The title Paradise Lost works as a pun on two levels. The British writer Giles Milton is the author (no relation, I assume, to the classical poet John Milton). "Paradise" was the name of the Smyrna neighborhood of wealthy British and other European merchant families that had made Smyrna their home for several generations. This neighborhood was certainly "lost" to those families, as Smyrna was lost to the Christian population that had lived there for nearly two thousand years. But since the events described in the book amount to a horrifying tragedy in which hundreds of thousands of people were brutally killed, the punning should have been avoided.
The title aside, this is a terrific book. It recounts the history leading up to the massacres of Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna, and the expulsions of their populations in 1922. The Greek army's ill-conceived occupation of the city following WWI, and its nearly insane expedition to defeat the nationalist Turkish forces that followed, along with the atrocities by both sides, and the ultimate defeat of the Greek army, are all dramatically recounted.
I found it hard to put down, and the last few chapters, which narrate day by day the terrible weeks of September 1922, kept me up at night reading. Milton does the right thing by telling his story from the point of view of members of these wealthy clans. It's a fresh perspective on the Smyrna tragedy, and one that most modern day readers will be better able to understand. These family members, with their middle class British sensibilities, probably seem familiar to most modern American readers, more so than the village Greeks, Armenians and Turks of that era.
For American readers unfamiliar with those events, this is a great book to read. The awful scenes in the streets of Smyrna and on the Smyrna quay were created by great power politics combined with the constantly-stoked frenzy for ethnic revenge. This is foreign to most Americans -- no foreign country has ever manipulated armies and politics and resources here, nor pitted one ethnic or racial group against another. We have the racial and class divide, and memories of slights and injustice, but nothing on this scale. We don't know what it's like.
And what can you say about Asa Jennings? I haven't read his story before, but if we're to believe this account, Jennings was the American YMCA director who took it on himself to cajole and con the demoralized Greek Navy and the reluctant navies of the major powers into rescuing tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees desperately waiting on the quay for days. There should be statues of him and streets named after Asa Jennings all over Greece.
No comments:
Post a Comment