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COLUMN: THREE FAMILIES TOUCHED BY GENOCIDE
Lancaster Newspapers, Pennsylvania
Nov 1 2013
By ELIZABETH EISENSTADT-EVANS
Correspondent
Her father didn't speak of his experiences in war-ravaged Armenia to
his young daughter, she said.
Mary is an administrative assistant at a large New York university. I
encountered her by sheer accident.
A conversation that had begun as a request for faculty phone numbers
and email addresses quickly became personal, as Mary shared some of
the details of growing up with a genocide survivor.
When she responded to an email a few days later, I realized that I
had not imagined the pain in her voice - pain that has its source in
events that occurred almost 100 years ago.
"I often think of my father, grandparents, and all the relatives
who did not make it," Mary wrote. As she grows older, she added,
"I also feel pity for the survivors who lived with the guilt for
having survived, and were too traumatized to share their suffering."
Though his grandparents had their own "wrenching stories," and he
grew up aware of the genocide, novelist Bohjalian says his father
rarely referred to the horrors that had beset his native land.
It was his Swedish mother, says the writer, who made sure he read
books like William Saroyan's "My name is Aram" (short stories about
the adventures of a boy growing up in an Armenian-American family).
"The story (of the Armenian massacres) is so profoundly important,"
says Bohjalian, linking it to the genocides that followed, including
the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur. "Once upon a time people
knew this story. Now they don't."
In 1992, Bohjalian made his first attempt at writing a novel about the
genocide, but understood, after he was done, that it was a "train wreck
and utterly unpublishable." In 2010, when his father's health began
to fail, he began to write the manuscript that became "The Sandcastle
Girls" - Sadly, his father died before the book was published.
Though its origins as the first Christian nation are a source of pride,
said the writer, today Armenia is a tiny slice of its former self,
surrounded by countries like Azerbaijan, with whom it has closed
borders. A large part of Armenia is now part of Turkey, says the
novelist.
"It's just a fact that three out of every four Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire were killed," says Bohjalian, adding that it takes a long time
to recover from that demographic cataclysm."
~U ~U ~U
Bohjalian's spiritual odyssey is, in many ways, a classically
American one.
Part of his father's American "reinvention," he says, was choosing
to attend services in an Episcopal church, rather than traveling, as
his Armenian relatives might have preferred, from their suburban New
York home to the city's St. Vartan Cathedral. By the time he moved to
the small Vermont town of Lincoln in the 1980s, "I was sufficiently
disconnected from any faith ... a classic Easter-Christmas Christian."
Adventitiously (or not?), the house that Bohjalian and wife Victoria
bought shares a driveway with a local "united" church (a Baptist
and Methodist blend). Now, having developed a deep friendship with
clergyman David Wood, they are regulars.
"One of the greatest blessings of my life is the fact that my wife
and I share that driveway," Bohjalian says.
After his immersion in the horrors of the last century, I ask him,
does Bohjalian believe in the concept of evil?
While he does believe that humans are capable of terrible violence,
says the grandson of genocide survivors, "it's important to keep
the perspective that while there is "spectacular evil in the world,
there is also spectacular good."
In a Philadelphia ceremony last month, Bojhalian was awarded the
Armenian National Committee of America's (ANCA) Eastern Region
Freedom Award.
~U ~U ~U
Last week I promised that I would share some of what I found when I
opened the box of manuscripts and letters my grandmother had saved
from the 1930s and 40s.
As expected, I discovered that Americans with German friends and
relatives were doing everything they could to bring them over here -
attempts that most likely failed (isolationism and anti-Semitism were
strong in pre World War II America). In addition, there were many,
many letters from merchant seaman all over the world (my grandmother
was part of the founding of a union for merchant seamen, regarded as
a lower class at that time by many).
Though it has always posed profound theological questions for me,
the Jewish Holocaust didn't significantly alter my life as a child -
few relatives lost, many other causes in a family of patriots for
all humankind.
But then I came across a letter written in 1938 from Berlin.
Typewritten on thin paper stock, now yellowed with age, it
has no salutation or signature, though it ends with the word
"Affectionately." In it the unknown writer describes in harrowing
detail what happened a week before at Kristallnacht (the 75th
anniversary is this year) - nine synagogues destroyed, shopkeepers
beaten, cemeteries desecrated, homes burned to the ground.
"We and our friends here, think day and night how we can escape this
hell," says the writer in the last paragraph. His or her only hope
was that the world would "denounce these cowardly acts and dastardly
acts of trying to destroy a minority people because that would be
the only way to stay these horrors."
We know what he or she did not know - there was to be no escape for
most Jews in Germany, or for anyone who sympathized with them.
