When Sarah Ignatius’ son was in eighth grade, she asked him whether his class was learning about the Armenian genocide as part of its unit on World War I.

Read more “Mighty Mary” and the all-woman team that cannonballed America’s Cup

His answer: The class was only spending two days on the entire war. No, they weren’t learning about the genocide.

That conversation would spark an idea, which more than a dozen years later would result in “The Kaleidoscope of Destiny,” the Somerville resident’s debut novel, which follows a 14-year-old Armenian boy struggling to survive the massacre that killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1915.

“I thought, well, people should know the same way they know about, like, the Holocaust that occurred during World War II,” Ignatius said.

As Ignatius considered how to introduce readers to one of history’s darkest chapters, she was also aware one of her son’s classmates was of Turkish descent, making her conscious of how she portrayed Turkish people in the novel.

“I didn’t want anybody in an eighth-grade class to feel bad about something that had happened over 100 years ago,” Ignatius said.

That concern helped shape the novel’s narrative. Arakel, a teenager from Kharpert in what is now eastern Turkey, is deported with his family as Ottoman authorities force Armenians from their homes. But his survival depends not only on other Armenians, but also on sympathetic Turks and Kurds who risk their own safety to help him.

Ignatius said those relationships reflect the complexity of life in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire and the individual choices people made once the genocide began.

Fleeing to Massachusetts

Armenians had lived for centuries as a predominantly Christian minority in the majority Muslim Ottoman Empire. As the empire declined in the late 19th century, demands by some Armenians for greater rights and representation were met with growing repression and the killings of  tens of thousands of Armenians.

The Young Turks came to power in 1908, with a hardline faction taking control in 1913 and increasingly embracing Turkish nationalism and a more ethnically homogeneous state. After the Ottoman Empire entered World War I the following year, officials accused Armenians of sympathizing with neighboring Russia and used the war as a pretext for their removal. In 1915, the government began arresting Armenian leaders and deporting entire communities, forcing hundreds of thousands on deadly marches toward the Syrian desert.

Persecution of Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire helped make Massachusetts home to one of the U.S.’ largest Armenian American communities. Armenians began arriving in significant numbers in the late 19th century, with the population growing substantially after the genocide. Large Armenian communities remain today in Watertown, Cambridge and Belmont.

Read more A Robin Hood origin story

Restoring humanity

The novel’s initial setting was chosen because Ignatius’ grandfather was born in Kharpert, where both he and her great-grandfather attended Euphrates College. He immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s as violence against Armenians was escalating. Relatives who remained were later swept up in the genocide.

In 2006, Ignatius traveled to Kharpert with the Belmont-based National Association for Armenian Studies and Research. Her grandfather never returned after leaving, and little remained of the Armenian community he had known, but walking the same hills gave Ignatius a new connection to her family’s past.

“I just felt this huge world opening up to me that was my family, my family’s ancestry, as well as that region of the world,” Ignatius said. “It was almost like I was laughing and crying at the same time.”

Although the novel grew from that family history, Arakel is not based on any particular relative. Ignatius initially considered telling one of their stories but knew only fragments of what had happened and did not want to invent the rest.

Instead, the lawyer, who had previously co-written a book on immigration law, turned to the unfamiliar territory of fiction. She took creative writing courses, worked with mentors and spent years writing and rewriting the manuscript through multiple rejections, while reading more than 60 books and poring over historical records.

The goal was to capture not only the destruction of Armenian communities, but the lives that preceded it.

“I felt like I was restoring some humanity to my ancestors who had perished in the genocide,” Ignatius said, “so we wouldn’t just remember Armenians for how they died, but for what their world had been like before the genocide.”

Ignatius’ connection to the region’s Armenian community continued to deepen as she worked on the book. She served as executive director of NAASR from 2016 to 2022 and discovered while working there that her grandfather had donated to the organization in the 1950s, when Armenian Americans were raising money to establish what became the country’s first endowed chair in Armenian studies at Harvard University in 1959.

Ignatius will return to NAASR, 395 Concord Ave. in Belmont, to launch “The Kaleidoscope of Destiny” at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 22, ahead of its Sept. 27 publication. She will be joined by author and artist Dana Mashoian Walrath, who mentored Ignatius through the International Armenian Literary Alliance as she developed the novel.

Read more Go for goldfinches