Black Dog of Fate - Paperback

by Peter Balakian (Author)

Winner of the PEN/Albrand Award
A New York Times Notable Book

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a memoir of family secrets, survival, and growing up in the shadow of the Armenian genocide

"A fascinating and affecting memoir....Written with great sensitivity, Black Dog of Fate is at once a family memoir, a history of the extermination of the Armenians in Turkey, and the story of a young man's passage into adulthood."--New York Times Book Review

In this prize-winning classic memoir, New York Times-bestselling author Peter Balakian explores his suburban childhood and charts his slow uncovering of the truth of what happened to his family during the Armenian Genocide. In describing his awakening to the facts of history, Balakian introduces us to a remarkable family of matriarchs and merchants, physicians, a bishop, and his aunts, two well-known figures in the world of literature. The unforgettable central figure of the story is Balakian's grandmother, a survivor and widow of the Genocide who speaks in fragments of metaphor and myth as she cooks up Armenian delicacies, plays the stock market, and keeps track of the baseball stats of her beloved Yankees. The book is infused with the intense and often comic collision between this family's ancient Near Eastern traditions and the American pop culture of the '50s and '60s.

Balakian moves with ease from childhood memory, to history, to his ancestors' lives, to the story of his own coming of age. Written with power and grace, Black Dog of Fate is a tale of survival against enormous odds.

Front Jacket

The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia and immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced--the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians in 1915, including many of Balakian's relatives, in the century's first genocide.
In elegant, moving prose, Black Dog of Fate charts Balakian's growth and personal awakening to the facts of his family's history and the horrifying aftermath of the Turkish government's continued campaign to cover up one of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity. In unearthing the secrets of a family's past and how they affect its present, "Black Dog of Fate gives fresh meaning to the story of what it means to be an American.

Author Biography

Peter Balakian is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University. He is the author of several books, including Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection The Ozone Journal. Balakian's work has been translated into many languages, and he has appeared widely on national TV and radio. He lives in Hamilton, New York.