London UK, October 2011 — Ithaca Press has acquired the world English Language rights to publish Through the Wall of Fire: Armenia—Iraq—Palestine; from Wrath to Reconciliation by Muriel Mirak-Weissbach.
This book presents three conflict situations which are still awaiting resolution: Armenia —Turkey, Iraq, and Israel— Palestine. In writing this book, the author sets out to recount the experiences of ethnic cleansing, genocide and war from the viewpoint of those who were children at the time, and to communicate the nature of the trauma that they suffered. The daughter of two orphans, both victims of the 1915 genocide against the Armenians, Muriel grew up with an acute emotional awareness of what that trauma had wrought on her parents’ generation. This autobiographical fact was decisive in shaping her outlook and later work.
In Through the Wall of Fire, she draws a parallel between the victims of genocide and conflict and their quest to overcome the emotional challenges posed by their circumstances, and Dante’s Divine Comedy; particularly the journey to paradise by passing through the Wall of Fire, which she argues provides an insight into the process through which an emotional and moral shift may occur. She argues that the victims of conflict, ‘like the poet, are called upon to shed fears associated with the past, to overcome bestial emotions such as hatred, rage, arrogance and desire for vendetta, and above all to transcend their petty provincialism’.
Ithaca Press is planning to launch this title in August 2012.