58 pages • 1 hour read
Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir
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Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Grandmother”
Chapter 1 Summary: “Black Dog of Fate”
This chapter ruminates on the author’s relationship with his Armenian grandmother, Nafina Aroosian, when Peter was a middle-schooler in the northern New Jersey suburbs of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Peter had a close relationship with his grandmother, who lived nearby, despite significant cultural distance between them. During one of their Friday baking sessions at her apartment, his grandmother told the “black dog of fate” story about a young, poor woman’s meager offering to the mythical character Fate in the form of a dead, cooked dog with a “wormy” apple in its mouth. Fate accepted the offering kindly—more kindly than offerings of fine stuffed lambs and rubies from richer visitors (9-10). The author, speaking from the perspective of his young self, did not understand the moral of the story. His grandmother cryptically explained that the dog represented hope and mystery in the human world—that “appearances are deceiving” (11)—but the old story, like many qualities about his grandmother, remained elusive.
In other ways, Peter and his grandmother shared modern interests and spoke in a modern vocabulary that appreciated rock and roll music, construction on the Garden State Parkway, and baseball. The author notes that his grandmother was an avid Yankees fan, and that “she felt the game more deeply than anyone knew” (12). They conversed about the sport, the players, and the management.
Nafina spent many evenings at Peter’s family’s house during the early, frightening years of the Cold War. When Peter secretly observed his grandmother watching the news, praying in Armenian, and smoking a pipe, he did not understand the ritual. These reminders of his grandmother’s past and identity lead Peter to reflect on how little he knew about Armenia, “the old country” that no one seemed to want to talk about directly (16). To Peter, Armenia came to simply mean his grandmother, and vice versa: “Whatever it was, she was. Whatever she was, it was” (17).
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Woman in Blue”
Nafina placed great stock in her dreams and shared them with the family. Peter recalls hearing about her premonitory dreams and her stories that “also had dreamlike qualities about them” (20).
Peter recounts the beginning of a particular story about the titular “woman in blue,” but interjects it with another story about getting lost in Harlem and his grandmother brandishing her cane to defend a man being attacked on a bus. He does not relate the whole story of the woman in blue, who promised protection to a young mother through the church of Mairig Asdvadzadzeen (“mother of God” in Armenian), but the author suggests that the images in the story stuck with him as “part of [his] grandmother’s story” once he came to understand her life (25).
Nafina Aroosian died in November 1964 without warning. Peter took her death hard, especially because he could no longer hear her stories or ask her questions. One question in particular was on his mind, and that was how Neil Sedaka, an American singer, reminded his grandmother of a Turkish Jew that she said she had once known long ago. The author did not understand the connections his grandmother mentioned in passing, and he knew he could never ask her “that simple question” about what it all meant (27).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Freedom, New Jersey”
The chapter opens with a commentary on music and memory. The author recalls the culture of the suburbs and adolescence. He says those memories were “a personal web of sensations” (28) rooted in “the happy society of teenage Tenafly,” New Jersey (31), and expressed in the sounds and lyrics of his 45s (song recordings on vinyl). He references “The Same Old Song” by the Four Tops—a “self-reflexive” song about memory, the fusing of the past and the present, and, to the author, the eternity of song once etched in vinyl.
Other memories were “connected to something larger than [his] life” (30). Nafina remained at the center of an impulse to learn about and relate to the world beyond Peter’s immediate circumstances. He remembered his grandmother and likened her to the Fate character who called on earthbound humans and demanded attention in the story about the black dog (31). A strange memory of his grandmother telling a story, or dream, to her fever-ridden grandson washed over Peter while on a date with his teenage girlfriend. In his stupor, he had heard her reference violent images (or perhaps memories) involving abusive law enforcement, visions of Armenian life, and her suffering family. The memory and its sudden intrusion disturb Peter, who wonders about Armenia, a place he has nearly forgotten to consider in the absence of his grandmother.
Part 1 Analysis
In this early section, the author highlights juxtaposition and builds the tension between mid-century suburban America and “the old country” of his ancestors (16). His grandmother embodies the meeting of the two worlds: she speaks Armenian, ritually bakes ethnic food, and dotes on her oldest grandson in the tradition of generational patriarchy. She also avidly follows Yankees baseball and is a fan of Elvis. These qualities don’t necessarily contradict, but merge to create a multi-dimensional character who is both old and modern, Armenian and American.
The author, in his youth, is mostly the product of his suburban upbringing, but flits in and out of his grandmother’s peripheral Armenian sphere. A case in point is his recollection of regular Friday baking with his grandmother, during which he wore an “oxford button-down, white chinos, and scuffed bucks,” but because he worried about his “Little League friends” thinking he was a “hopeless sissy,” he also kept on his “maroon baseball cap […] as a way of safeguarding [his] masculinity” (6). He admits in the second chapter that time with his grandmother gave him “access to some other world, some evocative place of dark and light” (18), wherein he navigated this sphere between an imagined, ancient Armenia and the everyday trivial concerns of well-dressed and -fed suburban youth.
Especially after recounting his grandmother’s death, the author begins to transition from childhood memories into the larger context of the Armenian past through reflections of his late grandmother. First, he mentions that 1915 was a significant year in his grandmother’s life but does not say why (25). Then, he fixates on a comment she made about knowing a Turkish Jew a long time ago (26). Finally, he recalls a disturbing and distorted memory of her sharing a story about a dark moment in her past. The details are obscure, but she mentioned bleeding, her crying baby, an armed Turk, and the mythical woman in blue (34-35). In the last scene in the section, the author recognizes the importance of that strange story his grandmother told “in clipped, deliberate speech” (36), wondering about the hidden horrors of her past.
The author is still an adolescent when the section ends. In many ways, he had been closer to his Armenian roots in his childhood because he spent so much time with his grandmother. The pace and possibilities of a comfortable young life distanced him from abstract familial concerns or histories after her death, but he never shook the influence Nafina had on him. In his pensive moments as a teenager, he revisits the elusiveness of her quirks and recognizes a larger, concealed story behind her habits, but he is yet to unearth or explore that story.
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