If I had read this book 40 years ago, I would have known how to ask my grandmother better questions about her ordeal - she was one of the 'lucky' few that was evacuated from Smyrna to Salonika in this event, but not until she had witnessed the murder of all her male relatives and many female ones too. On top of that, I have now figured out that based on the evacuation date, her subsequent marriage date, and the birth date of her oldest child - my long dead uncle Gus - that he was probably the result of being raped by Turkish soldiers. That's some heavy stuff to have effect you.
As a history major and lifelong student, I have read probably thousands of accounts of historical events. Many of them demonstrate that the writer was a great researcher, but also a lousy story teller. Ureneck has the knack for weaving the story as if it is a routine novel: the characters are all well developed and comprehensible, the story line is ordered and clear (despite the event being anything but), and the transitions are exactly where I was looking for them.
As a former Army officer, and later Defense Consultant for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I have known many types of government and military leaders and bureaucrats. There representative types are all paraded through these pages in the form of the key players. We have heroes in the form of the common man thrown into uncommon actions with YMCA pastor Mr. Jennings; Sickening Cowards like Captain Hepburn, who was so concerned with how displeasing his superior would effect his career, that he literally stood by and watched tens of thousands perish in the massacre and fire rather than offer refuge on the American Fleet (his conscious, combined with the pressure from all his officers, eventually forced him to do the humanitarian thing and allow the rescue of some); and worst of all, the cowardly and conniving Admiral Bristol, who imagined himself the American Potentate of the Mediterranean combining his desires to curry favors with the Turks and his irrational and racist hatred of Greek and Armenian Christians, to surpress not only efforts to rescue these people from genocide, but also surpress the fact of this genocide from the American government and public by purposely altering intelligence reports, and surpressing news accounts by foreign correspondents. This is one guy that does not deserve to be buried in Arlington if he is.
A very informative and moving read.
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It's About Time We Find a Hero or Two
It's about time that a hero or two emerges during the dreadful period covered in this book! Marjorie Housepian's Smyrna Affair covered this many years ago and Avery Mann's new novel Persona Non Grata: End of the Great Game provides the larger context in a thrilling mystery. I know a living Armenian bishop who was rescued from drowning in the harbor by an American sailor who violated his orders and risked court martial. The young child was saved and hidden while the sailors watched his parents drown. American and British ships sat idly watching, while Admiral Bristol and company looked on and did and said nothing. Officials of Standard Oil of New York had to walk over rotting Armenian corpses and push starving beggars aside as they negotiated for concessions and said nothing. America joined the Great Game and Wall Street financiers help fund the Young Turks who murdered 1.5 million innocent Armenians. The Young Turks, or CUP leaders, continued in power. Celal Bayar, led pogroms killing 300,000 Greeks in 1913 and, as the third president of modern Turkey in the 1950s, ordered pogroms against the Greeks again while overseeing the destruction of Armenian churches, monasteries and cultural legacy in Anatolia. This was while Turkey was in NATO and the US continued its secret relationship putting in Jupiter missiles and advanced listening posts. Too bad we never listened to the screams of innocents being murdered then or now. As Avery Mann writes, the Great Game must end or the pawns on the chessboard will continue to die while the so-called great powers waste their own lives and treasure in short sighted pursuits that always seem to backfire in the longer term.
Top reviews from other countries
Sue
Brilliant coverage of the tragedy that befell Smyrna in 1922
Reviewed in Australia on March 9, 2023Joanne Kyvetos
My father's story. This is not a book that ...
Reviewed in Canada on November 1, 2016
