Armenians as many other nations have been persecuted for hundreds of years and this fact of Armenian history isn’t as famous as tortures of Christians in a Moslem world, for example. Who knows very well about events that took place between April and October 1915? It was the time when 1.2 million Armenians were made to leave their homes by the Turkish government and were sent on death march into the Syrian Desert. This match was called “death”, as they were sent with no water or food. The silence used to be a rule for most Armenian families and the Armenian-American family of Peter Balakian, the author of the book “Black Dog of Fate”, was no exception. Tortures of Armenian population were a forbidden topic in his family. Nobody had ever mentioned about horrible starvation and murders of his relatives until Peter was twenty. Only then he learned that his grandmother was one of the survivors of Armenian genocide. Soon he got to all the truth and couldn’t keep silence as all members of his family and other Armenians. The result is his famous book “Black Dog of Fate” that combines facts about Balakian’s family, a story about the boy who became elder and all in this book is a history of Armenian people and their extermination in Turkey.
The title is based on a parable that was told Peter Balakian by his grandmother, Nafina. The story is about goddess Fate and two kinds of gifts that were made for her. The first gift was a young meaty lamb, its eyes were like two rubies and his body was stuffed with almonds. The second gift was a dead black dog with a wormy apple in its mouth. The main paradox is that goddess Fate didn’t take the lamb and accepted the dead dog. The life is unpredictable and just this fact is the purport of the book and it is reflected in the title.
