Operation Nemesis

March 16, 2015
Fans of Bogosian’s one-man shows (Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead) will recognize his provocative sensibility in this book’s very first paragraph, in which he recalls being told by his grandfather, “If you ever meet
a Turk, kill him.” Bogosian doesn’t linger on this advice, given to him when he was four: he presents it as an alarming but not unusual consequence of the Armenian genocide of 1915, which his grandfather escaped (but other family members did not). From there, Bogosian drops the memoir and launches into an engrossing, heavily-researched account of Operation Nemesis, the code name for an international campaign, carried out by Armenian survivors, to assassinate the various Turkish heads of state who orchestrated the genocide. The details read like a Hollywood epic, but Bogosian plays it straight, letting the facts tell the story without sensationalizing or romanticizing. Though the author is well known as a playwright, actor, and novelist (Perforated Heart), this is his first work of nonfiction, and the book’s scope is ambitious: it also covers centuries of Armenian history and the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. For those familiar with this terrain, Bogosian has uncovered a little-known aspect of it in fascinating detail. For everyone else, this is a highly readable introduction.

Author and actor ("Law and Order") Eric Bogosian reads his carefully compiled history of a group of Armenian survivors, members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, who banded together to avenge the more than one million deaths of Armenians at the hands of the Turks in 1915. The group's goal was the assassination of six Turkish leaders in Berlin, Constantinople, Tiflis, and Rome. In a clear, steady voice, Bogosian recounts the complex relationship between the Armenians and the Ottoman Empire from its beginnings through the early twentieth century. Bogosian switches from Turkic, Arabic, Greek, and European languages without hesitation, moving the story forward to its terrible conclusion. More than a century after the Armenian massacre, Bogosian's detailed historical account of the assassination of the Turkish leaders teaches listeners about both the genocide and its aftermath. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine