Today, April 24, 2015, is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. During the next several years, about one and a half million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman Empire: shot, worked to death, or marched into the Syrian desert to starve or die of thirst. An American official who was an eyewitness wrote home, “The whole country [is] one vast charnel house, or, more correctly speaking, slaughterhouse.”
For most Americans, this seems like it happened a million years ago on another planet. But as with everything important about history, if you pay attention you’ll realize it was yesterday, two blocks away from where you live. In my case, I was named after my mother’s oldest brother, Jonathan; soon after he was born in 1928 my grandparents moved with him to Beirut, and because a new baby kept them busy, they hired a young woman as a maid. She was desperate: she was Armenian, and had walked over mountains and hundreds of miles to get to Lebanon, and was the only member of her family still alive.