now

This past weekend I attended “All That’s Left to You: Palestinian Writers in Conversation”, a panel that was part of this year’s PEN World Voices Festival. For three years Sarah Schulman, Arte East and I—at first separately and then together—had worked to make this historic panel a reality. Jakab Orsos, the new director of the Festival, was an enthusiastic promoter of the event, and it was thanks to support from the Lannan Foundation and the Open Society Foundations that the Palestinian writers were able to come to New York to participate in the premiere North American literary gathering.

As PEN noted in its own description of the event, “For the first time in the Festival’s history PEN brings together a panel of leading Palestinian writers to take their place in the global literary community. From Palestine and from the diaspora, they will share their work, experiences, and visions, revealing how a literature is both imagined and created under occupation, siege and exile.” The title for the panel, suggested by one of the writers, “All That’s Left to You,” is taken from the title of a novella by Ghassan Khanafani, a revered Palestinian journalist and fiction writer who was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972.

The panelists were Adania Shibli, who teaches at Birzeit University in Ramallah, Najwan Darwish, who divides his time between Haifa and Jerusalem, and Randa Jarrar, who lives and teaches in Fresno, California. Their conversation was moderated by the esteemed Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury. The Tishman Auditorium at The New School was full—there were approximately five hundred people in attendance—and the afternoon was a triumph. Each of the writers read for 7-10 minutes: Randa chose a beautiful and poignant short fiction set in Gaza called “The Story of My Building’; Adania read a hilarious and biting excerpt from her essay “On East-West Dialogue”; Najwan read three stunning poems in Arabic, with the English translations projected on a screen behind him (see an exemplary poem here). Then the writers answered two questions about identity and exile posed by Elias Khoury, before taking questions from the audience.

The event was historic for a number of reasons. It was the first time that PEN had hosted a panel made up solely of Palestinian writers. Each of the writers represented a different segment of Palestinian society—one from the Diaspora, one a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and one who resides in the Occupied West Bank. It was the first time I have ever heard Palestinian writers speak in a mainstream literary venue in New York City the unvarnished truth about the misery of occupation, the humiliations they are put through by the Israeli government when traveling in and out of Israel and Palestine (read about Randa’s saga here), and the catastrophic ongoing loss and fragmentation experienced by the Palestinian people since 1948. The audience’s enthusiastic applause at the close of the session made me feel that we had inched a little closer to justice.

Nancy Kricorian

On April 24th, 1915, several hundred Armenian community leaders, writers and intellectuals in Constantinople were rounded up and deported, launching what would become a mass slaughter and exile of the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Each year on April 24th, Armenians around the world commemorate what has variously been called the Great Crime, the Deportations, the Massacres, and the Genocide. The poem below was inspired by stories that my grandmother told me of her experiences during the Deportations and in the years immediately following.

ARMENIA

For Mariam Kodjababian Kricorian

I. Syria

This is what I remember:
I would make fine stitches
in scraps of cloth and my father
would look up from his work
and praise my tiny row of seeds.
I loved to sit among the buttons
and bolts of cloth and hear the rock
of the pedal and sewing machine.

One winter morning when the snow
drifts stood as high as my head,
my father swung me to his shoulders
and carried me two miles to school
past the white mountains of cedar.

I don’t know why it happened.
A notice nailed to the wall
in my eighth year and we gathered
few belongings, and all our people
marched and stumbled toward Syria.

My mother fell by the road,
and we left her there.
The great dark birds followed us.
The soldiers were dogs, and we became
less than nothing in the desert.

My father died, and my small sisters
grew thinner to their deaths.
There was me and my brother Sarkis,
and the black tent flapping in the sand.

II. Cyprus

There were twenty beds to make,
double back the stiff cuff of sheet
over the rough blanket, the cotton cover,
and baste it all together twenty times.

Then the long boards of the floors,
quick dance of the broom, splash
of the pail and the mop and thirty
stairs from the top
to the bottom of the inn.

My uncle’s wife had me earn my keep.
My brother was made an apprentice
to the drunken tailor in the next village,
where straight seams happened in the morning
and not much in the afternoon.

He arrived late one night at the inn,
a tall narrow man in American suits.
His stare made my hands tremble
and the milk pitcher smash to the floor
when I served his meal.
He tucked notes in my apron pocket
when he passed me in the hall.
I tore them up unopened.
I was sixteen and he twice my age.

