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Summary: Excellent! I recommend it to everyone I know.
Review: I have stolen moments here and there out of my days this past week to follow stride for stride in the shoes of Sano and her purposeful life story. Certainly, Thea Halo's work of artful writing is more articulate and powerful because of her relationship with her mother, Sano. I am grateful for insight into this tragic portion of history personalized in "Not Even My Name". My thanks to Ms. Halo for shedding light on the atrocities against so many peoples of that time and for the loving tribute to her mother.
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Summary: A Timely Story
Review: A simple but gripping factual encounter of the evil forces that ruled Asia Minor in the first 2 decades of the 20th century.My father was a survivor of his Armenian family which was annihilated by the Ottoman regime in 1915 not too far away from Sano`s homeland.The arrival of this book coincides with the decision last month, by the House of Representatives` International Relations Committee to send to the House floor a resolution,(H.Res.596)that would call on the President to officialy commemorate the Aremenian Genocide. The Turkish Government and its lobbysts in Washington will try to disuade Congress from passing the resolution, based on National Security reasons. But what about Sano? What about her family and the millions of Armenians,Greeks,Assyrians? Have they not suffered enough? I wish more of our Representatives would read this very timely book.
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Summary: A Haunting Memoir of Sorrow and Triumph
Review: An absolutely wonderful book! I felt I was with Sano (a Pontic Greek) and her family in the beautiful Pontic mountains in Turkey before Turkish soldiers made them leave their home and go on a death march in 1920. Then while reading about the death march her family made with all the other inhabitants of her village, I could not put the book down. I felt such sorrow I had tears in my eyes when reading about the brutality these people endured. I cryed when Sano was left with a Kurdish family because her family could not feed her anymore. Shortly after Sano was left with this other family she found out her mother had died as a result of malnutrition and exposure. Such tragedy, how could anyone live through something like this, but Sano does, and she ends up in America with a husband who is three times her age. She then raises her 10 children in America with dignity and courage. Kudos go to Thea Halo (Sano's daughter) for writing such a beautiful and inspiring book. I can only hope this is not Thea Halo's last book but that she will continue to write.
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Summary: Gems of Inestimable Value
Review: Not Even My Name has engraved itself on my heart. I find myself sending it to friends, quoting it to those I love, and now, rereading it from front to back. Perhaps it is the bond of love, the sincerity, the truthfulness, and purity from which it sprang which gives it its power. Perhaps it is also, as the author's mother says, the way in which she held the memories silently in her heart for so long, distilling their essence into images and words that convey the potency of the experiences they reflect. Themia is a Pontic Greek, who, as a child, was driven from her Turkish village into a death march in which two sisters and her mother perished. It was not until recently, when her daughter fulfilled an innocent childhood promise to take her mother back to find her village, that the full story was told.In so many ways, I feel as though they allowed me to slip quietly inside their worlds, their relationship, their lives. I can see everything ... the village, the wildflowers, the calf, the family. I can feel the first experiences, the leaving, the remembering, and the returning, with heart racing, wondering, against all logic, whether her mother might be standing there at the door of the house. I can feel the fear of touching the little calf who was there tied to a tree, lest it might vanish as all others had. A poem tells how the family's lives unraveled during the march-many left in the dust. I am glad, so glad, that the "God's knot" in Themia's life held ... that she endured ... that she chose to share this story. May we build a world in which our knowledge of the contents of human hearts becomes so profound that we will be incapable of injury. May we all become, as the author did, self-appointed protectors of those of pure spirit. May we come to understand, as Thea did, that true unconditional love springs not from naivete, but from wisdom and respect for the "tentative hold" we have upon those we love. May we not wait until people are gone to realize how much we love them. I would encourage professors of literature, social work, and history to incorporate this book into their curricula. The writing is outstanding. The history we need to know. So many have come to this country, leaving behind a world of unimaginable horrors. Often, they keep their stories wrapped up within their hearts as they build a new life. This book testifies to the healing power, for both the individual and those they love, of the telling of the tale. It is only as such narratives are shared that we will truly come to know ourselves as a nation and as a world ... a "mine rich in gems of inestimable value". I could repeat the whole book, were I to tell you every word that stirred my heart ....
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Summary: I loved it!!!!
