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Armanoush had a feeling that beneath Auntie Varsenig's constant objection to her reading lay a more structural, if not primordial, concern: a fear of survival. She simply did not want her to shine too bright, to stand out from the flock. Writers, poets, artists, intellectuals were the first ones within the Armenian millet tob e eliminated by the late Ottoman government. They had first gotten rid of "the brains" and only then proceeded to extradite the rest - the laypeople. Like too many Armenian families in the diaspora, safe and sound here but never truly at ease, the Tchakmakhchians were both elated and vexed when a child of theirs read too much, thought too much, and swerved too far away from the ordinary.
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