My uncle asked, Mariam, will you go
with this man to America?

We left Cyprus one week later
on a ship as big as our village.
My name was made Mary, my age eighteen.
I never saw my brother again.

III. Egypt

Our wedding picture was taken
in Cairo. My husband’s cousin
helped me with the row
of small buttons down the back
of the ivory satin gown; she loaned me
gold earrings and a bracelet.
I sat in a chair and my feet
in their pale shoes barely
grazed the floor.
Leo stood beside me,
a hand on my shoulder,
staring straight into the eye
of the machine and the man
under the black cloth behind it.
With the flash of light
I saw the fierce sun of the desert,
and felt the fear rise up,
great wings beating against my ribs.
I saw Sarkis waving from the pier.
I thought of letting my long hair down,
and nothing else.

Nancy Kricorian

This poem was originally published in WITNESS in its Spring 1988 Issue.

I visited Paris for the first time when I was a twenty-year-old college student. I can close my eyes and remember what the unfamiliar city looked like to me during this initial encounter—the orderliness of the public gardens with their gravel walkways, wooden benches and round-seated metal chairs; the relative smallness of the automobiles; and the historic monuments gleaming under floodlights at night.

Coming from the United States—the New World— the enormous weight of history Paris carried was a visceral shock, especially the buildings: Medieval cloisters, Gothic cathedrals, seventeenth century catacombs, Revolutionary and Napoleonic monuments, and elegant 19th-century apartment blocks. But I was fascinated even more by the traces left behind by the Second World War. Rather than buildings and monuments, the trauma of the war and the Nazi Occupation remains present in mundane, unexpected, and easy-to-overlook markers scattered throughout the city.

There were seats on the metro reserved for the war wounded. The first time I saw these signs, the French term mutilés de guerre, which had originated to refer to wounded veterans from the First World War, stunned me in its graphicness. I was always expecting to see men with empty sleeves or wooden legs sitting in the designated seats. All around the city, I noticed marble plaques on walls commemorating groups and individuals who had struggled and suffered during the Occupation, ranging from Jewish children who had been deported to blind people who had participated in the Resistance, and young men who had died fighting on the streets liberating Paris in August 1944.

During the ten years I spent researching and writing my novel ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, I realized that the manner in which Paris memorialized Les Années Noires (The Dark Years) was in many ways akin to how it had experienced the war. The city was spared the horrific bombing that devastated London and Berlin. But loss and fear were interwoven into every corner of the city; I realized that my biggest task as a writer was to convey the immediate if mostly commonplace presence of that constant looming terror, even as daily life went on.

Several salient factors about how most Parisians had lived the war came through in everything I learned. It was a dark time both literally and figuratively. There were black outs and black out curtains limiting sight and vision. Political repression backed up by deportation and systemic violence, censorship, self-censorship, and denunciations by neighbors all resulted in a feeling of moral darkness and isolation. In addition to this pervasive gloom, people were hungry. The Germans used France as their breadbasket during the war, taking vast quantities of French agricultural products such as wheat, butter, cheese, and wine, leaving the French to subsist on root vegetables that had formerly been cattle fodder. Parisian grimly joked about the German doryphores (potato bugs) who had made off with all their potatoes. A third factor that came up in all the accounts was how cold people were during the bitter winters of the Occupation. With the German war machine siphoning off oil, gas and coal, there was not much left for heating Parisian apartments and schools.

When I was writing the novel, it was as though every day I left my home in Manhattan and spent a few hours with my characters in their Belleville apartment. I heard the sounds of the concierge’s bucket and mop on the landing. I smelled the dreaded rutabagas cooking in the kitchen. And I shivered with Maral, my narrator and main character, as she bundled into several sweaters before crawling into her glacial bed.

This was the Paris that I traveled to on a daily basis for almost ten years—not the romantic city of my student days, nor the place where on family holiday I took my children to play on the brightly colored climbing structures in the Jardin des Tuileries. It was a somber city, a city of shadows and privation, but also a place where people of conscience worked hard to keep a small light of dignity burning in an inhumane time. Now that I have finished the book, I understand that the Paris of 70 years ago has yet to truly vanish: its ghost-like presence gently marks the city landscape. And now, on my next visit to Paris, I have Maral, her friends, and her family, to walk with me as guides to that almost-hidden past.

