The Unspoken as Heritage

“‘Genocide’ was first coined to portray the brutality of the Turkish state as it murdered the Armenian population living within its borders. Yet the Armenian genocide has become largely invisible, a part of history erased from common awareness. Harry Harootunian's chronicle of the Armenian genocide's impact on his family's hellish life forces us to reexamine what we do not know about our pasts and the causes and consequences of our ignorance. Through this remarkable account, Harootunian refuses to let his family die twice.” - Irene Silverblatt, Professor of Cultural Anthropology History, Duke University

“The Unspoken as Heritage is a brave text offering something we all need: the recognition that a heritage shaped by catastrophe lingers, even thrives, in the unspoken and the everyday, rather than in the grand narratives of History. Harry Harootunian accounts for the unaccounted in the future tense, asking what should become of us as we live on in the wake of loss, rather than in the past tense of nationalist restoration. The rich and textured scraps of his parents lives, organized by ineradicable silence, here count for something potent: not the evidentiary, but the imaginative; not the exceptional, but the expectant.” - David Kazanjian, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania

"Elegantly written and intriguingly structured. . . For readers interested in the problem of genocide, in the silence of survivors, and in second-generation immigrants, The Unspoken as Heritage offers richly rewarding reflections from the point of view of someone who has confronted unanswered questions that have lingered from his childhood." - Werner Sollors, Critical Inquiry

“Harry Harootunian has authored a timely and thought-provoking book on the Armenian Genocide. The Unspoken as Heritage strikes a balance between the facts of the historical events and the author’s own personal journey to comprehend the full and complete tragedy that tore to shards his parents’ lives.” - Barbara Erysian, Canadian Journal of History

“Professor Harootunian has managed to produce a book of profound depth and beauty. It is equal parts a personal memoir, a sociological examination of the Armenian Genocide and its often-unexamined psychological effects on survivors and their children, and a meditation of what it is to be a second-generation immigrant in a country ensconced in mythic self-glorification.”
  - Artyom H. Tonoyan, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

“[The Unspoken as Heritage] is very rich and flows smoothly.... Harootunian’s study about his own family (as a singular case) sheds light upon what happened to the Armenians who ran away from the Ottoman Empire in the beginning of the twentieth century (as a collective process).” - Pedro Bogossian-Porto, Ethnic and Racial Studies