Beautifully illustrated children’s novel touches on the Armenian Genocide of 1915
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch first heard about the Armenian Genocide seventeen years ago while doing research for a magazine article about the first “Georgetown Boys” — a group of 47 Armenian orphans who were rescued by Canada in 1923 and were housed and schooled at a farm in Georgetown Ontario.
After interviewing the son of a “Georgetown Boy,” Marsha was left with more questions than answers. For example, why were all of the rescued orphans male? Why were they all between the ages of eight and twelve? What happened to their parents? What happened to their sisters?
The search for answers launched Marsha on a decade-long path of discovery. She read everything she could find about the Armenian Genocide, including missionary diaries, personal accounts, history texts and newspaper accounts. She also found a treasure-trove of information at the Multicultural Historical Archives of Ontario which houses a collection of taped oral interviews with the “boys” themselves. She initally listened to these interviews in the early 1990s but was not allowed to listen to them all because some of the interviews were kept confidential until all of the “boys” had died. The last Georgetown Boy died several years ago, and so Marsha went back and listened to the rest of the tapes.
What she discovered gave her the material to write Aram’s Choice, the story of one orphan’s journey from Turkey in 1923 all the way to Georgetown Ontario. The book is based on true events.
Here’s the cover:
http://www.fitzhenry.ca/detail.aspx?ID=9541
