Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

Nafina Aroosian, born Nafina Shekerlemedjian, is the author’s maternal grandmother and his earliest and most profound educator on Armenian culture. As a young mother of two, Nafina undertook a death march through the Syrian desert to Aleppo, Syria. In the five years she spent in Aleppo, she nearly died of typhus and worked as a tailoress from a small flat. With the help of her only surviving brother and the meager funds she earned, she relocated with her daughters to the United States. Ottoman officers killed all of her other siblings, parents, and first husband during the Armenian Genocide.

The atrocities she witnessed and experienced during the genocide traumatized Nafina. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 (by which time she had been living in the US for about two decades), she went nearly catatonic with fear that the Turks were again coming to kill her family. Doctors treated her with electroshock therapy and the family never mentioned the episode again during her lifetime. She never directly spoke about the genocide in her late life when the author knew her but she would occasionally share bizarre stories and hazy flashbacks that made little sense without more historical context. The author seizes on memories of these exchanges in his own adult life when he reconstructs her story and learns about the genocide.

In many ways, Black Dog of Fate starts and ends with Nafina. The first section of the book, “Grandmother,” recalls Peter’s early years with her, when the pair baked traditional Armenian bread on weekends and passionately discussed Yankees baseball. The author knew Nafina as an old woman deeply invested in the New York Stock Exchange and American popular culture. By the end of the book, he pieces together her story before she came to the US and returns to some of the places she went in the most horrific period of her life.

Her life story, and Peter’s relationship to her and her memory, serve as a microcosm of the Armenian diaspora born of the 1915 genocide. Nafina was both Armenian and American in her ideology and her immediate circumstances. Her grandson, though raised in suburban America, was an inheritor of the Armenian past and his family’s suffering. 

Gerard Balakian is Peter’s father. Peter’s young and adolescent relationships with both of his parents were complicated because of the air of silence they maintained surrounding the family’s past and their strict adherence to particular cultural routines. As a teenager, Peter took particular issue with his father when he forced Peter to attend private high school. The two never expressed much conventional affection towards each other, but they did reconcile and relate to each other intellectually in adulthood. Gerard was a well-liked doctor and enjoyed conversing about history and politics to his adult son, who obtained masters and doctoral degrees from top American institutions.

Though the book opens with a focus on the author’s maternal ancestry, important figures emerge on his father’s side and shed light on his father’s strictness and silence. Gerard was born in Constantinople and fled the genocide as an infant. He spent time in different European towns before reaching the US. His great uncle was among the few survivors of a mass execution of Armenian intellectuals who spent the rest of his life building Armenian churches and supporting Armenian communities. Gerard capitalized on the advantages that came with a professional career in the United States and drove his son to do the same, having come so close to poverty and death as a child.

Peter’s Aunt Gladys is Nafina Aroosian’s first daughter and Peter’s aunt. Along with her mother and her sister, Alice, she undertook a death march to Aleppo and survived. She was a staple in the author’s upbringing, as his mother and her sisters frequently gathered to cook, eat, shop, and otherwise spend time together. Peter learned as an adult that Gladys was actually his mother’s half-sister. She was born to Nafina’s first husband, Hagop Chilinguirian, who died during the genocide.

Gladys has few personal memories of the Armenian Genocide, but she is the one to share the initial horde of information about the family’s history with Peter. She tells him much that he never knew about his grandmother, in particular, including that she suffered enduring trauma and lost her first husband. She shares some historical sources with Peter, as well, including a lawsuit that Nafina filed against the Turkish government following the genocide and a single family photograph of Nafina’s family, all murdered in the genocide save one half-brother.

While in Aleppo, Peter sees a photograph of Gladys and Alice as school children and identifies a deep sadness and loss of innocence in their faces. Gladys, more than Peter’s mother or father, represents the closeness that her generation in the family maintains to the events of 1915. 

Abdul Hamid II is a historical figure that becomes important to the narrative once Peter delves into Turkish and Armenian history. Hamid was the last sultan of a unified Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century. He ruled from 1876-1908. During his period of rule, the empire fractured from warfare with Russians and Greeks and from Balkan revolutions. Despite this decline, Hamid’s rule is also known for modernization efforts, including the establishment of railways and professional schools. That modernization also led to increased debt for the empire.

Hamid garnered a reputation as the “Red Sultan” because he was politically responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the mid-1890s by enlisting a secret police service to kill Armenians pegged as republican dissenters. The author explains, “the sultan took out his frustration over the diminishment of his empire on his Christian minorities, especially the Armenians” (156). Modern communication disseminated news of the massacres to Western Europe and North America, which Western observers viewed as extreme and unjustified cruelty. This news further denigrated the Ottoman Empire in the international community.

Though this period was not what came to be known as the Armenian Genocide, it solidified a practice in the Turkish state of systematically targeting and murdering Armenians. Peter references this earlier period of killing, also known as the Hamidian massacres, as a prologue and another significant event in the long history of persecution and suffering that Armenians faced.

The overthrowal of Hamid in 1908 ushered in a brief period of respite and hope for Armenians, but the promise of increased freedoms under new rulers was an illusion.