Events

 In Family of Shadows Garin Hovannisian presents the history of Armenia, past, present, and future, through the story of three generations of the men in his family: his great-grandfather Kasper, his grandfather Richard, and his father Raffi.   A teenager in 1915 in the village of Kharpert, in what was then western Armenia, Kasper was caught in the chaos of the first genocide of the 20th century -- the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians and the displacement of a historic people from its homeland of three thousand years. He witnessed the murder of his kid brother, his father, and his family. He eventually escaped to the United States and built an agricultural and real estate empire. Growing up on Kasper’s twenty-acre farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley in the 1930s, Richard spoke no Armenian. In junior high school, he was horrified to learn that, according to the class atlas, Armenia did not exist. He resolved to learn Armenian and has spent his life chronicling the nation’s history and campaigning for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Today, Richard is a professor of Armenian history at UCLA and one of the world’s authorities on genocide. A corporate lawyer in Los Angeles, Raffi had visited Soviet Armenia many times. In 1990, he and his immediate family returned for good. When Armenia declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Raffi was handed a fax machine and a building that would soon become the republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Today, Raffi leads Heritage, a national liberal party, in Armenia’s parliament --and will run for president in the 2013 election . A powerful story about the long shadows that history casts on one family, Family of Shadows also perfectly captures Armenia’s history in the last 100 years.   Garin Hovannisian is a graduate of UCLA (06) and of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (M.S., 08). The recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Armenia, he now lives between Los Angeles and Yerevan. His writing on Armenian issues, including the Genocide, has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and many other publications, as well as in major periodicals of the Diaspora, such as The Armenian Observer and the literary journal Ararat.