The Knock at the Door: A Journey Through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide

By Margaret Ajemian Ahnert
209 pp. Beaufort Books, 2007 $24.95

Reviewed by Nicki Laskowski

Ester was only fifteen years old when she witnessed a man being executed by soldiers and a Christian Church being firebombed and burned to the ground with people inside. Her father was subsequently arrested and her family forced from their home in an event now known as the Armenian genocide. From 1915 to 1923, Armenians like Ester were uprooted from their homes and forced into a “death march” that left 1.5 million dead. Yet Ester survived.

Margaret Ajemian Ahnert’s The Knock at the Door is a dark story, one that depicts the brutality of Ester’s experiences, when simply surviving the day seemed miraculous. But this is also an intimately personal story for Ahnert – Ester is her mother. In the prologue Ahnert writes: “These pages document her life as she told it to me. She was the narrator. I was her scribe. Every scribe leaves a trace of himself in the work. This is the story of us, told together.”

The book is more than a memoir of things past. It sways between Ester’s memories and Ahnert’s interactions with her aging mother, who not only survives but thrives. The past and the present are seamlessly woven together by Ahnert’s consistent use of the first person: her mother’s voice is her voice; her voice is her mother’s voice.

And so these stories seem somehow alive today, living between a mother and daughter, a grandmother and her grandchildren, living within the blood and the heritage that gets passed from one generation to another.

This book could have been depressingly dark and bitter, but the author manages to transform it into a story of hope, hope that the memory of her mother’s experiences will not be forgotten, and that, even in the face of cruelty, the human spirit can prevail.