Not Even My Name (Electronic book text)

"Not Even My Name" is the unforgettable story of Sano Halo'ssurvival of the death march at age 10 that annihilated her family -- astold to her daughter, Thea -- and the poignant mother-daughterpilgrimage to Turkey in search of Sano's home seventy years after herexile. Sano, a Pontic Greek from a small village near the Black Sea, also recounts the end of her ancient, pastoral way of life in the PonticMountains.

The dreadful realization that something was amiss came little by littleto Sano's village. Strangers began to inhabit the fields and forests, always watching from a distance like birds of prey. Turkish soldiersmade periodic raids to seize men for slave labor in foul, lice-infestedcamps, where most died of disease, malnutrition, and exposure. Then inthe spring of 1920, Turkish soldiers pounded on doors with the butts oftheir rifles and shouted the proclamation issued by General Kemal(Ataturk): "You are to leave this place. You are to take with you onlywhat you can carry..." On their death march, victims lay where they felland buzzards hung over their heads. So ended the three-thousand-yearhistory of the Pontic Greeks in Turkey.

Stripped of everything she had ever held dear, even her name, at agefifteen Sano was sold into marriage to a man who brought her to America.He was three times her age. "Not Even My Name" follows Sano'smarriage, the raising of her ten children, and her transformation froman innocent girl who lived an ancient way of life in a remote place to anurturing mother and determined woman in twentieth-century New YorkCity.

Although Turkey actively suppresses the truth about the slaughter ofalmost 3 million of its Christian minorities -- Greek, Armenian,andAssyrian -- during and after World War I, and the exile of millions ofothers, here is a rare, first-hand account of the horrors of thatgenocide. But Sano's story is also one of triumph. A brilliant andmesmerizing memoir written in haunting and eloquen