Misak: An Armenian Life

Misak: An Armenian Life is Karen Jeppe’s touching and heartfelt account of her adopted son’s experiences from childhood to early adulthood. Set in the city of Urfa and the surrounding areas of the eastern Ottoman Empire, the narrative is both biography and autobiography, with Jeppe weaving her own story into the account. The joint tale, spanning from the 1890s to the years immediately before the outbreak of the First World War, is dramatized for effect and intended to solicit empathy and material support from its readers. In fact, the original audience for this account was the readership of the Danish journal Armeniervennen, the main publication of the Danish aid organization for which Jeppe was a representative in Urfa and later also in the Syrian city of Aleppo. But now this story is also available in English, having been resurrected, so to speak, from the pages of the aforementioned and long-since defunct periodical. A new and broader set of readers can therefore experience Jeppe’s gripping narrative and appreciate her perspective on Armenian life in the late Ottoman Empire.