A Holocaust survivor novel maps Armenian massacres onto the Shoah through shared anti-Semitic perception.

Evidence

For Senocak, the theme of the Jew as the oriental/Eastern Jew and as the hybrid, evoked in Zadie Smith’s novel, is part of a theme of Turkish acculturation into contemporary German culture. It has an analogy in The Story of the Last Thought (Das Märchen von letzten Gedanken; 1991) by the Jewish survivor-author Edgar Hilsenrath. This account of the Armenian massacres ends in Auschwitz because the Armenian protagonist, a survivor of the massacres as an infant, looks too Jewish as an adult. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 767

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: Narrative spark: a protagonist who survives one genocide as an infant, then killed later because adult appearance re-reads as the ‘wrong’ ethnicity — persecution that outlasts its own historical moment via perceptual recurrence.