Janine was born in Paris in 1934, between two world wars. She grew up in Les Halles in the very center of the French capital. There were almost no other Armenians around, and unlike the other children of immigrants from her generation, Janine never had to deal with xenophobia.

 

“I was born into a family of merchants from Bursa, we all spoke Turkish,” Janine says. “My maternal grandmother, Luisa Kavafyan, just like the family of my father, was from that city in western Anatolia. In 1929, my paternal grandmother paid her a visit, looking to make a match between her son and Luisa’s daughter. Both of my grandfathers died in the desert, but the widows honored their memory by observing the ancient tradition.”

“My parents never harked back to their terrifying stories from the past. They constantly urged me to work hard, to stay out of poverty,” Janine remembers. But in 1978, eight years after her husband’s death, Janine’s mother Makhtig showed her the diary her father had kept. That was how Janine came to own a manuscript with the unassuming title “August 10, 1915, Wednesday: Everything That I Endured from 1915 to 1919.” She had no way of reading it.

 

“It was written in Turkish but using the Armenian alphabet. I had to find somebody who spoke both languages,” Janine says. She went to the writer Krikor Beledian, asking him to make the translation. “Beledian recreated my father for me. In life, I barely knew him. This was a miracle!” Janine exclaims. In her father’s lifetime, she rarely had the chance to speak to him about their family’s history.

 

In 2009 Janine published a book called “Memories of the Armenian Genocide” based on her father’s diary. Bearing her late father’s name alongside her own, it holds a special place in Altounian’s bibliography.

 

Janine’s father Vahram was the third son of Abraham and Nakhide. Vahram’s father was a grocer and cultivated roses in Bursa. In August 1915, Bursa’s Armenians were given three days to leave the country. Vahram’s elder brothers, Manuk and Arutyun, escaped to Lyon. Abraham, Nakhide, and their younger sons, Haik and Vahram, were deported. It all happened so quickly that they could not even sell their houses. Their property was confiscated.

 

From Bursa they went to Deir ez-Zor, and for three months they lived under the protection of the local stationmaster at Kütahya, where the brothers’ parents were able to earn some money. Then the family was moved on to Afyonkarahisar and later to Konya, Tarsus, Adana, Toprak Kale and Osman. They were starving and it took all of their remaining strength to get to Al-Bab, northeast of Aleppo. T

Vahram wrote in his diary: “The Arab put us on a donkey. Six days later, we found ourselves in a camp. He gave us some bread, and we ate until we were full. I went to bed in his tent, and Haik went to sleep in the adjacent one. In the morning I was terrified when I discovered that the people from the adjacent tent were gone and had taken my brother with them. I searched for them everywhere, but in vain.”

 

One day the boy was able to join a convoy that was traveling to Raqqa. There, after a long search through the whole city, he managed to find his mother. He took her with him to the camp in the desert. The Arab, who wanted to adopt Vahram, took pity on the woman and let her stay in the tent. Later their camp moved to Raqqa, to the shore of the Euphrates River, as the Turks were expelled from Syria. In the summer of 1919 the Young Turks’ regime disintegrated as Western Allies took control of Turkey, and those who were deported years before were given an opportunity to return.

 

Now Vahram and his mother faced a new voyage: Aleppo, Adana, Constantinople, and finally – their native Bursa. Vahram’s brothers Manuk and Arutyun were living in France, and after some searching made contact with their mother and Vahram. In November 1919, Vahram and Nakhide moved to France.

 

In the mid-1970s not much was known about the Armenian Genocide in France. The 60th anniversary, in 1975, was marked by the publication of Jean-Marie Carzou’s first book “Genocide Exemplaire,” while Charles Aznavour’s song “Ils sont Tombés” (“They Fell”) also commemorated the tragedy. 

 

In June of 1975 Janine Altounian wrote a long article and brought it to a seminar run by the historian Anahide Ter Minassian. She suggested that Janine send the text to the editorial office of the prestigious publication Les Temps Modernes (New Times).

 

That article, titled “What does it mean to be Armenian?” was the result of a desire to get closer to one’s history while also giving voice to witnesses of the Genocide. The magazine quickly agreed to publish it, and soon other articles appeared: “Armenian girl in school” was published in 1977, and “In search of a relationship with my father, 60 years after Genocide” was published in 1978.

 

“I am French from head to toe!” Janine claims, but the aroma of traditional Armenian coffee drifting through her cozy Paris apartment is not the only trace of her roots.

 

“My work intrinsically binds me to my parents. They passed on to me their uniqueness, which, albeit subconsciously, manifests itself in my acquired cultural values. There is a very important passage in my father’s diary. It talks of my grandmother, whom I never got to meet, who insisted on giving her murdered father a proper funeral. She said: ‘I won’t move an inch until he is buried.’ And this was at a time when she could have been raped or murdered herself,” Janine recalls.

 

In Paris Vahram became a tailor, while Janine’s mother helped him in the shop and ran the house. 

While her mother was coming to terms with her daughter’s choice of career, Janine discovered the colossal divide between her cozy family world and the realities of a French school. “My grandmother and uncles were always at home, among themselves they spoke Turkish and they spoke Armenian to me,” Janine says. “My brother was ten years younger, he missed that special atmosphere.”

 

In 1958, Janine began teaching German, first in the provinces and then in Paris. Ten years later, after the birth of her third daughter, Janine divorced her husband. At that point she discovered an interest in analytical research, which ultimately led her to psychoanalysis. At a teaching conference Janine met a colleague, another tutor of German, who told her about a project to translate Freud’s works under the guidance of the eminent psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche.

“If you come from a family of immigrants, you’ve got nothing to lose. I told my colleague that I would be interested in meeting the translation team, because I read Freud’s work when I was preparing for my exams to become a language instructor. At the end of the meeting he told me: ‘See you next week!’ I just wanted to see them work, I never dreamed of anything more,” Janine remembers.

 

Janine became the only woman to join the group of researchers and translators who prepared the complete works of Freud for publication in French. In 2003 Janine Altounian published “The Writing of Freud,” a book in which she analyzed the language of the famous psychoanalyst and the problems associated with translating works that deal with complex phenomena and subconscious processes. 

 

Over time she began to apply psychoanalysis to examining issues connected with hereditary trauma. With her roots among Armenians who managed to escape the Genocide, Janine dedicated several decades to this work. She was also one of the co-founders of the International Association for Research on Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide (AIRCRIGE).

 

When Janine took her whole family on a trip to Armenia she didn’t get a feeling of “recognition” there. But her trip to Turkey in 2013, a visit to the scenes of the 100-year-old crimes committed against the Armenian people, left a very strong impression. She has already published five books dedicated to the transfer of traumatic memories, but she continues her research relentlessly in line with the values she learned from her parents.