Nancy Kricorian
April 2013
New York City

This piece originally appeared on the American Library of Paris blog in advance of a book presentation scheduled there on May 15, 2013

I’m just back from the Boston leg of my book tour where I did presentations at the Saint James Armenian Cultural Center in Watertown and the Brookline Booksmith. Former schoolmates of mine organized the Saint James event, and the afternoon was a warm homecoming for my novel and me. The Brookline Booksmith, which has now hosted me for each of my books, also provided an enthusiastic welcome. Just before boarding the train back to New York City I taped a cable TV show called “The Literati Scene with Smoki Bacon and Dick Concannon.” My touring is two-thirds of the way finished—next up are Spotty Dog Books in Hudson, New York and the American Library in Paris, followed by the AGBU Centers in Montreal and Toronto.

A month after the official publication date, I’m taking pause to consider where things are with my book and with the state of publishing in general. The other day I told my mother that I have been feeling as though I’m selling Girl Scout Cookies door to door. My mother said, “You never liked doing that, did you?” (As a matter of fact, I quit Girl Scouts in part because I hated doing that.) This morning when I wrote to my agent that it seems as though I’m engaged in house-to-house urban combat, she replied, “I feel like that most days.” (For a funny video portrait of the promotional life of the writer check out Book Launch 2.0)

An essay by writer Deborah Copaken Kogan entitled “My So Called ‘Post-Feminist’ Life in Arts and Letters” was posted on The Nation web site earlier this week offering a sharp and dismal look at sexism in the publishing and reviewing worlds. She discussed how important a review in The New York Times is to the fate of a book, and her own frustration about the esteemed publication’s silence on her work. She decided to take action by “composing a carefully worded private e-mail to the editor of The New York Times Book Review, alerting him to his neglect of all four of my published books. He responds graciously with two sentences in which he promises to share this information with his colleagues. Eight months later the novel remains unreviewed.”

My first two novels were not reviewed in The New York Times, and until last month the only mention my work had garnered from them was in an article about the Palestine Festival of Literature by the then Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner. ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS did receive a brief review in the “Newly Released Books” column a few weeks ago. I didn’t send it out at the time because I was smarting from a comment embedded in the paragraph. But the mention was important to the publisher and for my novel in part because it provided a laudatory quotation from “the newspaper of record” to be used on the paperback edition.

To be fair, many good books receive few reviews because of the sheer volume of newly released titles and the diminished number of review pages. But it is instructive to look at comparative analyses about who does the reviewing and who gets reviewed. The VIDA Women in Literary Arts 2012 Count released on 4 March 2013 showed the unbalanced way that women and men are represented in mainstream literary magazines and book reviews. Roxanne Gay at The Rumpus did a breakdown by ethnicity of writers reviewed by The New York Times, amply displaying that women are not alone in this struggle. But as bad as things are for women writers and writers of color, it could be worse—look at the film industry.

Ending on a more positive note, I’m sharing a recent interview about ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS and what I’m now calling, thanks to a suggestion from my editor, my ARMENIAN DIASPORA QUARTET. You can read it on News.Am in English, Armenian or Russian.

Nancy Kricorian

Saturday afternoons my sister and I climbed the stairs to our grandmother’s second-floor apartment in the two-family house we shared with her in Watertown, Massachusetts. Sometimes we helped her make macaroni and cheese for lunch, and others we assisted her in preparing elaborate Armenian foods, such as trays full of manti, tiny meat dumplings that would later float in soup, or stuffed grape leaves, which we called cigars. But my favorite was making cheoreg, a sweet roll that was traditionally served at Easter and that my grandmother kept on hand for when her friends stopped by for coffee.

My grandmother prepared the dough before we arrived, so we missed the mixing and the two-hour rise in the unlit oven. She called us, either by phone or by shouting into the broom closet that was just above ours, when the dough was ready to be worked. The minute we entered the kitchen we could smell it—the yeast, the butter, and the aromatic mahlab, made from dried cherry seeds. We sat at the kitchen table, and she handed us each an egg-sized piece of dough that was buttery and fluffy and practically alive. We rolled it out either on the table or between our palms until it was about eight inches long. Then we twisted it into a snail-shaped knot that we set on a baking sheet. Once all the sheets were full my grandmother covered them with a towel for the dough to rise again.

