FROM VAN TO DETROIT SURVIVING THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

From Van to Detroit Surviving the Armenian Genocide by Souren Aprahamian - I waited a long time for this book to be available, and it was worth the wait.  Survivor memoirs is an amazing genre.  How an individual survives, either alone or with others is so random in so many ways.  Luck, strategy, intelligence, luck and more luck are what matters.  In this case, Souren, born in 1907, was still a young boy when his mother literally carried him on her back to save them from being killed by the Turks.  Souren, who was always curious and observant, lived a long life, worked hard and lived 101 years. His story is a history as well as an autobiography, and his writing is clear and detailed.  The reader comes away from this book with a broader understanding of what it was like to live in those times in a big house on the outskirts of a village as the child of a well known and prosperous family.  When around him, others took a wrong turn or made a fateful decision, he and his mom and his nephew kept going and found themselves alive in Detroit, on the other side of the world in a life they never could have imagined during the hard times.