Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

Though Peter has already introduced the reader to the comforts of middle-class suburbia, this chapter opens with a critique of suburbia, as told by Auntie Anna, one of the many Balakians that gathered for weekly family feasts. She says suburbia “would be the ruin of America” (40), a place for the lost and decultured American bourgeoise. The author’s mother defends the suburbs as a safe and healthy community, despite reports that came out even by 1960 about “the moral decay of suburban life—divorce, alcoholism, adultery, juvenile delinquency” (41).

Peter cherishes suburbia because he lives in close proximity to friends and they have room to play baseball, and he wants to fit in. He wonders why, with such an abstract connection to Armenia, his family can’t be Jewish like all of their neighbors: “If only I were Jewish, I thought, things would be better” (45). Peter reasons, “Like my mother said, we were American. We didn’t’ go to church bazaars or Armenian gatherings. We didn’t talk about Armenia. I couldn’t even speak the language” (45). His cultural distance from his friends particularly arose when they publicly displayed the “language and rituals they carried out each week that were bound up in thousands of years of history and stories and ideas” that Peter didn’t understand (47).