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Armenian Patriotism, Revisited

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  • Armenian Patriotism, Revisited

    ARMENIAN PATRIOTISM, REVISITED
    By Gendy Alimurung

    LA Weekly
    http://www.laweekly.com/2011-02-03/columns/armenian-patriotism-revisited/
    Feb 3 2011
    CA

    A Los Angeles man returns to the homeland - and might become its
    president

    When writer Garin Hovannisian goes home to Armenia in a few days, he
    will feel weirdly homesick. "It's so strange. I always miss the place
    where I'm not," he says, sitting in a cafe in Glendale, the one place
    in Los Angeles where there are so many Armenians it can seem like you
    already are in the old country. To understand his very contemporary
    kind of longing, you have to go back a bit, to the Ottoman Empire.

    Specifically, to a guy named Kaspar.

    Kaspar was Garin's great-grandfather, one of the tens of thousands of
    people fleeing the Armenian genocide. When the Ottoman Turks butchered
    the men of his village, Kaspar escaped to the San Joaquin Valley, where
    he started a grape farm. He gave his kids American names and taught
    them to embrace their adoptive country. One of these kids was Richard.

    Richard did not love the vines and the farm. He fled his home, too,
    but to Los Angeles and a professorship at UCLA, where he founded the
    department of Armenian studies.

    Richard, in turn, begat a son named Raffi, who grew up in Brentwood,
    played football at Palisades High, became a lawyer and married. Raffi
    set up practice and made lots of money. He became, in short, the
    epitome of the American dream. You'd think this is where the story
    ends, everybody fat, fulfilled and happy. And it could have ended
    there. But if you read the book Garin - Raffi's son - has written on
    the subject, you'd see it's actually only the beginning.

    Because then, the fatherland called. Or rather, faxed.

    "My dad sat in his office in Century City and realized history was
    waking up miles away," he says. "It was waking up after decades
    of silence."

    Garin was 3 years old when his father announced they were moving to
    Soviet Armenia. It was 1989. It was kind of a shock. "My poor mother!"

    Garin says. "She was actually a refugee from Soviet Armenia. She had
    just become a successful lawyer herself."

    Nevertheless, they traded the house in Brentwood for an apartment
    in Yerevan. Garin's dad didn't have a job lined up in Armenia, but
    his revolutionary and democratic hopes were high. You can live on
    patriotism, it turns out.

    Raffi joined up with the people who would become the country's
    new leaders and made himself indispensable: visiting the Karabakh
    conflict's front lines one day, arranging interviews between the new
    democratic party's members and the world's press the next.

    In 1991, following mass demonstrations throughout the Soviet Union,
    Gorbachev's empire crumbled and Armenia declared independence from
    the Soviet Union. The fledgling government needed just such a natural
    connector, a person who knew law and the outside world, who had
    contacts in the United States, who could speak English, French and
    Russian. Soon Raffi was appointed the new Republic of Armenia's first
    minister of foreign affairs. He negotiated diplomatic relations with
    every foreign country. He raised the new flag at the United Nations.

    He installed the ministry's first fax machine. "We recognize," came the
    return transmissions, communiques from Britain and Japan and Mexico,
    acknowledging the new country's independence.

    "My dad was born in the U.S. but always had a sense that his future
    was somewhere else," Garin says. "He's left me kind of a divided
    legacy. My immediate family are in Armenia, but my extended family
    is in California."

    >From age 3 on, Garin traveled back and forth from L.A. to Armenia,
    spending half the school year here, half there. He remembers trips
    on Aeroflot planes. He remembers passengers drinking vodka, eating,
    handing him candy, "a party in the air."

    He has grown up into a thoughtful, gracious young man who has never
    felt fully at home, never fully adjusted to the culture he's in.

    History, apparently, is written not by winners but by their children.

    The bicultural upbringing that made a diplomat out of Raffi made a
    writer out of Garin. His book Family of Shadows is Armenian history as
    seen through the achievements of the prodigal sons - Kaspar, Richard
    and Raffi - of one of its leading families. It is a book bursting,
    aching with pride. Pride for fathers. Pride for family, duty and
    nation. Yet there are feelings left unspoken, too: disappointment,
    disillusionment. Hence, the shadows. They slip through the narrative,
    darker interior moments that are gone as soon as seen:

    We lived in a castle. That is what it seemed like, anyway, because
    there was a Russian pool table on the veranda and secret service
    agents in the basement. I marveled at all of this, yet I knew this was
    not my real home. I knew that beyond the gray walls of the dacha was
    Yerevan, which itself was not real, and beyond that was California,
    where all my grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins lived.

    Where I was now, this was just beautiful nonsense. I was simply
    walking through my father's dreams.

    How can a son be anything but proud of a father who has done so much?

    How can you be in two places - metaphoric, psychic, geographic -
    at once? History may be written by children, but it is made by parents.

    To flesh out details, Garin interviewed his father and grandfather.

    "The most terrifying ones I did were with my grandfather. He's the
    master interviewer. He's collected some 800 interviews with genocide
    survivors."

    If Garin seems too young to tell the family saga, having personally
    lived only 24 years of it, he worried about that as well. "It required
    courage," he says. "No, arrogance."

    Maybe it's genetic, that courageous arrogance. His father was just 30
    when he abandoned his cushy upper-middle-class Southern California
    existence and uprooted the family to join the revolution. He is
    expected to run for Armenia's presidency in the next election.

    Thus far, the dual life continues. Garin's dad still lives in Armenia,
    and Garin still splits his time between continents, racking up
    the frequent-flier miles. When in Los Angeles, he crashes with his
    grandfather in Westwood, walking distance from the UCLA campus. In
    Armenia, he sits at a desk in an apartment in Yerevan, facing a window
    that looks out on Mount Ararat. Reaching across the cafe table now,
    he flips to Family of Shadows' title page and draws a mountain with
    the sun peeking out behind it. He will write a novel next, he believes.

    For his debut, Garin has, quite literally, put his family first.

    "I can't say that I would make the same decision he did," Garin
    says of his dad, though he'd be lying if he said the dream and the
    patriotism mean nothing to him.

    But which dream, is the question. Which country?

    "The American dream or the Armenian dream. I'm not sure which one I
    want yet," he admits. "Ah, well. Life is meaningful in the balance."




    From: A. Papazian
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