July 2, 2013

What type of work and effort goes into constructing a novel set in a specific historical period? Armenian American novelist Nancy Kricorian spent over a decade researching her latest novel that was released this spring.

Kricorian, who was invited to Toronto by the local AGBU Chapter, took us on a journey to Paris under Nazi occupation, the setting of All the Light There Was.

Among community representatives and book lovers, her audience at the Alex Manoogian Cultural Centre also included director Atom Egoyan and his wife, actress Arsinee Khanjian.

AGBU YP member Lori Sroujian presented the novelist as a writer and activist. New York City based Kricorian is a Columbia University graduate and has taught at Rutgers and Yale universities. She has published two novels, Zabelle and Dreams of Bread and Fire, and her poetry has been widely published in literary journals. All the Light There Was, a story of an Armenian family struggling to survive the dark days of Paris, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt this March.

Kricorian said she conceived the idea for the novel after reading about a French Communist resistance network whose leader was a French Armenian poet Missak Manouchian. The novel grew out of questions about how the Armenians in Paris, who were genocide survivors, lived through the Nazi occupation.

The question took her into a prolonged research, visits to Paris and especially to the neighborhood of Belleville, where her protagonist Maral Pegorian’s family lives. She interviewed elderly Armenians who had lived through the occupation and others who were active with French resistance groups. And she discovered their hidden stories, like the one about the blue-eyed, blonde-haired historian Anahide Ter Minassian, whose father took her around to the offices of German officials to prove that Armenians were an Aryan people; or about how as a teenager, singer Charles Aznavour had the task of dumping the uniforms of deserting German soldiers into the sewers of Paris.

Kricorian described how her characters lived with her throughout the stages of writing the book. She would transport herself into their lives in Belleville Paris and go with them through all the hardship and horrors of the occupation. It was a dark time for Paris in both physical and moral terms: repression, violence, food shortages, and blackouts loomed over the city. The German army siphoned off all agricultural products, leaving the French population hungry most of the time. Kricorian said she would crowd the pantry of her Manhattan home with food items that her characters lacked and would feel the cold of Paris on her skin.

Kricorian’s account was enlightening as to how a novel is constructed in the imagination of the author and how involved the Armenian community in Paris was in the French resistance movement. Following the presentation, she took questions from the audience about her meticulous research and about why she chose to tell this particular story.

She said she was fascinated by the Diasporan experience: how genocide survivors, their children and grandchildren cope with their new environments, rebuild and resurrect from the ashes of their past. She also revealed the topic of her next novel—the Lebanese Armenian community living though Lebanon’s civil war.

AGBU Toronto Chair Knar Basmadjian thanked the author for giving us the opportunity to learn more about the workings of her novel and its characters. The reading was followed by a book signing.