A century later, history is repeating itself along the Euphrates, where MacKeen traveled the area has once again become a cemetery. The war in Syria now makes travel to the country impossible. By the time she had returned to Syria in 2009, the Bedouin sheikh had died. The Hundred-Year Walk is a harrowing account by Dawn Anahid MacKeen of her grandfather Stepan Miskjians survival during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1918). In Raqqa, Syria, she met a Bedouin sheikh who helped her find the family of the Arab sheikh who saved her grandfather’s life.
In 2006, MacKeen discovered four more notebooks just as she was about to quit the book for lack of additional information. He escaped countless times, and all that he witnessed almost died with him. Her grandfather barely survived the Armenian genocide. But several factors almost kept her from writing this astounding piece of history. MacKeen is an award-winning investigative journalist who has written for places like the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Elle, and Newsday. And it’s in the desert that Dawn finds the unexpected: the secret to Stepan’s survival. It’s filled with edge of your seat escapes and accounts of lifesaving kindnesses in the harsh desert. In a dazzlingly original work of nonfiction, the two time Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys recreates the exuberance. In the second place, they are determined to domineer over us and establish a. Reading this rare firsthand account, his granddaughter Dawn MacKeen finds herself first drawn into the colorful bazaars before the war and then into the horrors Stepan later endured. The interior minister explained to the American ambassador that August why he was taking such drastic measures with the Armenians: In the first place, they have enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks. The Hundred-Year Walk alternates between Stepan’s saga and another journey that takes place a century later, after his family discovers his long-lost journals. Part reportage, part memoir, The Hundred Year Walk alternates between Stepan’s tale of resilience and Dawn’s remarkable journey, giving us a rare eyewitness account of the twentieth century’s first large-scale genocide. The Hundred-Year Walk Quotes Showing 1-3 of 3.
See the green hills surrounding his Adabazar, where his dreams of becoming the town’s first courier had taken root, before they withered and died in the desert.” But she had to “taste his thirst, touch the land where he walked. Stepan kept meticulous journals of his entire story, a “road map to his life,” which MacKeen felt compelled to follow by traveling to Turkey and Syria to walk in his steps-a dangerous venture since it was illegal there to even mention this part of history. Growing up, Dawn MacKeen heard fragments of her grandfather Stepan Miskjian’s story, of how he was swept up in the deadly mass deportation of Armenians during World War I and of how he miraculously managed to escape. Inspired to retrace his steps, she sets out alone to Turkey and Syria, shadowing her resourceful, resilient grandfather across a landscape still rife with tension.The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey by Dawn MacKeen is the inspiring story of a young Armenian’s harrowing escape from genocide and of his granddaughter’s quest to retrace his steps The Hundred-Year Walk alternates between Stepan's saga and another journey that takes place a century later, after his family discovers his long-lost journals.
In his desperate bid for survival, Stepan dons disguises, outmaneuvers gendarmes, and, when he least expects it, encounters the miraculous kindness of strangers. Just before killing squads slaughter his caravan during a forced desert march, Stepan manages to escape, making a perilous six-day trek to the Euphrates River. He is separated from his family as they are swept up in the government's mass deportation of Armenians. Dawn Anahid MacKeen Emily Woo Zeller Neil Shah - In the heart of the Ottoman Empire as World War I rages, Stepan Miskjian's world becomes undone. Gradually realizing the unthinkable-that they are all being driven to their deaths-he fights, through starvation and thirst, not to lose hope. Get this from a library The hundred-year walk : an Armenian odyssey. He is separated from his family as they are swept up in the government's mass deportation of Armenians into internment camps. In the heart of the Ottoman Empire as World War I rages, Stepan Miskjian's world becomes undone.