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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. In what year was the Treaty of Lausanne signed?

2. Why was Dr. Reyhadi refused admittance into the Balakian's country club?

3. What is bakshish?

4. What does the name Zivart mean in Armenian?

5. How old was Aunt Gladys when the deportations began?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why did Balakian take the bones from the memorial site at Der Zor?

2. How does numbness help people who have endured great horrors?

3. Why did Aunt Anna likely embrace surrealism rather than realism in literature?

4. Why did Balakian eventually come to see his family's silence about the genocide as a gift?

5. What was Nafina's reaction to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor?

6. How did writing the poem, "The History of Armenia," help Balakian process his new knowledge of his people's history?

7. Why is Der Zor considered the Armenian equivalent of Auschwitz?

8. How did American Ambassador Morgenthau attempt to help the Armenians?

9. Why were the orders for deportation of all Armenians into the Syrian desert the equivalent of a death sentence?

10. How does genocide denial affect the survivors and their descendants?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Balakian's grandmother initially sought compensation from the Turkish government for her family's sufferings. How important is compensation to the victims of state-sponsored terror? Can any compensation be sufficient or does the compensation have a deeper, more symbolic meaning? Did the grandmother's filing of the documents help her process the events? Can there ever be sufficient compensation for the Armenian people, especially almost a century after the genocide?

Essay Topic 2

The Turkish government has never apologized for the Armenian genocide and the world has moved on. What impact, if any, would an official Turkish apology have on the Armenian people today? Is it possible for an apology to be delivered a century later? How would the Armenian people benefit from an apology before the world? Would it free them? Would it free the Turks?

Essay Topic 3

Before the massacres began, the Turkish government rounded up and executed 250 Armenian intellectuals. How did this serve as a precursor for the mass killings to follow? Why would a genocidal government first kill a community's intellectuals? Did it make it easier to commit mass murder by eliminating those who would be most articulate in denouncing the crimes? Have there been other genocides preceded by the rounding up of a certain subset of the victim population?

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