Like her grandfather, MacKeen has a gift for reporting. Having escaped his death march through the Syrian desert, he was given sanctuary by a Bedouin leader, Sheik Hammud al-Aekleh, who sympathized with the plight of the Armenians. She retraced his steps from his hometown in Adabazar (now Adapazari), east of Istanbul, to the Syrian city of Raqqua on the Euphrates River. Called a “must read” by the New York Post, The Hundred-Year Walk reframes his memoirs and recounts her own journey to Turkey and Syria in 2007. Grandfather’s writings became the basis for MacKeen’s book, The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey. “’It’s all in here!’ my mother said, pointing to a pair of small booklets, in Armenian, published by my grandfather in the 1960s.” This led to the discovery of a cache of his notebooks, meticulously penned in grandfather’s careful handwriting, setting down his life from before and through the Genocide. If sometimes repulsed, she was always curious. 17 event ahead of Armenian Cultural Month in October. John the Baptist Armenian Church at a Sept. “As a child, I was repulsed by some of those stories,” she said, speaking at St.
(Greenfield, Wis.) Dawn Anahid MacKeen grew up hearing her mother’s stories about her grandfather, Stepan Miskjian, a Genocide survivor who immigrated to America. Their shared story is a testament to family, to home, and to the power of the human spirit to transcend the barriers of religion, ethnicity and even time itself.Dawn Anahid MacKeen on ‘The Hundred-Year Walk’ at Milwaukee-Armenian Cultural Event With his journals guiding her, she grows ever closer to the man she barely knew as a child. Inspired to retrace his steps, she sets off alone to Turkey and Syria, shadowing her resourceful, resilient grandfather across a landscape still rife with tension. Reading this rare firsthand account, his granddaughter Dawn MacKeen finds herself first drawn into the colorful bazaars before the war and then into the horrors Stepan later endured. The Hundred-Year Walk alternates between Stepan’s saga and another journey that takes place a century later, after his family discovers his long-lost journals.
In his desperate bid for survival, Stepan dons disguises, outmaneuvers gendarmes, and, when he least expects it, encounters the miraculous kindness of strangers. Just before killing squads slaughter his caravan during a forced desert march, Stepan manages to escape, making a perilous six-day journey to the Euphrates River carrying nothing more than two cups of water and one gold coin. Gradually realizing the unthinkable - that they are all being driven to their deaths - he fights, through starvation and thirst, not to lose hope. He is separated from his family as they are swept up in the government’s mass deportation of Armenians into internment camps. In the heart of the Ottoman Empire as World War I rages, Stepan Miskjian’s world becomes undone. The book is an epic tale of one man’s courage in the face of genocide and his granddaughter’s quest to tell his story The judges called this book “two stories of courage in one rich narrative: a granddaughter uses her grandfather’s letters and diaries to follow his path through the World War I Armenian Genocide.” She will receive the award for her winning title, The Hundred-Year Walk – An Armenian Odyssey, at the annual ASJA Chicago Conference, November 17-18 at Columbia College Chicago. The American Society of Journalists and Writers has named Dawn Anahid MacKeen winner of its ASJA Writing Awards for Books in the Biography/History category.