“ Inch ge medadzes,” she said, shaking her head, the Armenian words sounding like gibberish to me. Oblivious to me standing there, my mother continued to shake her cropped brown bob back and forth, moving her lips furtively. I couldn’t quite make out her words, drowned as they were by running water and the clank of Corelle plates. It had been just a few weeks since I had moved back into my childhood home, and there I was in the doorway trying to eavesdrop, just like I had back in grade school. So it was no surprise when, in the summer of 2006, I stumbled on her again like this. At the sink, her hands scrubbing a dish, her voice a murmur. Growing up, I would find her in the kitchen, locked in conversation with Mama and Baba. Her readers will be rapt-and a lot smarter by the end.”-Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion¶ “Harrowing.”- Us Weeklyįor as long as I can remember, my mother has been talking to her dead parents.
Dawn uses his journals to guide her to the places he was imperiled and imprisoned and the desert he crossed with only half a bottle of water. In The Hundred-Year Walk MacKeen alternates between Stepan’s courageous account, drawn from his long-lost journals, and her own story as she attempts to retrace his steps, setting out alone to Turkey and Syria, shadowing her resourceful, resilient grandfather across a landscape still rife with tension.
The award-winning story of a young Armenian man’s harrowing escape from the massacre of his people and of his granddaughter’s quest to retrace his steps ¶ “Part family heirloom, part history lesson, The Hundred-Year Walk is an emotionally poignant work, powerfully imagined and expertly crafted.”-Aline Ohanesian, author of Orhan’s Inheritance ¶ Growing up, Dawn MacKeen heard from her mother how her grandfather Stepan miraculously escaped from the Turks during the Armenian genocide of 1915, when more than one million people-half the Armenian population-were killed. ICLE (International Center for Leadership in Education)Ĭustomer Service & Technical Support Portal Into Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, 8-12 And it’s in the desert that Dawn finds the unexpected: the secret to Stepan’s survival.Science & Engineering Leveled Readers, K-5
It’s filled with edge of your seat escapes and accounts of lifesaving kindnesses in the harsh desert. 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. There, he found himself alone and on a grueling death march along the banks of the Euphrates River. Using his newly discovered journals as a guide, she reconstructs her grandfather’s odyssey to the far reaches of the Ottoman Empire. Longing for a fuller picture of Stepan’s life and the lost home her family fled Dawn travels to Turkey and Syria, across a landscape still rife with tension. Growing up, Dawn MacKeen heard fragments of her grandfather Stepan’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.