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Love And War: The Story Of A Girl In Occupied France

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  • Love And War: The Story Of A Girl In Occupied France

    LOVE AND WAR: THE STORY OF A GIRL IN OCCUPIED FRANCE

    By Nanore Barsoumian // September 18, 2013 in Books & Art, Featured, Headline

    All The Light There Was
    By Nancy Kricorian
    Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2013)
    279 pages, $24.00

    Anarchists, communists, liberals, Jews, emigres-Frenchmen from all
    walks of life resisted the Nazi occupation in France and the Vichy
    regime during World War II. They collectively made up what is referred
    to as the French Resistance. Armenians also joined the struggle, in
    defense of the France they had come to love. History often belongs
    to the boldest, the "great men"-and a handful of women-who defined
    their time. From the ranks of the Armenian fighters, a few names
    stand out, chief among them the poet Missak Manouchian, a Communist
    who commanded the Manouchian Group. But there were others whose
    stories, acts of heroism, and contributions to the Resistance went by
    unnoticed. Nancy Kricorian's recent novel, All The Light There Was,
    peers into the everyday struggle on the domestic front, and offers
    an unlikely heroine-an Armenian girl who comes of age during the Nazi
    occupation of France.

    All the Light There Was is a story of loss, love, and finding the
    guiding light when darkness prevails.

    Kricorian paints a palpable reality, ushering in the tribulations,
    uncertainties, and fears that her characters had to face. The story
    unfolds from the perspective of the 14-year-old Maral Pegorian. Time
    passes through a different stream-often in fragments marked by
    different pronunciations of love-for the pubescent Maral. For instance,
    when she meets Andon, a suitor, time seems to pass in weekly increments
    as she sees him only on Sundays. "This is the story of how we lived
    the war, and how I found my husband," offers Maral early in the
    book. It is also about the smaller ways in which war affects those
    condemned to live it (like the meals made of bulgur and turnips),
    the sacrifices, and the bonds and love that nudge survivors on.

    Through her narrator, Kricorian offers us a commentary on women's
    roles, and on the demands and expectations an Armenian girl grapples
    with. Had the story been narrated by Maral's "mule-headed" brother
    Missak or his friend Zaven-both aiding the resistance-a decidedly
    revolutionary narrative would have emerged. Had it been written by
    Maral's father, a shoe-cobbler with an affinity for lengthy political
    discussions, or her mother Azniv, the story may have turned to the
    politics and events of the time, or about motherly love and grief. But
    with Maral, the story is told from the physical confines of a young
    woman living under her parents' roof. Her home, school, friends'
    homes, the Armenian Cathedral, and the parks near her house outline
    the boundaries of her physical world. Envious of her brother and
    his friends who are allowed to flirt with fate, Maral often finds
    herself rebelling against the gender mold she is stuffed into, and
    being treated "like a hen in a coop."

    Even though the predominant setting is the household-replete with
    activities such as knitting, cooking, and washing-Maral attempts to
    burst out of that narrow world. At times she succeeds, running through
    the streets of Paris as authorities crack down on marchers. Other
    times, her escape is through her brother and his stories.

    Hers is a story of resilience, emotional and physical. Maral is also
    a "hero"-allowing compassion to lead her actions-as she takes the
    initiative to save the life of her Jewish neighbors' three-year-old
    daughter, Claire. The fate the Jews seemed to face reminded the older
    Armenians of the horrors they experienced only two decades before.

    "The child is an orphan. The same as we were. Except we saw it all.

    Our parents dead before our eyes. Bodies in the dirt. Children with big
    bellies and heads, arms and legs skinny like spiders. It is the same
    thing again, Azniv, the way they sent us to die in the desert," says
    Aunt Shakeh to her sister, Azniv, in a rare reference to the genocide.

    The narrative of the past-the deportations, killings, separations,
    orphanages-dictates how Armenians see and respond to the events
    unfolding around them. However, Maral observes that the topic of
    Armenian Genocide rarely surfaces in conversation. She explains: "It
    was strange that I knew so little about what they had gone through,
    especially as it seemed to loom like a vast, amorphous shadow over our
    lives. My mother and my aunt referred vaguely and ominously to what
    they called the Massacres or the Deportations. If I asked a question
    about that period in the Old Country, my mother would say darkly,
    'It's better not to talk about those times.' Auntie Shakeh would go
    pale and invoke God. So after a while, I stopped asking, and it was
    all I could do to keep from rolling my eyes when they made their dire,
    cryptic references."

    All The Light There Was is a powerful story of how ethnic bonds can
    blur allegiances. We encounter Armenians among Nazi collaborators,
    Allied soldiers, and resistance fighters. We meet Andon the
    collaborator, whose family hailed from Moush. Andon joined the
    Wehrmacht after he was recruited from a German camp, where he was
    being held as a Soviet prisoner of war. We meet Zeitountsi Hrant, the
    American soldier from New York. And there are the Armenian Resistance
    fighters like the Kacherian brothers, Zaven and Barkev.

    They all have a bond that connects them: They are the children of
    genocide survivors dispersed across the globe. And so, the Armenian
    identity comes first before the other, hyphenated identity. In one
    revealing moment, Maral's friend Jacqueline, upon meeting Andon,
    says, "I know that under that German uniform, there beats an Armenian
    heart." Maral is at the intersection of all these identities, and it
    appears she is tasked with reaffirming these bonds, sometimes with
    as little as a symbolic kiss.

    War emerges as a miasma of dead romances, dead boys, POWs, food
    shortages, tuberculosis, hunger, betrayal, and the hellholes they
    called work camps. Following news of the death of a loved one, Maral
    sees her loss and pain not as uniquely hers but as an affliction that
    indiscriminately targets victims everywhere: "I didn't know what to
    feel or think. I observed the three of us from above, small people in a
    small apartment, bent with grief. This scene was playing itself out in
    apartments and houses all across the city, all across the continent,
    and all around the world. The war was a great factory of suffering,
    all of it fashioned by human hands." All the Light There Was is a story
    of loss, love, and finding the guiding light when darkness prevails. As
    Maral's father says, "This world is made of dark and light, my girl,
    and in the darkest times you have to believe the sun will come again,
    even if you yourself don't live to see it."

    http://www.armenianweekly.com/2013/09/18/love-and-war-the-story-of-a-girl-in-occupied-france/

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