Rima Elkouri

Léa is an elementary teacher in Canada and had always been close to her Téta - her Armenian grandmother. But the old woman never told her complete story - Léa knows that the old woman's twin brother still lives in Aleppo, even now, decades after the family immigrated from Syria to Canada, and that they were both born in Turkey but the rest of the story had always been a mystery. And when the old woman dies, Léa decides to visit their ancestral village in Turkey - Manam and learn what really happened. Except that things are not as easy.

For anyone with any passing understanding of the region's history in the early part of the 20th century, the locations of the village and the twin brother tell the story - the tragic part of the history of Léa's family started with the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917 in Turkey. The family fled to Syria and that's where the brother still lives while the Syrian War is raging around him and the region is getting less and less stable (and his letters recount that - while we see them alongside the story of the past, showing that things and times change but people are always people).

Léa gets recommended a guide, a young Kurdish filmmaker, and the two of them go to the area of the village to try to discover what really happened. The tale of that trip and the tale of the past are told in parallel and one sometimes needs to stop and wonder how come we never learned from the past.

We know the grandmother made it out of Turkey, for awhile it is unclear if the granddaughter will be as lucky. The novel reads like a piece of investigative journalism - and that's intentional - that story may not be the truth but there are a lot of similar ones which are true. The Turkey of this novel - refusing to admit that the Armenia Genocide happened, refusing to admit that the Syrian border is unstable, falling down back in time rapidly - reads as the real world Turkey as well.

Novels in which people look for their past are common and when done properly can be a useful way to draw some attention to less-explored parts of history. This novel does that well - with all the bleakness and drama and heartbreak of two different eras. The style is sparse and there is more left unsaid than is actually said - and that works just fine here.

And at the end, I could not stop wondering: Will we ever learn from the past?… (mere)