Vergeen Reviews

Vergeen
Mae Derdarian
Paperback (1997)

  "Vergeen is one of those rare survivor accounts that is not only riveting in terms of the dramatic events with which it is suffused, but it is also a pungent testimony to the proverbial Armenian stamina to endure and survive unspeakable cruelties.  In lucid and exquisite language, Derdarian displays her gift of relying on an economy of words in narrating this true story."

      Professor Vahakn Dadrian, Director,
      Genocide Study, H. F. Guggenheim Foundation.

  "Derdarian has greatly enriched (Vergeen's) testimony .... Earlier chapters of (her) childhood, spent in the embrace of a close-knit family and rich cultural heritage, are rendered lovingly, with great attention to detail and a fine ear for dialogue.  Armenian words, sprinkled throughout the text along with their translation, add to the ethnic flavor of the book."

       The Observer Newspapers, April 20, 1997.

  "I found Derdarian's moving account of the ordeal Vergeen sustained as a slave of her captors and how she was taunted, tattooed and molested before escaping to freedom and safe passage to America as a story for all peoples to love and appreciate about a 13-year-old girl's thrust for life and survival."

       Editorial Page Editor,
       The Macomb Daily, August 10, 1997.

  "Every now and then a book comes along that haunts the reader long after the last page is turned. Vergeen: A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide is one of those stories.  Just as the Diary of Ann Frank recalls the audacity of Hitler's campaign to annihilate Jews, Vergeen resurrects the Turks' senseless slaughter of its Armenian population. ..... Mae Derdarian has created a page-turner, combing Vergeen's journals and her own mother's recorded accounts of what both women endured as survivors of the first genocide of the 20th century. .... Genocide is the plague of the 20th century. Yet the voice of Ann Frank gives pause and Hitler's taunt, 'Who today still speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?' is inscribed in exquisite irony on a wall of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  Who will remember Vergeen?  Anyone who reads this remarkable memoir."

   The Detroit Jewish News, March 27, 1998.

LIFE -- "The Book Club"
August 1998

by Marilyn Johnson

   I'm shivering over Life and Death in Shanghai outside an ice rink while my daughter skates.  Nien Cheng is in prison.  Her meal has arrived, but her hands are cuffed behind her back and she has to figure out how to get the rice out of the bowl.  Her solution: She spreads a towel, turns and, with pinned hands, painfully scoops a bit out of the bowl onto the towel.  Then she lowers her head to the rice on the towel and eats "like an animal."  The world this writer inhabits is more real to me than the chilly bench and the shouts of children until I'm distracted by a woman who stands over me, wondering how I can concentrate in such a setting.  I have to read it, I explain.  Ah, she says knowingly.  Book club, right?

   The image of a woman huddled over a book -- like the woman I saw yesterday reading We were the Mulvaneys in a car overlooking a playground -- has been multiplying in our culture, and odds are that these lone, rapt figures are reading for a book club.  Nobody knows how many of us there are, or how we break down demographically. Rachel Jacobsohn, author of The Reading Group Handbook, guesses that the number has doubled in four years, inspired only partly by Oprah's televised book club; she thinks an estimate of half a million groups is conservative.  Why are so many of us hooked?

   Book clubs are "the fire we gather around" as one woman said, "like the fire in The Clan of the Cave Bear."  I love that primitive image. I walk down my street at night and see TV sets pulsing through people's windows, and I think: We are looking for anything to warm our hands around.  If you walk past a house where a book group is meeting, the lamps glow on a circle of people animated by conversation, wired on coffee or flush with wine.  Five years ago, when my book group began, only one of the eight members was a friend.  Now we are a group of friends, a force, a noisy book-trading cadre.  I'm sure our voices carry to the street.  My son complains, "I can hardly sleep when your book party is here, you all laugh so loud."  My book party.  We work; we have families; we're too busy to linger like our mothers over morning coffee, so we make evening dates and stack them with our ambitions.  Why put ourselves to sleep with books when books can wake us up and excite us?  Why walk around lonely and haunted by the last book we read when we can have a whole group to argue with or read aloud to?

