When he was fourteen years old, writer Adam Bagdasarian experienced a transforming event: he read William Saroyan's My Name Is Aram. For the young Bagdasarian, this book was a "revelation," as he noted on the National Book Foundation Web site. "The simplicity of the language, the warmth and humor of the narrator's voice dissolved the usual wall between writer and reader and made me feel a part of the stories I was reading," Bagdasarian further explained. Until that point, reading had been a dry occupation, a school assignment. Suddenly, with Saroyan's buoyant yet melancholy tales, Bagdasarian saw the possibilities inherent in words and writing. My Name Is Aram helped Bagdasarian "discover the kind of writer that I wanted to be--someone who, regardless of the subject matter, made his readers feel as though they had found a good companion."
Detailing a Forgotten Holocaust
With his debut novel, Forgotten Fire, Bagdasarian achieves his goal in the opinion of several reviewers. Of Armenian descent like Saroyan, Bagdasarian drew on the experiences of his great uncle, looking at the tragic happenings between 1915 and 1918 during what has become known as the Armenian holocaust. Ten percent of the population of the Ottoman Empire--present-day Turkey and parts of the Middle East--the Armenians were a Christian minority in the midst of a Muslim majority. Islamic Turkish rulers began to see this religious minority as a threat, and with the advent of the Young Turks, who came to power in 1915, the government began a systematic extermination of Turkish Armenians, deporting the two million then living in the country. Three quarters of these perished in the subsequent turmoil, either by being executed by the Turks or by starving to death.
This genocide forms the backstory for Bagdasarian's story, and the author manages to "put a human face on the numbers, in much the same way that Anne Frank helps us penetrate behind the blind numbers, to live the events through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy," according to Marvin Hoffman in the Houston Chronicle. Bagdasarian creates a fictional narrator in young Vahan Kendarian, a member of a well-off family living in the province of Bitlis in eastern Turkey. Vahan's father is a lawyer and a respected citizen with friends in the government, but not even these connections can save him or his family when the purges get underway. Vahan is forced to watch as his father is arrested and taken away, never to return. When an uncle is later arrested and then released, the man determines to escape from the region. Before he leaves he passes out cyanide pills for the family to take in case they are arrested. The police again come to Vahan's home, searching for the uncle. Not finding him, they execute Vahan's two older brothers in the back garden, while the rest of the family is taken into custody.
"What follows is a nightmarish chronicle of decimation of the remaining family," explained Hoffman. The grandmother is brutally killed while on a forced march, and Vahan's sister kills herself with a cyanide capsule rather than submit to being raped by the Turkish soldiers. Finally Vahan and his younger brother, Sisak, manage to escape, leaving their mother behind. Separated during the escape, the two brothers are reunited as Sisak is near death. For the next three years, Vahan, on his own, remains on the run from the Turks, at times surviving by disguising himself as a girl, as a deaf mute, or as a beggar. Ironically, Vahan's life is saved by a former friend of his father, a powerful man who is also one of the engineers of the holocaust. Hired as a stable boy for this Turkish governor, Vahan has a tragic love affair with a young Armenian girl who dies in childbirth; he ultimately makes his way to Constantinople, where he is taken in by an orphanage for Armenians. Yet he can never leave behind the sadness of what happened to his people, just as Bagdasarian's great uncle could not; that man left a record of his struggles on tape so that such atrocities would never be forgotten.
Reviewers and readers alike responded warmly to Bagdasarian's tale of oppression and survival. "As gruesome as some of this material is," wrote Stephen Del Vecchio in Teacher magazine, "Bagdasarian handles the violent incidents in the book in a nonexploitative way." For Marek Breiger, writing in the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California Online, Bagdasarian enters the company of writers such as Eli Wiesel and Primo Levi in writing in denunciation of mass murder. "In writing his people's history," Breiger added, Bagdasarian "has spoken for all people victimized by Hitler and other despots. His hero . . . recognizes that after such suffering, freedom does not necessarily bring happiness." Writing in the Book Report, Charlotte Decker felt that Bagdasarian creates "a story that is a tribute to the human ability to endure." Similarly, a reviewer for Reading Teacher remarked that "in the face of gross inhumanities, Vahan discovers reserves of strength and courage--the 'fire' he did not know he had."
More praise for Bagdasarian's first novel came from Booklist contributor Hazel Rochman, who called Forgotten Fire a "powerful historical novel." Rochman further pointed out that Bagdasarian's "first-person narrative is quiet, without sensationalism, but the stark horror of the first few chapters is almost unbearable." Claire Rosser, writing in Kliatt, found Forgotten Fire to be "an important book for anyone with an Armenian heritage." Rosser also noted that, "As a survival story alone, it will appeal to a wider group of YA readers." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly commented that "Vahan's narrative covers a harrowing journey." For this same contributor, "the prose is often graceful" and the "events are as gripping as they are horrifying." Andrew Medlar, writing in School Library Journal, noted that "it would be misleading to say that readers will enjoy" Bagdasarian's novel, "but it is certain they will be captivated, frightened, and profoundly affected by it." Likewise, Christine M. Heppermann, reviewing Forgotten Fire in Horn Book, called it a "vividly, even horrifically, evoked novel" and concluded that "it is hard to turn away" from Bagdasarian's "intense prose even when you feel you can no longer bear it."
Random Stories of Growing Up
Bagdasarian takes up lighter fare in his second book, a collection of stories titled First French Kiss and Other Traumas. Here the author assembles twenty-three tales that present a "random journey to the happy, confusing, humorous, traumatic, sad, romantic years of age five to twenty," as Bagdasarian explains in his book. These tales "will resonate with those who are still in that age range," wrote Hilary Williamson in BookLoons online "and remind the rest of us of what we do and don't miss from those years." In his short fiction Bagdasarian deals with subjects ranging from the trials of puberty to the torments of hypochondria. The title story is based on a sixth-grader's experience in which the narrator learns the difficulties inherent in performing a first kiss. That story is a "comic exploration of expectation and reality," according to a Kirkus Reviews critic. Romance and farce are interwoven in "Going Steady," while family relationships are explored in "My Side of the Story." "My Tutor" is a story about a teacher whose aging makes him forgetful of geometry; "Karate" looks at how the author's dreams of physical invulnerability are shattered by an older brother. The Kirkus Reviews contributor found these stories both "tender and poignant," and the entire collection "astute and impressionistic," bearing a tone of "wise humor."
Arranged thematically, the collection as a whole presents a "wry, self-absorbed narrative . . . based on the author's coming-of-age in a happy, affluent family in Beverly Hills," maintained Booklist contributor Rochman. A critic for Publishers Weekly called French Kiss and Other Traumas a "volume of brief, sparely wrought stories [that] encapsulates significant moments during a boy's youth." For Vicki Reutter, writing in School Library Journal, Bagdasarian's "well-developed characters and amusing insights into some universal experiences make this title a rewarding choice." Similarly, Williamson thought "these are moving tales that bring back the feel of childhood and teen years." And Horn Book reviewer Heppermann commented that "the mix of comic situations . . . with intelligent reflection gives each reminiscence a larger relevance." Heppermann further noted that Bagdasarian "is an affecting writer whether his material is serious or comic, far-flung or set in his own back yard."
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