LOST WORDS

An Armenian grandfather reflects on his past.

Cooking with his mama, a young boy has no reason to believe anything is out of the ordinary. But people are leaving town, and Mama tells the child and his sisters that they must go, too. She and their father will follow soon. The boy has much he wants to express, but he has lost the words. He endures a long, weary march through the desert and makes it to safety but doesn’t reunite with his parents. The boy grows older and has children and grandchildren. The pain recedes, but the words don’t return—until his grandson, on a day so like the first, asks where they are from. Stories of the Armenian genocide are rarely committed to paper, but nearly every diasporic Armenian family has them, keeping them as close as the ubiquitous sepia-toned photos of relatives whose lives were lost but whose names remain. Though inspired by the experiences of the author’s husband’s grandfather, this is also the story of the countless children forced to leave their homes for reasons they couldn’t articulate and of their children and grandchildren, who will always strive to know where they come from. The warm, soft illustrations add a dreamlike quality to the spare words, moving in their simplicity. The tale might seem detached on the surface, but it can hardly be anything else, when the words to tell it fully have been lost.

Heartbreaking yet warmly tinged with hope.