Description: Official Website for There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia and Beyond
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“Toumani’s emotional responses to her experience in Turkey, and her honesty in navigating and describing them, lend her story the authority that can come only from a storyteller who recognizes that history is a matter of both fact and feeling. Although this book offers plenty of insight — funny, affectionate, often frustrated — into a unique diasporic culture, Toumani is ultimately less interested in what makes a person Armenian, Turkish or anything else than in what can happen when we start to think beyond
—Joanna Scutts, THE WASHINGTON POST
“[A] superb narrative... Toumani, with admirable courage and the enviable skills of a more experienced historian, has written a memoir that delicately walks the line between the subjective nature of memoir and the objective details of the past.”