While we waited for the dough and for the oven to heat to the correct temperature, there were a number of amusing activities from which to choose. We played “Button, button, who’s got the button?” with a button on a round of yarn. We pulled pieces of satin from my grandmother’s dresser drawer and wrapped dolls in them. We took my grandmother’s large cookie tin of buttons and spilled them on the bed to sort them. Or the three of us lay on her bed while she told stories from the Bible or the Old Country, both of them exotic, far-off places.

Once the rolls had risen, it was time to brush beaten egg over them and sprinkle them with sesame and black nigella seeds. While they baked, my grandmother’s entire apartment was suffused with that distinctive cheoreg aroma—butter, flour, egg, sugar, yeast and mahlab. When they were done, my grandmother used a spatula to move them from baking tray to cooling rack. Then it was time to sample them still warm from the oven, served with a slice of cheese and some strawberry jam. That was truly heaven.

Nancy Kricorian

I know it sounds a little corny, but I am thrilled that Suzanne Toren has recorded the audio book for ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS. Suzanne and I spent several hours on the phone going over the Armenian names and phrases in all three of my novels—audio versions of ZABELLE and DREAMS OF BREAD AND FIRE will be available soon—and I was awed by her ability to repeat things back with perfect pronunciation.

ZABELLE and ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS are downloadable as ebooks, and I recently signed a rider to my Grove/Atlantic contract for DREAMS so that ebook will soon be online as well. I feel grateful that all three of my novels will be available in all three formats—a book to hold in your hand, an electronic version to read on your device, and an audio version for your listening pleasure.

This week I did two radio interviews, one with the inimitable Leonard Lopate on WNYC and the other with the Armenian Radio Hour of New Jersey. More radio and even TV interviews are on the horizon. I will share when they are available.

I’m posting a favorite photo from the California leg of the ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS tour. I’m standing with some members of the Armenian International Women’s Association San Francisco Chapter at Book Passage in the Ferry Building. Their outpouring of warmth and enthusiasm made the evening one of the highlights of the trip.

I discovered the work of Russian writer Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) a few years ago through his masterpiece, the World War II novel LIFE AND FATE. At the time, I had steeped myself in the literature of World War II because of work on my own novel, ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, which is set in Paris during the Nazi Occupation, and Grossman’s book was a stunning surprise. Just a few weeks ago I picked up the newly published ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK by Grossman. It is a memoir of the two months he spent in Soviet Armenia in late 1961, soon after LIFE AND FATE was suppressed by the authorities because of its unflinching portrayal of life in Stalinist Russia. Rather than imprisoning the author, they buried his book. LIFE AND FATE, which existed as a long-hidden typescript that Grossman had left with a friend, was finally published in the late 80’s, but Grossman died without knowing that his masterwork would see the light of day.

In ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK, Grossman manages a combination of reverence for nature and for what is best in people with irreverence for the venality of corrupt officials and the baleful influence of nationalism. There is a beautiful and deeply humane scene at the end of the book when Grossman is a guest at an Armenian peasant wedding, and an old man rises to speak in Armenian; when his words are translated, Grossman is amazed to hear him speak of the connection between the terrible suffering of the Jews in World War II and the great catastrophe the Armenians endured in 1915. For Grossman, whose mother was killed in the Nazi massacres of Jews in Berdichev in September 1941, this was a profound moment of mutual recognition. Reading his work a half century later, I was privileged to share that recognition with him.

Nancy Kricorian

This post originally appeared on Writers Read

A few days ago, a reader sent me a photo of ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS on the morning it arrived at his apartment in Honolulu one day after the official publication date. It reminded me of photos my friend Chris Bohjalian has posted to his Facebook author page that fans from around the country send him of his novels in the places where they are being read: back yards, living rooms, beachfronts, and boat decks. It also gave me a strange sensation to think that the characters I had lived with for so long were now in other people’s homes.

This past summer when a young Armenian radio interviewer I spoke with in Beirut suggested that producing a book was akin to birthing a child, I blurted out, “Actually I have given birth to two children and published two books, and that comparison has always seemed like something someone who has never experienced childbirth would say.”

