Susanna Harutyunyan, "God Has Passed Through Here" (trans. Shushan Avagyan) (Armenia)

It’s December 14. Welcome back to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Susanna Harutyunyan’s story, “God Has Passed Through Here”:

The vast shadow of the Armenian Genocide, when a million ethnic Armenians were murdered in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, hangs over every Armenian writer today. Susanna Harutyunyan depicts in her stories the eerie landscapes of a persecuted people and their extraordinary imaginative life. In her story ironically titled “God Has  Passed Through Here,” a young woman, Noem, who glows mysteriously in the night, is forced by her parents to allow herself to be inspected by foreign male visitors and, like Iphigenia in the Greek myth, she is eventually sacrificed—cut up and sold—to help her ailing father and her hungry family.

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What did you think of today's story? Use the hashtag #ssac2021 on Twitter and Instagram to check in with your fellow advent calendarians. And check back tomorrow for commentary on the next story!