I knew she had a profound story to tell and that she didn’t think telling it would do the world much good. I decided she was wrong. But the more I pursued her, the quieter she became. And then she was silent. She kept her words and thoughts from me for months, but it didn’t matter. I was hooked. I knew hers was the story I had to tell.
By then, I had gained a lot of experience with silent characters. There was Nene, of course, who never discussed her past with me again. Later, as a student of history, I’d spent hours teasing out the faint voices of women and children in the archives. Untold stories had become my specialty. But how do you write a novel about a character who refuses to speak? I didn’t have a clue. I tried looking into the old woman’s past and what I could conjure up suddenly resembled the villages of my great-grandmother’s past. I was filling in all the parts of the story Nene never got to tell me.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that voice turned out to be the voice of Seda, one of my main characters, and she led me out of my graduate program and into the throes of a six-year journey that resulted in Orhan’s Inheritance.
Orhan came after Seda, but he fascinated me from the start. A young Turkish businessman living in Istanbul in 1990, Orhan isn’t especially interested in history. History books in Turkey ignore the Armenian Genocide, and the government still denies it ever happened. What happened in Turkey one hundred years ago doesn’t really concern Orhan, but I desperately wanted it to. I wanted the Orhans of the world to know what happened to my great-grandparents. I wanted their stories to be heard and their losses validated. I wanted him to learn from me, but the truth is I learned a great deal from him too, and so did Seda. These two characters, one ignorant of his family’s and his nation’s past, and the other sick of the toll the past has taken on her life, meet and are forced to weave their pasts together to make sense of their lives.
For me, the hidden stories of people, families, and places, exotic or familiar, aren’t meant to be entombed in silence. When uncovered and shared, they make the world just a little bit better. When I think back to Captain von Trapp singing “Edelweiss,” what I remember most is the palatable longing in his voice as he crooned the last verse, “Bless my homeland forever.” Orhan’s Inheritance is my contribution to the soundtrack of Ottoman and Armenian history, a history rich with story, romance, danger, and second chances. And one I hope readers will return to again and again.
Aline Ohanesian’s great-grandmother was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Her history was the kernel for the story that Ohanesian tells in her first novel, Orhan’s Inheritance. Ohanesian was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for fiction and Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. She lives and writes in San Juan Capistrano, California, with her husband and two young sons. Her website is www.alineohanesian.com. (Author photo by Raffi Hadidian.)