Washoe County Library System

" Katerina longs to know why her late grandmother, Miriam, refused to talk about the past, especially when she inherits a journal and handwritten letters stashed in a wooden spice box, cryptic treasures written in Armenian, Miriam's mother tongue. On vacation in Cyprus, Katerina finds the key to unlocking her grandmother's secrets and discovers a family legacy of exile and loss. Aged seven, Miriam was expelled from her home in Eastern Turkey...

Using archival film and photographs and interviews with historians and scholars, examines the destruction of over a million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks and the Turkish government's repeated repudiation of the word 'genocide'.

"Starting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the twentieth century. By the end of the First World War, the number of Armenians in what would become Turkey had been reduced by ninety percent--more than a million people. A century later, the Armenian Genocide remains controversial but relatively unknown, overshadowed by later slaughters and the chasm separating...

Relates the true story of Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York who arrived in Smyrna, the richest and most cosmopolitan city of the Ottomon Empire, to teach sports to boys. But instead he worked tirelessly to help rescue more than 250,000 refugees during the genocide of Armenian and Greek Christians.

"One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a woman walks into a doctor's surgery. 'I need to have an abortion, ' she announces. She is nineteen years old and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life." "Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse, all the Kazanci men die in their early forties, so it is a house of women, among them Asya's beautiful, rebellious mother Zeliha,...