Dimensions
237 x 160 x 27mm
A teenager in 1915 in the village of Kharpert, in what was then western Armenia, Kasper was caught in the chaos of the first genocide of the 20th century -- the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians and the displacement of a historic people from its homeland of three thousand years. He witnessed the murder of his kid brother, his father, and his family. He eventually escaped to the United States and built an agricultural and real estate empire.
Growing up on Kasper's twenty-acre farm in California's San Joaquin Valley in the 1930s, Richard spoke no Armenian. In junior high school, he was horrified to learn that, according to the class atlas, Armenia did not exist. He resolved to learn Armenian and has spent his life chronicling the nation's history and campaigning for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Today, Richard is a professor of Armenian history at UCLA and one of the world's authorities on genocide.
A corporate lawyer in Los Angeles, Raffi had visited Soviet Armenia many times. In 1990, he and his immediate family returned for good. When Armenia declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Raffi was handed a fax machine and a building that would soon become the republic's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Today, Raffi leads Heritage, a national liberal party, in Armenia's parliament--and will run for president in the 2013 election
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A powerful story about the long shadows that history casts on one family, Family of Shadows also perfectly captures Armenia's history in the last 100 years.
