Four Years in the Mountains of Kurdistan: An Armenian Boy's Memoir of Survival

Aram Haigaz's memoir of the years (1915-1919) during and immediately after the Armenian genocide is a beautifully wrought account of his experiences and resilience of the human spirit. Aram was 15 when his village fell to the Turks and he watched all of the town's men - including all of the men in his family - be killed before being forced into a caravan with the surviving women and children, including his mother.

At his mother's urging, Aram renounces his faith, finds a protector of sorts, and escapes the caravan - and his fate - by spending the next four years as a servant-slave to one and then another of the clannish, ruling beys. The stories he tells of his time with the beys is remarkable. Quick-witted and intelligent, he is frequently in and out of jams, and it is clear that the bey comes to rely on him as much more than a lowly servant. Aram's penchant for morphing with his surroundings and doing what needed to be done to survive brought to mind the flight of a contemporary, Lev (Leo) Nussinbaum, from the Bolsheviks just a few years later. And, in fact, Haigaz's longed-for and beloved Armenia and Nussinbaum's native Azerbaijan were both absorbed by the Soviets in 1920.

Haigaz's memoir serves not only as a reminder of the Armenian genocide, but as a window into the last days of the Ottoman Empire, and how World War I looked and felt from the forgotten corners of this vast territory. In the descriptions of fugitives and warlords, of double dealing and bribes and shifting sands of alliance, one finds the seeds of trouble in the modern Middle East. (This landscape makes the feats of Gertrude Bell and Lawrence of Arabia all the more remarkable.)

Beyond the personal story and geo-political history, Four Years in the Mountains of Kurdistan lends a depth and poignancy to the Armenian genocide that Sandcastle Girls, by dint of being a fictional account, could not quite achieve. This is a fascinating memoir, the tale of a penniless and stateless refugee, one that has been experienced far too many times in the past 100 years, but rarely put to paper so well.