   Most book groups seem to be spontaneous, natural occurrences, do-it- yourself seminars where the discussions are both casual and intense -- dorm- like, I'd say.  What they have in common is a grass-roots intellectual eagerness.  Traditionally, readers have been at the passive end of the publishing process -- the meek receiving the holy text -- but that's changing.  I called all over the country, looking for a group with a good story, and whether I was talking to a serious, academic club tackling 19th century literature or a cheerful bunch of friends consuming best-sellers, I came away with the distinct impression that readers are finding their voice, In book groups, we talk back to books.

   This is no mere fad.  Reading clubs have a substantial history. The oldest group I found is the Seneca Ladies Literary Society in Woodstock, Ill., formed 143 years ago to raise money to preserve George Washington's home.  The members used to do their mending while the hostesses read aloud.  The society, which includes two third-generation members, continues to meet, and Eleanor Gerloff, at 68 one of the group's younger members, says, "We still have minutes from the 1800s."  A club doesn't have to be this old to illuminate history.  The Lit Group, based in the Detroit suburbs, is part of a generation of groups that started in the days of consciousness-raising.  Its 31-year run provides a good illustration of how women can begin as fans and end up as part of an active literary community.

   The Lit Group began humbly when two smart, kinetic young mothers, Audrey Kron and Edie Broida, met at a bread truck outside their apartment building in Oak Park, Mich., in 1967.  "There was so much going on in the world," Audrey recalls ruefully, "and we were toilet training."

   Audrey and Edie each invited five women to join them, and once a month they'd tuck their babies into bed and gather in someone's living room for dessert and a discussion of The Harrad Experiment, Camus, Portnoy's Complaint.  All the President's Men was followed by The Golden Notebook and the feminist canon, and somewhere in there they read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Manchild in the Promised Land and had the idea of inviting a local black activist to speak to them. The man, who later became a Detroit councilman and mayoral candidate, relished the opportunity to rant to a roomful of white, Jewish suburbanites.  "We want what you honkies have!" he told them.  The Lit Group, in other words, was a vehicle for experimenting the '60s.  And, consequently, it became a vehicle for change.  The young mothers turned into graduate students, businesswomen and professionals. Instead of dessert, they began serving dinner, on occasion passing out Styrofoam boxes of takeout.  They took trips together, the women leaving the first night, their husbands joining them the next.  They watched their children grow up.  They weathered several divorces. They treated members to extravagant 50th birthday celebrations.  They became grandmothers.  And through it all they read -- everything from The Gutenberg Elegies to The Celestine Prophecy and a few hundred novels besides.

   They are an unusally stable group.  Eleven of the 13 members have been together from the beginning, and though they and their husbands have begun to retire, no one has left the Detroit area.  Articulate, funny, contentious -- they all talk over one another, except for Connie Grossman, so when Connie opens her mouth, they hush -- these are strikingly attractive women in their fifties and early sixties. (One modestly attributes their looks to "a period where we read a bunch of books about nutrition.")  "My son says of certain women,'She could be a part of your group, Mom," Audrey says.  "It's a quality, a certain aliveness.  We're interesting.  We're positive.  We care about ourselves."  "We're all on the same page," as member Ruby Kushner describes it.  Another says: "We dealt with everything together, though we haven't yet had to deal with the death of one of the members.  The next fifteen or twenty years are going to be an important time for us."

   Life and Death in Shanghai touched them so deeply, with its tale of the Cultural Revolution that took six years of Nien Cheng's freedom and her only child, that they called Cheng up -- there she was, listed in the Washington, D.C., phone book -- and asked if she ever came to Detroit.  No, Cheng said, but she thanked them for their interest and politely suggested they stop for tea if they were ever in the Washington area.  For Edie and Audrey, that was as good as an invitation.  Within weeks, they had hopped a plane and were sitting in Cheng's sunny, book-lined apartment, cups in hand.  Their friendship with Cheng has deepened since then, and she has met the entire group. Audrey calls her every Mother's Day.  At 61, she says, "I'm about the age Nien's daughter would have been."

