My grandmother was Kurdish. She was from Van, in what is now eastern Turkey. What my family has told me is that her parents were killed in the Ottoman-era violence there. As a child, early in the 1900s, she walked from Van to Aleppo, with an uncle and her younger sister. My aunts say she was holding her sister’s hand. Somewhere along the way, her sister was lost and never found. In Aleppo, while she was still a child, her guardians married her off to a much older man.