She seemed taken aback, and I wish I had given a more generous response. After some thought, and during this time when my third novel is newly arrived in bookstores, I realize that I could have suggested that for me the experience is more akin to sending a child off to kindergarten for the first time. You have devoted years to grooming this child to go out into the world among his or her peers and into the care of others. It’s a little scary—will your kid get along with the other kids? Will the teacher like her? If she uses a curse word or slaps another kid, will everyone think you are a terrible parent? Your child is not you, but in some ways she is a reflection of your parenting and therefore an extension of you. I am not my book, but I devised the plot, wrote the sentences, and animated the characters. And now it is time for them to go play—nicely, but not TOO nicely, I hope!

Nancy Kricorian

In the old days, publishers sent out bound galleys or proofs to a limited number of reviewers, journalists, film and translation scouts, and booksellers in the hopes of drumming up early interest in an upcoming title. Now there is Net Galley, a platform where a publisher can upload an electronic version of the galleys that provides early access to reviewers, bloggers, journalists, librarians, booksellers, educators and other “readers of influence.”

From what I can tell, people who have accessed ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS through Net Galley include members of the Amazon Vines reviewers program and a wide array of bloggers, some of whom posted ratings on Goodreads.

So far I have come across reviews from a young woman in Indonesia, on a blog called “A Sweet Spot Home” that features posts about entertaining along with book reviews, and on a blog called “BooksNFreshAir.” I have no idea how many people these advance reviews reach and how much they help the launch of a title, but my editor said, “They can’t hurt.”

What does it mean that there are now thousands of people weighing in on a book through blogs, customer comments, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads and dozens of other platforms? Neil Gabler had an interesting piece in The Guardian a few years ago called “Everyone’s a critic now” that examines the effects of online community commentary on reviewing. He sums up his argument thus: “The point is that authority has migrated from critics to ordinary folks, and there is nothing—not collusion or singleness of purpose or torrents of publicity—that the traditional critics can do about it. They have seen their monopoly usurped by what amounts to a vast technological word-of-mouth of hundreds of millions of people.”

March 12 is the official publication date of ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, and the early reviews will soon be joined by those from mainstream outlets along with a cacophony of amateur reviews and customer comments. Bring on the vibrant, noisy, democratic conversation.

Nancy Kricorian

“Death is a great project, of all experiences it is perhaps the most interesting of all. We shall see what remains and what will be. Life has been beautiful, with awful moments and admirable ones. Death shall perhaps be even more beautiful, who knows!” ~ Stéphane Hessel

Stéphane Hessel (1917-2013) died in his sleep last week at the age of 95.  He was a member of the French Resistance, a Buchenwald survivor, a co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a diplomat, and the author of TIME FOR OUTRAGE (Indignez-Vous!), a pamphlet that sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide and was credited as the inspiration for the Ingidnados Movement, which was a precursor of Occupy. Hessel’s motto, “To resist is to create, and to create is to resist,” became a rallying cry for young people the world over.

It was in his capacity as a juror and the honorary president of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine that I met Stéphane Hessel in London in November 2010. The first time I saw him, I didn’t know anything about him beyond the brief biography in the program, but he spoke the most elegant French I had ever heard, and his charm, grace, and intelligence suffused the auditorium with warmth and humanity as he talked.

When I came back to New York, I sought out his books and learned more about his extraordinary life. His parents were the models for the characters in Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim. He was a hero of the French Resistance, and survived execution at Buchenwald only because a doctor in the camp switched his identity with that of another French prisoner who had died. Hessel entertained himself and others in the camp by reciting the hundreds of poems that he had memorized in French, German and English. (Hessel edited a collection of these poems entitled O ma mémoire: la poésie, ma nécessité that was published in 2006.) He spent a lifetime devoted to causes that embodied his respect for international law and the dignity of each individual. Towards the end of his life, his vocal support for Palestinian human rights resulted in some ugly attacks against his character, but he was not swayed.

I saw Hessel again when he was in New York in October 2012 for the New York session of the Russell Tribunal. He was as inspiring as ever, although a little more frail, having difficulty at times navigating the steps up to the dais where the jurors sat. I noticed as he spoke that most of the people in the room were completely smitten by him. It occurred to me that he had the charisma one expects in movie stars and politicians. What an amazing thing that he had devoted his magnetic personality not to accruing wealth or power, but to the great humanitarian causes of our age.

Nancy Kricorian