   Nien Cheng's survival is of particular interest to Audrey because she has had Crohn's disease since she was a teenager; she has virtually no intestines and often carries a backpack with an I.V. concealed inside.  Edie points out that "Audrey was an invalid when I met her"; the group helped her see her physical problems as the raw material of her life.  In spite of frequent hospitalizations, she went to graduate school in psychology and is now a practicing therapist who specializes in -- what else? -- groups.  Audrey writes when she's stuck in the hospital.  She has privately published two upbeat guides for the chronically ill called Ask Audrey and Meeting the Challenge: Living with Chronic Illness.  She has also acted in amateur theater productions and occasionally throws herself slumber parties.  "Audrey, you are my comfort and inspiration," Cheng has written her.  "I think of your courage to give myself the will to live on."

   "Every so often, Audrey and I look at one another and say, 'We did good.'''  Edie says of the group.  Since her retirement as an English teacher and administrator, Edie has thrown herself into book work, leading the discussions for five other groups, writing reviews and occasionally "weeping because I can't read all the books I want to." She takes particular pleasure in discovering unknown books and writers.  Her latest discovery is Vergeen about a teenage girl who survives the march of the Armenians whose Turkish captors drove them into the Syrian desert during World War I.  Vergeen loses her family and, on the brink of losing her life in "slaughter valley," is sold as a slave to a Bedouin who tattoos and rapes her.  Ultimately, the girl escapes and emigrates to America.  Edie was so taken with the book, she talked the Lit Group into special-ordering copies (bookstores rarely carry self-published books; only the Internet bookstore Amazon.com was stocking it) and invited its author to their next meeting.

   And so on a warm night this spring, the virtually unknown Mae M. Derdarian, 76, sat swathed in black in an elegant living room in a Detroit suburb, surrounded by art and books and eager readers. Somehow she had found herself in this vivid secret pocket of culture, and she seemed stunned by her good fortune.  Vergeen, she told the women, had in many ways been her albatross.  Her mother's best friend had survived the genocide and written down her story, then entrusted her only copy to Derdarian, the only writer she knew.  Derdarian was a public relations writer and a single mother; she didn't touch the manuscript for almost 20 years, until she read an advertisement claiming that the Turks had engaged in a civil war with the Armenians, not perpetrated genocide.  This made her angry enough to pull out the scrawled pages and begin the painful process of turning them into a readable memoir.  She had a heart attack in the course of writing Vergeen, then had to face the fact that none of the 80 literary agents she approached wanted to represent it.  The women in the room, hushed and respectful during her talk, jumped into a lively, eager discussion the minute Derdarian stopped.  Esther Liwazer, who is married to a Holocaust survivor, told the group of an E-mail correspondence with her granddaughter, who confessed she thought "we were the only ones," and Derdarian said, with dignity, "I feel a kinship with you ladies because of our parents' past."

   The women took seats at a long dining room table, still talking -- one about the tattoos on Vergeen's face, another about how her husband had started reading the book first, not giving it up until he'd finished.  Someone asked Derdarian about her mother, who was a character in the book and also survived the genocide.  Derdarian told them her mother's story about a tent in one of the camps where the babies were dumped, and how the babies cried all night.  Though women gathered outside, begging to hold them or feed them, the Turkish soldiers refused to let anyone intervene in their starving.  Here her mother had broken done, and here, retelling her story to the best audience a writer could hope for, Derdarian herself felt tears running down her cheeks.  "I'm sorry," she said, touching her face with her napkin.  "There were times I sat at my computer and cried my eyes out."  She wasn't alone; most of us were tearing up.

   All this because of a book.

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