Deli Sarkis: The Scars He Carried: A Daughter Confronts the Armenian Genocide and Tells Her Father's Story

DELI SARKIS THE SCARS HE CARRIED describes two journeys: The one the author took to discover all she needed to know to get her father’s story written. The second is the most important and that is her father’s journey from his bucolic village life as a child to seeing first hand the destruction of his people in the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. He was an eye-witness to the first Genocide of the Twentieth Century, that of the Armenian people eliminated from their 3,000 year old historic homeland in Anatolia.
Sarkis, a young man, ends up in Iraq in the 1930s when an oil field of unprecedented size was found there. He takes a job as a truck driver and travels throughout the country. All the while Sarkis meets common folk and Arab and Kurdish sheikhs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Yazidi People, Turkmen and Armenians. He even manages the Hotel Farah in Erbil, Iraq. In the mid-1930s he meets a lovely, educated young Armenian woman from Marash, Turkey. They become engaged and marry in 1938. In 1941, Sarkis, Evelyn, and their two young children, Arthur Minas and Ellen Shakeh leave Iraq for the last time. They are on their way to America. More challenges await the young family in America as well as the birth of two more children, Janet Anahid and Lucille Catherine In San Francisco.
Many books have been written about the immigrant experience. What makes this one so compelling is that the places described especially in Iraq are written about daily, in newspapers throughout the world, which makes this a very relevant and timely book. Over all, however is the specter of a disappeared people and the scars left on the psyche of Deli Sarkis.