Orhan's Inheritance

Starred review from February 1, 2015
In Ohanesian's debut novel, a Turkish man confronts secrets about his family and his country's history and is faced with an impossible choice: Should the past remain in the past, or should all stories, even the most painful, come to light? When his grandfather dies, Orhan returns from Istanbul to the small village where he grew up and the contentious relationship he shares with his father; the tension is exacerbated when his grandfather's will reveals that he has left the family dye business to Orhan and the family house to a strange woman in an Armenian-American nursing home. While the rest of the nursing home prepares for an exhibit called "Bearing Witness: An Exhibit About Memory and Identity," Seda at first refuses to talk to Orhan about her connection to his grandfather. When she finally unburdens herself, giving voice to a harrowing tale of unimaginable sacrifice, he must decide what to do with this new information about his family and about the horrors of his country's history. In a complex balance, Ohanesian often condemns language as insufficient to convey these stories of loss and pain, while at the same time recognizing that telling the story can be cathartic and even universally necessary. The heart of the novel seems to suggest that "[t]here is only what is, what happened. The words come much later, corrupting everything with meaning." There are deep reflections on guilt, both collective and individual, and the power of memory to destroy or to heal. By rejecting the power of the written word but also, in writing a novel, relying on it to be powerful, Ohanesian explores both sides of this argument about bearing witness to Turkey's terrible legacy. A novel that delves into the darkest corners of human history and emerges with a tenuous sense of hope.

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Starred review from April 15, 2015

The death of 93-year-old Kemal Turkolu, founder of a Turkish kilim dynasty, throws his family into upheaval when his will (contradicting Turkish inheritance laws) assigns the rug business to his grandson Orhan, bypassing Kemal's embittered son, Mustafa. Worse, the family home in Anatolia is left to an elderly Armenian woman living in a Los Angeles retirement community. Who is this Seda Melkonian, whose legacy threatens to evict Mustafa and the irrepressible Auntie Fatma? Orhan travels to L.A. to get Seda to sign her rights back to the family and to uncover the connection to his grandfather. "Nobody does sorrow like the Armenians," Seda's niece Ani tells Orhan, and the story that Seda gradually reveals is one of heartbreaking loss and unending grief. In 1915 she and her family were swept up in the mass deportations and killings of over a million Christian Armenians by a crumbling Ottoman empire. VERDICT Traveling back and forth in time from 1915 to 1990, Ohanesian's beautifully written debut brings to life a historic tragedy that Turkey still denies ever happened. At times the brutality depicted makes for painful, shocking reading, but this is also a story of love and hope as one young man awakens to painful truths about his country's past. What is most astonishing is how sympathetically drawn Ohanesian's Turkish characters are. Moving and unforgettable. [Read the author's essay on p. 81; see also "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/15.]--Wilda Williams, Library Journal

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2015
Stretching back and forth through time over the course of the twentieth century, Ohanesian's heartrending debut chronicles the painful odyssey of one family against the broader backdrop of the Armenian genocide. When his grandfather, a successful Turkish businessman, dies, Orhan travels back to his native village, where he learns that his grandfather has unexpectedly willed his textile business to him, rather than to his father. Even more distressing than this humiliating break with tradition is the fact that the family's ancestral home has been left to an unknown woman residing in an Armenian American nursing home in Los Angeles. Commissioned to travel to the U.S. to meet this woman and get her to sign over the house to his father, Orhan is compelled to unravel the mystery of his grandfather's past and his family's role in a shameful period of his country's history. Ohanesian does a remarkable job of conveying the weight and the influence of time and place without excusing or excluding the human dimension that necessarily factors into the unfolding cataclysm.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)