Children of Armenia
A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-long Struggle for Justice
Prologue
Memories
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
-- Milan Kundera,
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Gourgen Mkrtich Yanikian was too focused on his mission to be concerned with his depleted finances on the morning of January 27, 1973. He owed $2,400 to creditors and was living off welfare checks and loans from friends which amounted to handouts he could never hope to repay with the $12 in his bank account. Yet he decided to forego a regular room and rent a cottage at $37.10 a night to impress his guests, diplomats from the Turkish Consulate in Los Angeles.
Though rage filled his heart, he coolly followed the plan he had mapped out months earlier. After instructing a hotel maid to clean his room and ordering a buffet lunch to be served at noon, he groomed his woolly mustache and put on a white beret and brown tweed overcoat. Yanikian's vitality belied his age. At seventy-seven, he co ... read full excerpt from: Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-long Struggle for Justice ebook
