A MANDATE FOR ARMENIA.
By JamesB. Gidney '36. Kent (Ohio): The KentState University Press, 1967. 270 pp. $7.50.
An Armenian assessing a book about Armenia written by an odar (a non-Armenian) begins with a prejudice in the author's favor if only out of an astonished gratitude that the book was written at all. Ever since the nineteen twenties Armenians have become increasingly resigned to the apparent indifference of western scholars to their historical fate and the ignorance of almost everyone else as to their identity. Yet American interest in Turkey from the late 19th century to the end of World War I was for the most part based on American interest in the Armenians. It is with the story of this interest and of how it came to be abandoned that Professor Gidney is concerned in AMandate for Armenia.
Between 1915 and 1917 every Sunday school child in the United States knew that the Armenians in Turkey - where their greatest number was then concentrated were being massacred on an unparalleled scale. The simplistic missionary view perceived the victims as martyrs to Christendom. Mr. Gidney, selecting judiciously from a wealth of materials, puts the burden of intensified Turkish hostility on the interference and ignominy of the western nations and on the intensification of national consciousness within the disintegrating Ottoman Empire.
The Western hand lay heavily on the Armenians. From their point of view wesern intervention on their behalf (which took the form of unfulfilled promises) demonstrated time and again that history could repeat itself with no one the wiser. The essential tragedy of the Armenians, as Mr. Gidney plainly shows, lay in their paucity of choices. After 1918 they had no choice at all but to trust against increasing odds that the United States, on the purely humanitarian grounds it so loudly professed, would accept a mandate over an independ- ent Armenia in northeastern Turkey.
With refreshing lucidity the author describes the manner in ' which these hopes were progressively doomed, maintaining a scholarly objectivity without sacrificing his evident compassion for the victims. One has to read related works to appreciate the measure of his accomplishment.
Mrs. Dobkin, Associate in English at Bainard College, has written a novel and anumber of short stories and articles underher maiden name. She is now working on anon-fiction book about the Near East.
