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The Impact of the Armenian Genocide on the Offspring of Ottoman Armenian Survivors
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Aftandilian, Gregory |
| Copyright Year | 2017 |
| Abstract | The genocide perpetrated by the Young Turk regime against its Ottoman Armenian citizens during World War I had a lasting and debilitating effect on the survivors of that horrendous calamity, as documented by many oral histories conducted during the 1970s and 1980s with survivors as well as by written accounts by the survivors themselves. What is less known is how the genocide affected the offspring of these survivors. From my own interviews with members of the Armenian-American “second generation,” many of whom are now in their 80s and 90s (those born in the 1920s and 1930s), and my examination of the few scholarly articles that have delved into this issue, I argue that there was indeed a transfer of trauma from one generation to the next. In addition, I argue that the extensive scholarship within the Jewish community, both in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora, on how the Holocaust has impacted the offspring of that genocide, can teach us much about the transgenerational passing of trauma with regard to the Armenian Genocide. Finally, I examine how the issue of genocide denial has also impacted the second generation. Survivors of the Armenian Genocide were generally women and children, as men were the first to be killed (either while they were conscripts in the Ottoman Army or in their ancestral villages in the Armenian Plateau or in other parts of Anatolia). Survivors, particularly those who endured the forced exile march to the Syrian Desert, endured beatings and rape, witnessed family members brutally killed by gendarmes or “chetes”—criminals set loose on the caravans—and saw remaining family members die of starvation or dehydration. Those who survived these death marches were able to settle in the Arab countries, or emigrate chiefly to France, the United States, or various countries in South America after the end of World War I. Tens of thousands of such survivors were able to come to the shores of America between the end of the war in 1918 and 1924, at which time discriminatory immigration laws were imposed on people coming from certain “undesirable” regions like Southern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Through Armenian compatriotic societies and other associations, many marriages took place during this time between Armenian bachelors who had come to America before World War I to work in the factories and the women refugees. These Armenian societies often paired |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.bu.edu/pardeeschool/files/2017/03/Aftandilian-article-on-offspring-of-genocide-survivors.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
