58 pages • 1 hour read
Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir
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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Mother”
Chapter 4 Summary: “An Armenian Jew in Suburbia”
Though Peter has already introduced the reader to the comforts of middle-class suburbia, this chapter opens with a critique of suburbia, as told by Auntie Anna, one of the many Balakians that gathered for weekly family feasts. She says suburbia “would be the ruin of America” (40), a place for the lost and decultured American bourgeoise. The author’s mother defends the suburbs as a safe and healthy community, despite reports that came out even by 1960 about “the moral decay of suburban life—divorce, alcoholism, adultery, juvenile delinquency” (41).
Peter cherishes suburbia because he lives in close proximity to friends and they have room to play baseball, and he wants to fit in. He wonders why, with such an abstract connection to Armenia, his family can’t be Jewish like all of their neighbors: “If only I were Jewish, I thought, things would be better” (45). Peter reasons, “Like my mother said, we were American. We didn’t’ go to church bazaars or Armenian gatherings. We didn’t talk about Armenia. I couldn’t even speak the language” (45). His cultural distance from his friends particularly arose when they publicly displayed the “language and rituals they carried out each week that were bound up in thousands of years of history and stories and ideas” that Peter didn’t understand (47).
Balakian calls Part 2 of the book “Mother,” and he gives a better sense of his mother, Arax Aroosian, and her significance in his life. The first bit of information is physical: In her blouse and apron, she is “at once decorous and casually suburban, with dark wavy hair cut short against her fair, freckled skin” (39). She voices appreciation for the suburbs and seems altogether proper and normal in the context of her middle-class life. As she speaks throughout the chapter, usually just a few sentences of dialogue at a time, she delivers poignant remarks that foreshadow developments in the author’s memoir. For example, she tells him not to “get too attached to places in life” (49). Peter notes that he thought her response was strange, but does not understand the weight behind the words. He merely detests his parents for their announcement that the family was moving from one suburb (Teaneck) to another (Tenafly).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Tahn on Crabtree Lane”
Peter’s immediate world changes when the family settles in Tenafly in 1960. They “had custom built a house in a new development of about twenty-five houses on an apple orchard that had belonged to a nineteenth-century estate” (50).Tenafly was an “elite American town” that altogether made the author feel both more American and also more Armenian (50). His mother routinely obsesses over the new house on Crabtree Lane, overseeing its construction and meticulously decorating every detail in her own unyielding vision.
Though the author was reluctant to leave his friends behind, the Crabtree Lane house wins him over with its many amenities and appliances. With the sheer force of American consumerism and suburban impersonality so present, however, Peter’s parents double down on Armenian cultural traditions, particularly cuisine (often featuring lamb and onions) and ritual dining. Arax particularly obsesses over preparing dinners that are either traditionally Armenian or “hybrids of southeastern Armenia and North America” (54). Food preparation and presentation take a lot of effort, but “her passion for food was both cultural and temperamental, part of the way she defined herself in the wake of the Armenian past and the suburban present” (54). Like her mother, she was not distinctly Armenian or distinctly American, but a product of a diaspora through which those worlds meshed. She embraced certain elements of both countries and denied others.
Once, in France, she refused to pay for a sub-par meal from a prominent restaurant, which resulted in the family’s expulsion and an under-the-table arrangement with local law enforcement. The author contextualizes her reaction in “her feminine, Armenian, post-Genocide disposition” (56). Her repressed past could bubble over into “a statement of beauty and sometimes rage that asserted itself in the name of things culinary” (56). Good, precisely prepared food bears great significance to her, with a family history so close to both starvation and also cultural resurgence through cooking.
Peter then discusses the youth hierarchy in the new town, ruled by Andy Wall and the “oldest, strongest, and most cunning” kids on the block (58). Seemingly free from parental admonishment, they patrol and harass the neighborhood. The dynamic angers Peter’s parents, who finally show some disdain for suburban culture symbolized by absent parents and their bland casseroles. Peter himself is not quite so critical, still wanting to fit in with the unhyphenated Americans around him.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Threads of Silk”
Peter brings up silk in the context of his maternal family’s long history of producing and selling it. Caring for silks for so many generations (even after the family moved to America, where the author’s grandparents cleaned and tailored silk garments) instilled in the family “the ritual of critically evaluating everything material and aesthetic” (67). Peter routinely experiences this practice when he models every new item of clothing for all of his aunts and grandmother, who either approve or vehemently deny the selections. The family also discusses dinners, from the presentation to the taste, in detail, while “all matters concerning decoration [consume] hours, weeks, months, even years…” (68). The author recalls regular slow drives through nearby neighborhoods with his mother, her sisters, and his grandmother, devoted to window shopping for houses. For the most part, the women criticized the houses they passed (in loud voices and with open windows).
There is a larger context for their impulse to asses taste levels and design aesthetics. The author suggests that even though “there was something vicarious, voyeuristic, and sublimated about their harsh opinions,” he also wonders, “Or was it that nothing in the material world was good enough for the heiresses of the family silk fortune lost to the Turks when the Armenians were driven from their homeland?” (69). This is yet again a passing reference to the atrocities in the Armenian past, though the author still has not provided much history or detail on the matter.
Part 2 Analysis
This section again backtracks to the author’s young childhood. As the author recounts his upbringing, his mother (and to a lesser degree, her sisters) takes center stage in his memories. Armenia remains on the periphery of his immediate world as he more actively engages with the entities around him, like Judaism, pick-up baseball, and suburban homes.
Peter stresses that the family’s circumstances in their American neighborhoods relate directly to the degree of foreignness that they embody and project. The uniformity and blandness of Teaneck drives the family to intensify and safeguard Armenian traditions, particularly surrounding food and eating. The regular critique of local houses is also an exercise in asserting fine taste in aesthetic matters, “part of some long-inherited past” (67). The author offers enough allusions to the Armenian Genocide to communicate the concept of displacement—Ottoman Turks expelled Armenians from their homelands, but no one eradicated Armenian culture.
Peter repeatedly offers descriptions of material possessions—clothes, household luxuries, even decadent food items—and then imbibes those objects with cultural significance and empowerment. What might initially come across as vanity or pickiness (like the obsession with flawless clothes, exemplary food preparation, and perfectly designed suburban homes), the author then recasts as remnants of a disrupted family tradition that belonged to a different culture—one brutalized by imperial powers.
Peter also offers more direct references to the Armenian Genocide at the heart of the family story, but he still does not explore the history in earnest. The active events in the narrative remain firmly rooted in the United States. Like Nafina, Arax is a product of intersecting cultures, though being a generation younger and raised in the United States, she does not exhibit the type of ethereal wisdom or enigma that Peter attributed to his grandmother. Peter still reflects on his mother’s idiosyncrasies in light of her family’s plight, and he ultimately presents her as a suburban mother steeped firmly in “the duties of consumerism” while also possessing, in her own estimation, the “superior sensibility of her lineage from a lost Armenian world” (60, 54). There seems to be a much bigger divide between Armenia and America in the author’s generation than in the previous two, though these perceptions come through the eyes of a child. When the author becomes a young adult, he will reflect on his own ethnic identity with more nuance and knowledge.
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