UCLA Alumni Sheds Light on History of Shadows

By ELVIRA DERHOVSEPIAN
Ederhovs@ucsd.edu

Garin K. Hovannisian—a name soon to hit the spotlight within our small, yet widespread Armenian community. His newly published book, Family of Shadows: A Century of Murder, Memory, and the Armenian American Dream, presents the history of three generations of men— beginning with Garin’s great-grandfather Kasper Hovannisian’s journey from the pitfall of the Armenian Genocide to the lives his descendants lead today. A teenager in 1915, Kasper was trapped in the anarchism of the Armenian Genocide and forced to witness the murder of his family. He eventually fled from his homeland and established a new life in America. Garin grew up living and breathing the history that is now recollected in this book. He spent his childhood realizing that his family had a story that was very uncommon among his peers, and after years of research, interviews and rough drafts to this successful piece, Family of Shadows is finally available for the public to understand the intensity of our culture and what the genocide truly means to Armenians.

The young writer speaks of the majority of his childhood being spent “in the professor’s house,” or in other words, his grandfather Richard’s house. “If you see the boxes cluttered in the living room and the books stacked in the offices and the newspapers scattered about the tables—you will immediately understand why I could not escape from history. My family past was, in a way, more real to me than the reality we were living.”

The book discusses Richard Hovannisian’s independent path toward unraveling the history of Armenia. He was the son of Kasper, and he spoke no Armenian as a young child growing up in the San Joaquin Valley. During the 1930s, he had noticed on an atlas in class that Armenia had not been identified during its time seized into the Soviet Union, as with many of the Soviet Socialist Republics.

Dr. Richard Hovannisian set out to learn the language and committed the rest of his career to the study and research of our concentrated Armenian culture and history. He has been recognized for an infinite number of accomplishments—beginning with an archive of all his scholarly books and articles on Armenian history, genocide, Near Eastern society and culture and more. He is Department Chair of Modern Armenian History at UCLA today. The professor’s son is Raffi Hovannisian, who served as the first Foreign Minister ofArmenia. There is a possibility that he will run for the 2013 presidential elections in Armenia.

Family of Shadows provides an outlook of the American Dream from the life of an Armenian. It highlights that the pursuit of the Armenian American Dream means more than landing a steady career and living a rich and prosperous life in the “land of the free”— it rather symbolizes the national duty for Armenians to carry on their culture in a foreign country and conquer all from which they were once forbidden. Family of Shadows demonstrates this duty through the lives of three generations from the Hovannisian family.

Many readers of The Armenian Chronicles can relate to Garin Hovannisian in at least one sense—that he was once a UCLA student himself. Hovannisian also wrote for Armenian Chronicles. With his Master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, this literary background is not something new for him. In fact, Hovannisian carries a hefty résumé for his work in the liberal arts. To name a few, he wrote a detailed article back in 2008 for the Los Angeles Times about none other than the Armenian Genocide marking its 93rd anniversary, titled “Not Just Genocide.” He also graced his writing talent for Liberty and the literary journal Ararat. On top of all that, he further demonstrated his passion for literature by establishing the Bruin Standard, a newspaper based in UCLA. He was awarded the Fulbright Fellowship in Creative Writing as well as the Lynton Award for Book Writing. Despite his endless accomplishments in the realm of journalism, he admits that “no work so far has fulfilled me more than the one I’ve just completed. Of course this doesn’t mean it’s any good,” he humbly states about his latest masterpiece. When asked if this book was what mainly triggered his passion for writing, he responded, “I’ve always written and I hope I will always write.” This book represents who he is and what brought him to this world today, something any other one of his previously written works would not be able to describe.

Hovannisian began planning the outline for this book during winter of 2007. Completed and published for the first time, the author now has his schedule “booked” with book readings across the country—from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Boston and New York.

“The book opens with the genocide, but you will discover that this particular story develops in extraordinary ways. It is an American Dream story with a big twist, but I’ll leave it to you to discover what that is.” With this mystery he now bestows upon all readers, it is now more appealing than ever before for every curious reader to grab a copy of Family of Shadows—now available for sale on Amazon.com.