greek armies.

Before 1914 over 2 million Armenians had lived in Turkey. After the deportations and massacres a scant 100,000 remained. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed between 1914 and 1920. The balance of the survivors fled the country for destinations across the globe.

The Novel in Focus

The plot

Veron Dumehjian, the child of a rich Armenian family in Azizya, Turkey, recounts the pleasures of her childhood between 1907 and 1914, before the disastrous deportations in which most of her family died. A few days after her two uncles were drafted into the Turkish army to fight in World War I, Veron and her family are ordered to gather their belongings and prepare to leave. They are taken to Konya, a Turkish city south of Azizya, under the protection of a Turkish gendarme. Veron overhears him saying to her father:

I have kept my promise to your mother by bringing you safely to Konya ... but now I must return.... We have fallen on evil days.... What can I say to lighten your load? May we meet again in Azizya after this present storm has passed.
(Kherdian, The Road from Home, p. 40)

He leaves them with the Muslim blessing, “Allah be with you.”

In the night Veron overhears her father and grandfather speaking with other men about the deportations. One asserts that only those Armenians with money to spare have managed to survive this long. The men who had not been conscripted to fight have been slaughtered, and the roads to Syria are already littered with the bodies of Armenian refugees. Veron falls asleep.

The next day Veron’s father announces that the family is to be deported by the Turks to the Mesopotamian deserts. On their journey, Veron watches in confusion as the old and infirm fall and are left behind. Her uncle pleads to no avail with the Turkish guards to allow Veron’s family to take people in their wagon. As the caravan rounds corners, the guards ride back, and rifle shots can be heard; the shots, it is implied, are directed at the old and the infirm.

The refugees arrive at the outskirts of Adana, where the 1909 massacres had taken place. They bathe in the river, and at night Veron’s father, who can pass for a Turk, sneaks into town to find food and perhaps news. He returns with sugarcane for the children and hopes that the tide of war has turned. Adana is so overrun by bandits that the Turks can hardly spare troops to continue the deportation. After weeks camped in the outskirts of the city, the Armenians are driven on, first to a cholera-ridden refugee camp in what is now Syria and then farther south, to Meskene, in the Syrian desert. Veron’s family’s wagon is requisitioned by the Turks, and her father, who speaks Arabic, is sent off to Aleppo and then Baghdad to help the Turks trade with Arabs. In Meskene, all of Veron’s siblings die of cholera.

After Veron’s father returns from Baghdad, her mother dies. Terrifying rumors about a concentration camp in Deir el Zor, south of Meskene, prompt Veron’s father to bribe the gendarmes and secure passage to Birijek, a city north of Meskene, in Turkey. Here he finds lodging for his daughter with other Armenian refugees. He explains, however, that he must leave again to work for the Turkish government in Aleppo, Syria. Returning to Birijek to visit his daughter, he dies of exhaustion.

In Birijek, Veron’s “aunties” (as she calls the Armenian women who care for her) find her a job carrying water for two Turkish families. A year passes before Veron receives communication from a relative of hers in Aleppo, who informs her that her grandmother is still alive in Azizya. Eager to rejoin her family, she leaves for Aleppo.

Here Veron meets some of her more distant relatives who had managed to escape the massacres. They are insensitive to her sufferings, and she happily leaves them for an orphanage where she can learn French and English. Here she lives for two years in the company of Armenian girls who, like herself, have lost their families in the deportations.

In 1918 the Turkish surrender convinces Veron and her family that they can return to their homes in Turkey. In Azizya, Veron learns that one of her uncles survived his service in the Turkish army, and that her favorite aunt and cousin are living in Smyrna. She lives in Azizya for two years in relative contentment.

In 1921 the marauding Greeks shatter this peace with their efforts to conquer western Turkey. The Turks in Azizya drive the Armenians to the Turkish parts of town and take refuge in the Armenian quarter. The Greeks, careful not to destroy the Christian dwellings, bomb only the Turkish houses. Veron is injured and taken to a Greek hospital. The Greeks offer safe passage to those Armenians who wish to flee Azizya. Veron’s grandmother sends her off with the Greek medics but stays behind herself to guard the family property.

After months in a soldiers’ hospital in Afyon, Veron fears that the Turks may soon retake this town. She leaves for Smyrna, where she eventually joins her cousin, Hrpsime, in an orphanage. Hrpsime’s mother, Lousapere, lives and works in Smyrna, but is too poor to support her child.

Lousapere finds work for Veron in a tobacco plant, and the two live together, visiting Hrpsime on weekends. But in August 1922, rumors of nearby Turkish victories panic the Armenians in Smyrna. In September the retreating Greek armies flee Smyrna, and Veron takes refuge with the rest of the Armenians in their church. The Turks set fire to the Armenian quarter, and the stone church becomes a prison.

A French-speaking woman passes herself off as a Red Cross worker and wins the support of an American general, who escorts the Armenians from the church to the harbor. Thousands of refugees gather there, hoping to board an outbound ship. From the harbor Veron and her aunt watch as Turkish soldiers trap Armenians in burning buildings and avenues. They remain by the shore all night, packed among the other terrified refugees.

After a few days, a ship from Greece arrives to take the refugees to Athens. Veron lives for two years in Athens before accepting the proposal of an Armenian man (whom she has not yet met) in America. In 1924 she marries Melkon Kherdian in Waukegan, Illinois.

Veron’s escape

The Armenian population was tragically unprepared for the wholesale massacres of World War I. After the pogrom of 1909, rather than encourage separatism, Armenian leaders tightened their bonds with the Young Turks. Many Armenians believed that the revolt against a common enemy, the sultan, had forged unity between the Turks and Armenians. Only after the deportations began did they realize the extent of the betrayal. Veron’s father exclaims, “Look around you! The Armenians are asleep in their foolish trust, and the Turks believe that two minus one equals three” (The Road from Home, p. 38).

The sympathetic Turk who aids the Dumehjian family during their journey to Konya was one of the many Turks who defied government orders by helping the refugees. Especially in the western cities of Turkey, the decrees of the Young Turk party outraged the local authorities. The governor of Angora (modern-day Ankara) flatly refused to deport and kill Armenians. The local police and regional military commander agreed that the Armenians were loyal Ottoman citizens. So the Young Turks replaced these uncooperative, humane authorities with reliable henchmen from Constantinople.

Veron escaped the death camp at Deir el Zor only because her father, once a wealthy man, could bribe the guards. Many of the Turkish soldiers wouldn’t have bothered with bribes. An Ottoman Bank president displayed money soaked with blood and torn through with dagger holes. These bills, ripped from the bodies of murdered Armenians, were deposited in Turkish accounts with no questions or objections.

Sources

Kherdian grew up as a bilingual child and learned in his youth many of the Armenian proverbs that he included in his novel. Although he always thought of his mother’s childhood as “a hell... that I had no intention of entering,” he could not forget her request: “Someday you grow up and tell my story” (Kherdian in Sarkissian, p. 275). From fourteen pages, handwritten in Armenian, Kherdian’s mother read to him the tale of her persecution and escape. Her son taped his interviews with her and, after a year’s work, finished the biographical novel.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

Retaliation

In 1973 Kourken Yanikian, a man more than seventy-five years old, shot and killed two Turkish diplomats in California. One of the survivors of the Armenian holocaust, Yanikian hoped to draw attention to the unacknowledged tragedy of the Armenian genocide.

Armenian terrorist groups have claimed the lives of Turks all over the world. Unlike Yanikian, who saw his family die in the mass deportation, the terrorists are usually younger Armenians, many of whom never lived in Turkey. The two most prominent organizations, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) and the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG), have spoiled the hopes of some Turks that the issue of the Armenian genocide might pass from the world agenda.

The crimes of terrorists have, in fact, drawn more attention to the Armenian massacres than the more patient and less violent reminders of law-abiding Armenians now dispersed throughout the world. The Turkish government has resolutely denied that the massacres took place. As recently as 1981, the Turkish ambassador to America insisted that “the accusations that Ottoman Turks, sixty-five years ago, during World War I, perpetrated systematic massacres of the Armenian population in Turkey... are totally baseless” (Koshy, p. 14). Others have acknowledged the massacres but disputed the death count, a statistic recorded not by Armenians but by foreign diplomats and even foreign mercenaries fighting with the Turks.

But regardless of numbers, the intent of the Young Turks to exterminate the Armenians was clear. In 1915, Talaat Pasha assured the governor of Aleppo that his government had decided to exterminate the entire Armenian population of Turkey. No one, Talaat Pasha said, who opposed the order was allowed to hold a position of authority in Turkey; women, children, and invalids would be exterminated as well as men.

The degree of success in reaching the diabolical goal would be remembered even if the individual victims were not. In 1939 the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler made the following comparison:

I have given orders to my Death Units to exterminate without mercy or pity men, women, and children belonging to the Polishspeaking race. It is only in this manner that we can acquire the vital territory which we need. After all, who remembers today the extermination of the Armenians?
(Hitler in Kherdian, p. xii)

Present-day Armenia

With the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, Armenia emerged as an independent nation. As Russian troops withdrew, old squabbles erupted between Armenia and the neighboring Republic of Azerbaijan. War broke out over the disputed Nagorny Karabakh territory, an Azerbaijani enclave situated entirely in Armenia. A cease-fire orchestrated by Russia in 1994 has quelled the fighting, but no final settlements have yet been reached.

Reception

Kherdian’s novel aroused the scorn of some historians who criticized the description of the Armenian massacres as inadequate. In fact, it was told from the perspective of an innocent child confused by the turmoil of events unfolding around her. Veron’s childish musings, contend these critics, understate the horror of her trials.

Other critics responded that the novel in fact succeeds because of Veron’s childlike optimism. Rather than dwell on the sufferings of the Armenians, Kherdian convinces us that this is the tale of an uncomprehending girl. This, more than anything else, dramatizes the cruelty of the deportations.