Black Dog of Fate

Balakian grew up in an Armenian American family in New Jersey where the genocide was never discussed — present as a weight, an absence, a set of behaviors that didn't make sense until he started asking questions. This memoir reconstructs both his American childhood and the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which over a million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman government in the first genocide of the 20th century. A dispatch from inside the specific grief of inheriting a catastrophe that your family survived by never speaking of it. One of the most important diaspora memoirs ever written.