Excerpt from The Hundred-Year Walk by Dawn Anahid MacKeen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She'd repeat this tale on loop. As she saw it, any occasion — during a morning bowl of Cheerios or after a piece of birthday cake — was the right time to recount her father's near-death experience. 

His story had truly haunted her childhood too, when days would begin and end with Baba in tears as he retold what he'd witnessed. He made a new home for his family in Spanish Harlem, but they were so poor she slept in a hammock. Perhaps looking into his daughter's innocent face reminded him of the thousands of children in their orphan uniforms who had paraded past him in the camps on their way to be slaughtered. He had lost almost everything in the ethnic cleansing; all he had was his story. This was our family's heirloom, our most precious bequest, and it was inherited by every subsequent generation — along with the burden of telling it again. 

Still, as a kid, I retained nothing from the much-repeated saga but the single detail that he'd drunk his own urine to survive in the desert. Repulsed, I'd always ask, "Why would anyone do that?" 

"It's because he was Armenian and faced very difficult times," my mother would explain. "It's all here." 

And then she'd pull out two small booklets published by an Armenian press in the 1960s: her dad's firsthand account of his survival, focused on the period when he was fleeing the Turks in Mesopotamia. 

I would stare at the hundreds of pages of Indo-European script, unable to cross the language barrier and uncover the secrets of his memoir, a narrative he'd begun writing in the 1930s and continued working on for the rest of his life. 

My mother had spent many years attempting to translate these booklets into English. This wasn't just her personal desire to share our family's trials but part of an attempt to educate the world and ensure that ethnic cleansing never happened again. Her father's story was the story of the forgotten genocide. The trains stuffed with people, the death marches, the internment camps. All were familiar horrors to me, to my generation, but the images I'd seen were from the Holocaust of World War II. As the Jews would be, the Armenian minority had been demonized as a threat to society. The Ottoman Empire used the global tumult of World War I as a cover. The majority of the two million Ottoman Armenians had been forced from their homes and deported to barren regions they had seen only on maps, if at all. 

From 1915 to 1918, an estimated 1,200,000 Armenians perished. Those who managed to stay alive were scattered across the globe. My mother's surviving aunts and uncles lived in Turkey, France, and the United States—something I had previously thought was a little glamorous. After learning more about my family history, I found it heartbreaking. Entire families had been lost or severed from one another. Stateless, some of them drifting like embers after a fire, the rest just ashes.

Excerpted from The Hundred-Year Walk by Dawn Anahid MacKeen. Copyright © 2016 by Dawn Anahid MacKeen. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.