8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Father's Murder Leads to an Authentic Identity, May 24, 2005
This review is from: In My Father's Name (Paperback)
Mark Arax has written a superb novel chronicling his zealous search for the
identity of the men who gunned down his father in his own bar in Fresno
back in 1972 when Mark was 15. The gripping story takes us from Fresno to LA
to NY to Mexico and Anatolia, the Ottoman empire, 1915, San Francisco, and
back to Fresno to circle around the little city of corruption and crime,
related to the pernicious drug trade. Armenia, a nation of people erased
from its ancestral homeland, submitted to genocide by the Turks
and dispersed in this American century, to America which promised freedom
and opportunity, delivered new strife, leading to new crises.
This epic saga tells of three generations of Arax family members overcoming
impossible odds to finally make a decent home for themselves in Fresno only
to have it shattered by a cold blooded murder on a Sunday evening in a
shady bar just before Mark's dad was to have made a public announcement,
naming names, letting the public know what went on in city hall and at
police headquarters. He was executed Mafia style with a son left in its
wake holding on to a bag of questions and a burning desire to get some
answers.
And yet, this state is endemic to the Armenian existence in its diaspora.
The resonances between Mark Arax's saga and that of every post-genocide
Armenian are loud and clear. Why were over a million of their forefathers
so brutally and systematically slaughtered like cattle at the turn of this
century? Why was the life of every Armenian in the Ottoman empire so cheap
and worthless? What had Armenians done to deserve the racist wrath of
Turks, Kurds and other nomadic bands of brigands in the Anatolian plains,
the ancestral homeland of all Armenians? Why do Turks today not admit what
is so plainly true? Why the denial and historical revisionism? How are
dignity and justice to be restored when nations place economic or strategic
considerations before the demands of historical truths? How can
democracies and free nations join in the Turkish lie that nothing happened
in 1915, it was just war, things like that happen all the time, let bygones
be bygones...?
Mark Arax would not stop asking his haunting questions either. His father
was murdered. The police never even tried to solve the case. Mark would
do his damnedest to get to the bottom of it himself, and he would do it at
any cost. Mark Arax was rewarded for his quixotic aspirations by much more
than he could have imagined. While the minutest details of his father's
murder are still unresolved, what Mark discovered was more precious and
more lasting than the particulars of a case of a Fresno drug mob and city
hall -- about to be exposed -- hit. Mark Arax found the true identity of
his people, the Armenians in the Californian diaspora, and their struggle
to preserve their traditions and rich heritage. Through all this, Mark
fathered himself to become a gifted professional journalist, a responsible
father and husband and a conscientious citizen. The long and persistent
journey that he took makes for a great read. The story is compelling and
gripping, yet it is filled with true human drama spanning three
generations. His is not a murder mystery with bought off politicians all
the way to Sacramento, with its rich source of drugs supplied from Mexico.
No, that is only part of the story. His is not the chronicling of how the
Hell's Angels distributed marijuana to all points north and south in the
60s and 70s, with the marijuana being air-dropped into the vineyards of
Fresno. No, that is only part of the story. His is not the story of a
"crazy" grandfather who was a businessman who held fond attachment to
communist ideology, who had big dreams and bombastic demeanor and yet
failed as many times as not in all his business ventures. His uncles,
great uncles and his own struggle with American or Armenian identity all
mix in to produce a unique story of love and redemption. A boy who has to
be the rudder in a cracked up society, a disintegrating yet ever expanding
town and a broken home. What Mark Arax achieves with his own life is a
courageous feat. To defeat the forces of decadence that took his father
away by rejecting that underworld and that easy life. To enter the ranks
of the successful the hard way, by dedication, talent, sweat and toil.
Ironically, Mark might very well have ended up a two bit hood himself and a
cheap hustler hanging around his dad's bar or the golf club, dealing,
racketeering and begging for trouble. Instead, his father's loss jolted
him into a state of permanent revulsion at that seedy world he was just
beginning to get comfortable in at the age of 15. By correctly identifying
it as the prime seducer who claimed his father, Mark avoided that scene and
kept it away from his family. Instead, by finding his deepest roots he has
been able to set some of his own. Let us hope that his tree flourishes
under that hot central California sun and that his children know their dad
for the American hero on the pages of "In My Father's Name," that he surely
is. Read for yourself and see!
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