Your Rejoice My Heart [Second Edition]
London: Gomidas Institute, 2024,
xiv + 396 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-909382-80-0, pb.,
UK£25.00 / US$30.00
To order please contact books@gomidas.org
You Rejoice My Heart reflects the author’s encounter with deeply uncomfortable truths regarding the mass persecution of Armenians in his native Turkey, a subject he engages in the most open and compassionate manner. "During the preparation of my book, I knocked on the doors of many Armenians. None of these people knew me before. For the first time, a Turk was asking about their backgrounds and wanted to revive their ‘memories’ that had been covered up and forgotten. These people trusted me and opened their doors, their hearts, their thoughts. They opened up and told me about their own or their families’ life stories. I saw that the Armenians I met were experiencing a pain that they could not express and did not wish to express. As they spoke, I realized that every Armenian was a drop from a sea of pain, a flower blooming on the fire, a broken heart. This book helps us to get to know the Armenians with whom we have lived for centuries, a people with their own history, culture, and national identity. I wanted to feel and understand the pain they carried within them, and to think about our past in a healthy, warm and friendly way.”
–From the Turkish edition of this work, Seninle Güler Yüreğim (2006).
About the Author
Map showing principal locations in You Rejoice My Heart
Preface to the Second Turkish Edition
Part One: It never occurred to me to ask
Meline, the Turkish language Teachers’ instructor
Meline is ill
"We’ve escaped death”
Part Two: On the road
The start of the journey
Looking for Armenians in Amasya
Madam Safiye - My heart did what it pleased
The Sivas train
The time of the Deportation
Do You Know What a Place Looks Like After a Fire?
In Taşova
An accounting on the way to Erbaa
Snow and thunderstorms in the mountains of Erzurum
Mustafali from Denizli
The things I heard in Aşkale
Baba Yusuf of Aşkale
How do you get to Ani?
Spring never came to Ani before you did
Ohan Özant of Amasya and Vahram Karabent of Merzifon
Ohan Özant from Amasya
Vahram Karabent of Merzifon
The calamity didn’t spare the Greeks, either…
Despite everything, we survived…
Part Three: Meline’s world
I saw my own prejudices when I loved you…
The past that made Meline who she is
Meline, the concierge’s daughter
The Capital Tax
"Don’t let the girl end up a blind chicken!”
Kirkor Ceyhan
"I’m from Zara, I’ve always looked for Zara…”
The only way to escape death
The past years in Zara
"I lived through the calamity of September -, ”
"I should pack up and go to a more peaceful country!”
"I’ve always looked for Zara…”
"If I’ve been able to make it this far....”
Meline’s Hunger Strike
"Come, Meline: you’ll go on with life even without your father!”
"I saw a pair of eyes! It’s all over!”
"There’s one more chance”
Madam Kalustyan’s crime
Crossroads
Who really was the person behind that bewitching pair of eyes?
Part Four: Kegham İşkol’s students and friends
Is that how May is in Istanbul these days?
Zakarya from Kayseri
"How did this happen?”
In the schoolyard of the Şişli Karagözyan Orphanage
The things my father told me...
A man seeking his village
"Why didn’t I look into my own past?”
Jale of Şebinkarahisar
The marriage of a Turk and an Armenian
The power of love
The reasons for hatred of the Armenians
Master Sarkis of Karaman: "We shouldn’t have let him
beat the priest…”
"We married in order to put an end to this poverty!”
The calamity they call the "Deportation”
You must endure what fate brings to you
"I am going to send my children to school, no matter what!”
We were called "infidel soldiers”
Moving to İstanbul
The night of September 6-7, 1955,
What’s the reason for this century-long hostility?
"I’ve never been a nationalist”
Since I’ve grown old, I’ve started to look for traces of my childhood
"We shouldn’t have let him beat the priest…”
Part Five: Crypto-Armenians
The Armenian Haci İbrahim from Kâhta
"My father’s prayers”
"The things that befell my father…”
"We were all living alone, in fear...”
Others of "our kind” in Kâhta
Those things that Veli Dede experienced
They snatched my mother and took her away’
The Armenian disease
"Attack the infidel quarter!”
"Milla Çelebi roused me from my slumber”
Red mark in their identity cards
"Fear, always the fear!”
Sultan Bakırcıgil: "Infidel ants!”
"We don’t have anything to laugh about”
My father’s moods
The bitterness of having to hide one’s origins
Part Six: "See what happens to a young man when he goes abroad”
The years abroad
"Give me your hand, Paris”
"Like a fish out of water”
"I have to find a job and start working”
"My right to live is finally recognized”
The dictionary of Armenian mythology
"There’s one other possibility, but it, too, might mean death”
Black earth under the snow
Part Seven: My heart laughs with you
Kegham’s grave
"Our religions are different, our God is the same”
"My heart laughs with you”
A final note
Appendix
Responses to You Rejoice My Heart (Turkish edition)
Destruction of first Turkish edition of You Rejoice My Heart