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My Grandmother, By Fethiye Cetin

 

Boyd Tonkin
Thursday 19 July 2012 20:27 BST
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This slim book, gracefully written and elegantly translated by Maureen Freely, bears a heavy history.

Cetin, a human-rights lawyer in Turkey, grew up believing grandmother Seher to be a Muslim Turk like her other relatives.

Much later she discovered the truth about an Armenian girl called Heranus, plucked from the massacres and death-marches of 1915 by a gendarme and brought up in his family.

Millions of Turks have such ancestors. Their stories, with this as a luminous example, now help the historic push for reconciliation.

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