Review: Other reviews are saying that Thea Halo's book, Not Even My Name, is great for teenagers. I totally agree. I am a teenager, and I loved it. Until I read this book, I had no idea that my people, the Assyrians, were murdered the way they were. My parents bought four copies of the book at the San Jose Genocide Conference, and so far I've lent mine to one person, and have two on the waiting list. I'd say if you haven't read it you need to. It's written so that you feel as though you are actually there, in the story. You feel the sadness Sano experienced at the loss of her family, and the hope of the new life in America. It is one of the best books on history I have ever read. Hi, Thea!!:)
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Summary: Not Even My Name
Review: History that reads like a novel. Thea Halo has set forth the facts of the Christian Holocost in Turkey in the touching story of her mother's survival. Required reading for the diaspora of Asia Minor. From a third generation American of Asia Minor descent, I say, "Thank you, Thea Halo, for writing this book. Your book tells the bittersweet story of many, like your mother, who survived... and equally as important, it tells the story of the multitude who did not. May their memory be eternal... "
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Summary: A Finely told Tale
Review: ". . . I still stood there watching my mother grow smaller and smaller, until she was no more than a tiny line on the horizon that turned to vapor and disappeared in the waves of heat rising from the ground." That is a sentence that concludes one chapter of this book, a sentence that understands how to respect language and bestow on the reader a verbal rhythm and drive that captures the experience of separation of mother and child. It is written by someone who has a reverence for language and for making a voice to tell a story that could very well have exploded into overstatement and generallly tedious victimology. Above all, it is written by someone who lets her subject emerge rather that self consciously "working it up." Later in the narrative, Sano, the heroine describes her fears when, stepping into the waves of Coney island, she fears she will be swept away and struggles, unbeknowdst to those ashore, to right herself even though she's still in shallow water. here again are waves of a different kind than in the above quote, but they are the right image for what Thea halo wants to do to embody the texture of her mother's experience as she is thrown to and fro by history. This is a book to be savored by someone who loves her subject enough to help others to that same love. Few books capture a sense of loss as painfully and beautifully as this one. It is a book about history, about family, struggle, ethnicity, culture, motherhood, ethnic cleansing and, yes, even about the way the past is ever-present and yet fleeting. These are subjects easily turned into formula and cliche, but Thea Halo knows how to make them all new. I would compare this work with THE COLOR OF WATER, another marvelous survivor's story beautifully rendered.
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Summary: A long awaited book for the next generation
Review: As a Pontian-Greek-American, reading this great book was like having my grandmother tell me her life's stories all over again. Couldn't put it down. Very infomative, touching and most of all a real treasure for my daughters. Now they can read this ideal book and learn about their great-grandparents history. Another very important point in this book is that the Pontian, Armenian and Assyrian Genocide, which is not written anywhere is revealed for everyone to be aware. The author wrote this book out of love for her mother, therefore there is no hatred involved. Even though the most important years of Sano's life were tragic, she still has nothing awful to say and is a very very lovely lady. I highly recommend reading this book, because its a true story and very well written. THANKS A MILLION THEA HALO.
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Summary: So much death, and so much life
Review: To most people unfamiliar with Turkey, "Diyarbakir" may at best be a city in southeastern Turkey with a population of mostly Kurdish origins. That city was the first thing I noticed on the map in the inside covers of Thea & Sano Halo's "Not Even My Name": the map shows Sano Halo's death march from the mountains of Pontus (in northern Turkey, very close to the Black Sea) to Diyarbakir and beyond; it does not of course show another death march, from Konya (central Turkey) to Diyarbakir, that killed my paternal grandfather and made exotic "Diyarbakir" known to me from my tender years. Having lived a rather sheltered life myself, I often wonder about people's ability to overcome hardship or death of loved ones. This book provides an extreme answer: the unwilling hero moves swiftly from witnessing her family's and village's total destruction to making a new life and a large family in America; her world was shaped by hurricanes beyond her control, and she simply stayed afloat, largely by luck (if not miracle). In addition to being a masterfully written personal saga, "Not Even My Name" has considerable historical value: indeed it is the first testimony in English about the destruction of Greek and Assyrian communities that stamped the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923; these episodes of massacre and expulsion are not as well known as the Armenian genocide of 1915, even though they share with it the ghastly concept of "death march", an ingeniously cruel way of annihilating unwanted minorities. While, unlike the Germans, the Turks do have some "legal defense" arguments based on invasions by Greece and Russia, their actions would undoubtly be classified as war crimes (if not genocide) by today's standards and principles. Brilliantly, the book starts and ends with the authors' search for their destroyed village. In addition to adding suspense to the story, this search carries positive messages of hope, remembrance and reconciliation. Indeed it is only with the kind help of local Turks that Sano Halo manages to find the ruins of her village; her stay on its muddy slopes is as brief and rewarding as that of an alpinist on a tempestuous mountain top, complete with a simple potato meal offered by a local Turkish woman -- the same potatoes she and other children had cooked during a daring outing in the early, happy days in "Iondone" (Agios Antonios, Saint Antony). The pace of those death marches was quick, fully in tune with Ataturk's frenzy to build modern Turkey. So quick that the victims were not allowed to stop in order to bury their dead, or at least carry them along and bury them at night. In one of the death march's most harrowing moments, Sano describes how they came across the copse of a girl from their village, "buried" under a book affectionately placed between her crossed hands and her chest. Such stories between absorbingly written tales of peaceful life, involving boar hunting, water-buffalo carts, necklaces of roasted chestnuts, and much more of considerable interest to the folklorist: life in Anatolia had not changed much over the centuries, and Sano did not know of "the magic light" (electricity) prior to her wedding night in an Aleppo hotel. The dotted line on the inside cover map moves south rather than north, and yet the Black Sea, the sea that brought the Greeks to Pontus in Homer's times -- "pontos" is Homer's "sea" -- and took many of them back to Greece in the 1920's, was so close: instead of finding a new home in Greece, Sano was completely cut off from her Greek roots, to the point of forgetting her archaic Greek dialect. Indeed her isolation from the Greek community, even in New York City, appears to have been total. And that's what the book's title is about: "Sano" is not Greek, not even Assyrian (like "Halo"), just Kurdish; her real name is, or rather was, "Euthemia" ("Joyous").
Rating:
Summary: the power of truth
Review: a true story! it also functions as a novel.
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