Michael J. ARLEN
( n. 1930 )

In an earlier book, Exiles, Michael J. Arlen created an unforgettable portrait of his parents—especially of his father, the famous Anglo-Armenian novelist of the nineteen-twenties—and of a childhood in the yellow Rolls-Royce era of prewar London and the South of France.
Now, in Passage to Ararat, Michael J. Arlen has gone beyond Exiles with this remarkable account of a journey to discover what his father tried to forget— Armenia. What it is to be an Armenian. What it was to be an Armenian—a descendant of a proud and individual people that conquerors since Darius the
Great had tried to suppress, until the Turks, with their genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century, so nearly succeeded that Adolf Hitler once said: “Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?”
Passage to Ararat is a true story with the drama and resonance of a novel. In this fascinating voyage, there is humor, sadness, marvelous characterizations, and also horror—some glimpses into the lesser-known chambers of "this most murderous of centuries." But perhaps most affectingly, Arlen tells a story as large as a whole people yet as personal and focused as the uneasy bond between a father and a son. For, in writing about his search for Armenia and the Armenians, he has written about anyone who has ever tried to come to terms, not just with a father, but with a father's fears. In the deepest sense, this is a masterful account of the affirmation and pain of kinship in modern times.