Comments on The Web of Hope, by George B. Kooshian

The sole purpose in writing my life story is to acquaint my posterity, immediate or future, with the somewhat bizarre or colorful happenings I went through...

I am fully satisfied that it would have been a tragic negligence on my part if I did not attempt to prepare this record, because I happen to be the first Kooshian to emigrate to America.

—The Author (George B. Kooshian)

This day-by-day eyewitness account by a young man, educated by Americans in Turkey and taught to keep a diary, is an incredible testimony to the triumph of the human spirit in the face of the most extreme trials, sustained by “youth, and a gleam of hope.” With a brutally honest eye and keen judgement of character he records all those with whom he came in contact—his beloved mother and his benefactor the Reverend Barker, the mysterious Tahir Effendi and his son Shukru, the monstrous Ahmed Chavoush and the elderly Hussein Effendi, the deceitful Armenian minister and the just Turkish bey, and an unending procession of notable and not-so-notable characters.

—The Editor (George B. Kooshian, Jr.)

The Web of Hope is a first-hand, day-to-day account of a young man who went into the face of genocide armed only with pencil and paper. From the notes he recorded during the death marches and massacres in 1915, a chilling picture of the Armenian Genocide takes shape. Of two thousand deportees in his caravan to the Syrian desert, George Kooshian was among the very few to escape and the only one able to bear witness. This stunning autobiography offers an everyday look at the destroyed and forever lost Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire before 1915, the unspeakable cruelty and deprivations during the deportation, the glimmer of hope following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Allied Powers in 1918, the renewed persecutions in the 1920s and emigration to the United States of America and ultimately to Pasadena, California. This volume is an important addition to the genre of memoir literature by genocide survivors, especially in the face of adamant and repressive state denial of the crime. It is a must-read for persons with an interest in Armenian and Near Eastern history, immigration studies, human rights, and ethical themes centered around the human spirit tested by the most crushing experiences, from a man who not only survived but thrived through faith.

–- Richard Hovannisian, Armenian Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Modern Armenian History, University of California, Los Angeles

"I am moved deeply."---Jirayr Libaridian