If you simply must interject yourself and your crackpot political or religious beliefs into somebody else’s literary event, here’s some helpful advice: Don’t pick a reading with the district attorney sitting right in the audience. That’s the mistake one Turkish protestor made when he decided to interrupt a Barnes & Noble reading by Margaret Ajemian Ahnert. Ahnert’s family memoir discusses how her mother survived the 1915 genocide of Turkey’s Armenian population, a matter of historical record that many Turks continue to maintain never happened or at least wasn’t as bad as all that. So naturally a group of Turkish protestors showed up at the reading to distribute pamphlets with their revisionist views, perhaps not knowing that Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau was among those waiting to hear Ahnert read. The event was delayed for twenty minutes until the police came and took the protest’s ringleader away for “resisting arrest, inciting a riot, unlawful assembly, and disorderly conduct for disturbing a lawful assembly.” Fortunately, things calmed down after that, and Ahnert was soon signing copies of The Knock at the Door for appreciative patrons.
(Thanks to Margot Atwell and Emily Felger for the photo…)