And it was on that night, just last week, that I realized in a new
way what genocide means in the life of a family and an ethnic group -
a voice crying out among the ruins of a civilized world, asking for
someone to have the decency to see, to watch, to bear witness, even
in the gathering darkness.
http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/913129_Column--Three-families-touched-by-genocide.html
Lancaster Newspapers, Pennsylvania
Nov 1 2013
By ELIZABETH EISENSTADT-EVANS
Correspondent
Her father didn't speak of his experiences in war-ravaged Armenia to
his young daughter, she said.
Mary is an administrative assistant at a large New York university. I
encountered her by sheer accident.
A conversation that had begun as a request for faculty phone numbers
and email addresses quickly became personal, as Mary shared some of
the details of growing up with a genocide survivor.
When she responded to an email a few days later, I realized that I
had not imagined the pain in her voice - pain that has its source in
events that occurred almost 100 years ago.
"I often think of my father, grandparents, and all the relatives
who did not make it," Mary wrote. As she grows older, she added,
"I also feel pity for the survivors who lived with the guilt for
having survived, and were too traumatized to share their suffering."
Though his grandparents had their own "wrenching stories," and he
grew up aware of the genocide, novelist Bohjalian says his father
rarely referred to the horrors that had beset his native land.
It was his Swedish mother, says the writer, who made sure he read
books like William Saroyan's "My name is Aram" (short stories about
the adventures of a boy growing up in an Armenian-American family).
"The story (of the Armenian massacres) is so profoundly important,"
says Bohjalian, linking it to the genocides that followed, including
the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur. "Once upon a time people
knew this story. Now they don't."
In 1992, Bohjalian made his first attempt at writing a novel about the
genocide, but understood, after he was done, that it was a "train wreck
and utterly unpublishable." In 2010, when his father's health began
to fail, he began to write the manuscript that became "The Sandcastle
Girls" - Sadly, his father died before the book was published.
Though its origins as the first Christian nation are a source of pride,
said the writer, today Armenia is a tiny slice of its former self,
surrounded by countries like Azerbaijan, with whom it has closed
borders. A large part of Armenia is now part of Turkey, says the
novelist.
"It's just a fact that three out of every four Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire were killed," says Bohjalian, adding that it takes a long time
to recover from that demographic cataclysm."
~U ~U ~U
Bohjalian's spiritual odyssey is, in many ways, a classically
American one.
Part of his father's American "reinvention," he says, was choosing
to attend services in an Episcopal church, rather than traveling, as
his Armenian relatives might have preferred, from their suburban New
York home to the city's St. Vartan Cathedral. By the time he moved to
the small Vermont town of Lincoln in the 1980s, "I was sufficiently
disconnected from any faith ... a classic Easter-Christmas Christian."
Adventitiously (or not?), the house that Bohjalian and wife Victoria
bought shares a driveway with a local "united" church (a Baptist
and Methodist blend). Now, having developed a deep friendship with
clergyman David Wood, they are regulars.
"One of the greatest blessings of my life is the fact that my wife
and I share that driveway," Bohjalian says.
After his immersion in the horrors of the last century, I ask him,
does Bohjalian believe in the concept of evil?
While he does believe that humans are capable of terrible violence,
says the grandson of genocide survivors, "it's important to keep
the perspective that while there is "spectacular evil in the world,
there is also spectacular good."
In a Philadelphia ceremony last month, Bojhalian was awarded the
Armenian National Committee of America's (ANCA) Eastern Region
Freedom Award.
~U ~U ~U
Last week I promised that I would share some of what I found when I
opened the box of manuscripts and letters my grandmother had saved
from the 1930s and 40s.
As expected, I discovered that Americans with German friends and
relatives were doing everything they could to bring them over here -
attempts that most likely failed (isolationism and anti-Semitism were
strong in pre World War II America). In addition, there were many,
many letters from merchant seaman all over the world (my grandmother
was part of the founding of a union for merchant seamen, regarded as
a lower class at that time by many).
Though it has always posed profound theological questions for me,
the Jewish Holocaust didn't significantly alter my life as a child -
few relatives lost, many other causes in a family of patriots for
all humankind.
But then I came across a letter written in 1938 from Berlin.
Typewritten on thin paper stock, now yellowed with age, it
has no salutation or signature, though it ends with the word
"Affectionately." In it the unknown writer describes in harrowing
detail what happened a week before at Kristallnacht (the 75th
anniversary is this year) - nine synagogues destroyed, shopkeepers
beaten, cemeteries desecrated, homes burned to the ground.
"We and our friends here, think day and night how we can escape this
hell," says the writer in the last paragraph. His or her only hope
was that the world would "denounce these cowardly acts and dastardly
acts of trying to destroy a minority people because that would be
the only way to stay these horrors."
We know what he or she did not know - there was to be no escape for
most Jews in Germany, or for anyone who sympathized with them.
And it was on that night, just last week, that I realized in a new
way what genocide means in the life of a family and an ethnic group -
a voice crying out among the ruins of a civilized world, asking for
someone to have the decency to see, to watch, to bear witness, even
in the gathering darkness.
http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/913129_Column--Three-families-touched-by-genocide.html