3 ideas
The novel sets two responses to a shared catastrophe against each other. The Turkish side survives by cutting itself off from the past and treating history as irrelevant to the present, while the diaspora Armenian side builds its identity around keeping the wound open. Each strategy distorts: forgetting produces a present with no foundation, and remembering produces an identity fixed to the victimhood of 1915.
Asya's literal bastardy, a father nobody names, mirrors the nation's figurative bastardy, a founding violence nobody names. When the origin of a family or a state is concealed, every later generation inherits a sense of rootlessness without knowing why. Asya's nihilism and the family's curse of early-dying men are symptoms of what was buried.
The chapters are named after the ingredients of ashure, a pudding eaten by both Turks and Armenians and said to be the dish Noah made from the ark's last provisions. Armenian and Turkish households cook the same recipes and keep the same habits, which undercuts the narrative of two separate peoples. Look at what two hostile groups eat and you see a common past that official histories deny.