Kay Mouradian wrote her first novel, A Gift in the Sunlight: An Armenian Story after her mother’s remarkable survival of the Armenian genocide prompted her to examine her own ancestral past. After working in various libraries and archives in the United States, she visited Hadjin, the village in Turkey where her mother and her mother’s family, along with 20,000 other Hadjintsies, were forced to leave their homes. Traveling across the same deportation route to the deserts of Syria where more than a million perished in the Armenian Genocide, she became acutely aware of the suffering of her mother’s generation and the lingering sense of injustice they carried. This series awakens some of those voices lost to history.
In my heart I, along with many Armenians throughout the world, honor Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913-1916. Morgenthau championed and alerted the world to the sufferings of the Turkish Armenians in 1915. A charismatic and wealthy man with a degree in law, he lived by the ethical principles he had planted as seeds during his young teenage years.
At age fourteen he took seriously his confirmation at temple and visited churches of all denominations, making abstracts of sermons by famous pulpit orators of his day, especially Congregationalists Henry Ward Beecher and Richard Storrs....
FROM AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAU’S PAPERS, REEL 22 Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 29540
HISTORY OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION
For the last six hundred years their history is a record of persecutions, a real martyrdom. No where else the abuse of brutal force has been so great as in Turkey. The conquered Christians have not had security of life, honor or property. Religious toleration has been practiced under most humiliating conditions....
From the Morgenthau archives at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library
To the Secretary of State, Washington
Sir: I have the honor to enclose herewith for the information of the Department copy of a letter received from the American Consul at Aleppo, dated June 14, 1915, relative to the Zeitoun-Marash situation, prepared by Rev. J.E. Merrill. I have the honor, etc. H. MORGENTHAU
The following statement regarding the Zeitoun-Marash situation rests on information of about May 21, when the writer was in Marash....
There are those in the literary community who say, ‘If you want to know the facts read a newspaper, but if you want to know the truth read a novel.’ That’s why I decided to write the story of my mother and her family as a novel so they could represent every Armenian family deported in 1915. Trying to capture the lay of the land from where my mother was deported at age 14, I made several trips to Turkey and traveled the genocide route from Hadjin to the Syrian deserts of Der Zor....
KAY MOURADIAN’s notes from these books:
THE FALL OF ABD-EL-HAMID by Francis McCullagh Methuen, 1910 and THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE by Alan Palmer John Murray, Publisher 1992 and INSIDE CONTANTINOPLE by Lewis Einstein, (U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary, Constantinople 1906-1909 and Special Agent at the American Embassy in Constantinople in 1915) John Murray, Publisher 1917
During the 1800’s the Ottoman Empire was unraveling. Abdul Hamid II, encouraged by powerful Ottomans in Constantinople, felt his brother Sultan Murad was not strong enough to rule the empire and helped to have him dethroned....