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PASSAGE TO ARARAT

by MICHAEL J. ARLEN

293 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95.

"They were not me and I could never be them." This wholly false conclusion is drawn by the author on his self-styled "voyage" backward through memory, history and time itself. "I" is Michael J. Arlen, the New Yorker critic and memoirist; "they" are Armenians, an obscure folk of Asia Minor who happen to be his blood relatives. For despite an elegant Anglo-American breeding, despite the aristocratic postures of his father, Michael Arlen is the son of Dikran Kouyoumjian, few generations removed from the peasant villages of Transcaucasia.

In an earlier volume, Exiles, Arlen was a prep school Telemachus, searching for the truth about his late parent, author of The Green Hat and other best-selling novels of the '20s, who had succumbed to writer's block, deprecation and obscurity. In that poignant volume the son could only compile small sorrows and acts of redemption. However acute, Exiles was the work of a miniaturist. In Passage to Ararat, Arlen set himself a near-Homeric task: the recovery of a forgotten people. To accomplish that mission he has performed a series of brilliancies: his research is irreproachable, his ear infallible. His writing retains a clarity and fury that animates each line. The tribes of the Bible leap from the page; the victims of mass murder speak out after decades of silence. Immigrants to the New World, exiles of the U.S.S.R., crack jokes at the devil and embrace the present with a gusto that belies their wretched past.

Armenia, Arlen notes, was a small nation placed by God and geography on the outskirts of the world's great central empires. Rising from the Human and Hittite tribes of the Euphrates, the Armenians enjoyed a brief spring as soldiers and artisans, then sank into the shadows of barbarian tribes and civilized conquerors from Darius the Great to the Young Turks of this century. The Armenians had made two crucial wagers: on Christianity and the growing power of Europe. But the gamblers, observes their chronicler, "had been in the wrong part of the world to make these bets—or at any rate to hope to collect on them."

Voyeuristic Shudder. Bad times became a way of life. The Muslim Ottoman Empire reduced Armenians to second-class citizens; then, as Asia Minor lurched toward "modernity," Turkey began its series of oppressions. They ended with lethal, unprovoked sweeps across the hills, torturing and killing no one knows how many millions. In 1910, a recent Oxford graduate named Arnold Toynbee meticulously described the "fiendish" mutilations and abasements. As late as 1918 Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, protested the mass killings of Armenian women and children. The Turkish Minister of the Interior gave a blanket reply to such plaintiffs: "Those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow."