Mark and Kevork Toroian, born in rural Turkey to an Armenian family, narrowly escaped death in the genocide of 1915-1918. They were little boys at the time. Their parents, siblings, friends, uncles, aunts, and essentially all the other Armenians in their entire town died in the massacre. One of the two survivors, Mark, wrote it all down, after he had the luck to survive and emigrate as a college student. Mark's first-person story forms the principal narrative of this book. The younger brother, Kevork, also had sufficient ...
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Mark and Kevork Toroian, born in rural Turkey to an Armenian family, narrowly escaped death in the genocide of 1915-1918. They were little boys at the time. Their parents, siblings, friends, uncles, aunts, and essentially all the other Armenians in their entire town died in the massacre. One of the two survivors, Mark, wrote it all down, after he had the luck to survive and emigrate as a college student. Mark's first-person story forms the principal narrative of this book. The younger brother, Kevork, also had sufficient luck to survive the genocide, but was forced to wait in Egypt for another three decades until an Act of Congress allowed him to emigrate to join Mark in the United States. Kevork's story - a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare - is laid out here in the form of letters, not narrative. We of the succeeding generation have kept the editing to a minimum, allowing the reader to see both the genocide and the obfuscation just as they were described by the actual participants, at the time when the events actually occurred. This book is not for the faint of heart. A companion e-book with the same title is available in Kindle format.The e-book is abridged in material ways, so please use the e-book for the sake of mobility, and regard this paperback as the complete story. http: //tinyurl.com/toroian-orphan
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