What we discover in the work of this most famous and prolific of Armenian-American writers [Saroyan] is a lifelong tension between the forces of good-humored acceptance and the more insistent voice of his own experience as the orphaned son of an Armenian immigrant…. Saroyan's relationship to his ethnic group [is] an affinity based less on the shared values of communal life than the common experience of "wounded homelessness," of belonging to a dying race, of having been abandoned by one's father into a world devoid of security and rest.

This was an attitude he had portrayed movingly in his 1934 short story, "Seventy Thousand Assyrians." Here Saroyan depicts the Assyrians as the one ethnic group whose claim to world attention fell even below that of the Armenians…. The moral of this bittersweet tale is that the fragility of his national ties has freed the humble Assyrian barber to join...