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NOW EMBARKING: AN ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION OF THE 1947 AND 1949 ARMENIAN REPATRIATION
http://www.mirrorspectator.com/2012/07/24/now-embarking-an-artistic-interpretation-of-the-1947-and-1949-armenian-repatriation/
July 24, 2012 11:05 am
Repatriates in Yerevan 1950-51 with the Antaramian American Nash
Ambassador (known as the car with the visor) By Hazel Antaramian-Hofman
I was born in 1960, in Yerevan, Armenia, yet spoke little Armenian
and what I did speak was Western Armenian. As a young child, I always
wondered why I came from such an exotic place when my father was
born in Kenosha, Wis., and my mother was from Lyon, France. Only
after years of hearing stories did I realize that I was the product
of two Armenian Diaspora post-World War II repatriate children, who
were compelled by their father and mother's emotive sense of hayrenik
to leave one known cultural and ideological ground for another.
The post-WWII repatriation movements uprooted many Armenians from
all over the world: France, Lebanon, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Syria,
Bulgaria, Romania, Palestine, the United States, even some from
Sudan, Iran, Iraq, India, Uruguay, Argentina and China. It was an
orchestrated campaign to repopulate what fraction that remained of
a vast land well-documented as the ancestral home of Armenians from
the time of Darius the Great. But the repatriates were headed not
to the romanticized, vast ancient land of their forebears, but to a
"sovietized" Armenia under Stalin. It was a migratory event complete
with personal and spiritual dispossession and cultural disparity.
The Republic of Armenia was in a state of extreme poverty after
World War II. By November 1945, Stalin authorized the return of
Armenians to Soviet Armenia with the incentive of bringing in new
life in the construction, vitalization and economic development to
a destitute Soviet Republic. Armenian nationalistic organizations,
political parties and religious leadership organized efforts of the
repatriation. The Armenian Repatriation Committee stressed the need
to nationally support the country of Armenia while downplaying the
reality that Armenia was now a Soviet-dominated country.
The basic repatriation story is riddled with individual twists and
turns, but in most cases, there was a common thread: more often,
a nationalistic, or at times, a socialist-leaning decision was made
by a patriarch or a matriarch, who uprooted their family in response
to an emotional global appeal encouraged by Soviet propaganda. The
call to Armenians worldwide was a maneuver to attract young people
of child-bearing ages; to secure skilled workers and professionals
from developed countries; and to obtain new technologies and products.
Encouraged by promises of free housing, land to build upon and job
opportunities, those who left the Diaspora made their life-altering
move with false hope. Upon their arrival, they witnessed unimaginable
social and economic conditions, with no opportunity to leave the
Soviet bloc Armenia or regain their confiscated citizenship papers.
The collective social memory of many hayrenadartsner was one of
betrayal and deceit under the guise of a patriotic call. Those who
survived the times would later tell stories concerning backward social
economics, disease, discrimination, psychological anxiety and physical
brutality encountered under the Soviet system. Zabel (Chookaszian)
Melconian, a 23-year-old New York native left the United States
in 1947, to support her father's decision to move to Armenia. After
experiencing abysmal living conditions, she recalls trying to warn her
relatives in America not to come to Armenia by sending them cryptic
messages in outbound letters, which were routinely censored.
Scholarly articles, lectures and testimonial documentation have
only begun to shed light on this period in Armenian history. Crosby
Phillian, a native New Yorker, who left the United States in 1949,
at the age of 16, says that "survival" was the sole mantra of many
repatriates who when living in Armenia had to sell their personal
belongings on the black market for a few rubles in order to eat for
the week. The sale of goods on the black market became a ritual
every Sunday. Anxiety-ridden akhbars were at the mercy of those
who had some money and knew how to work the system. Phillian, who
currently lives in France, also notes that the unwritten law in the
Soviet Union at the time seemed to be standing in long lines to buy
basic food items, such as bread, meat or cheese. Bursting crowds,
arguments and physical fights were not unusual occurrences in these
lines. There was even an occasional death. Phillian remembers when a
man who was trying to simply buy some cheese was killed by a woman's
shoe heel striking his head.
My own personal memory of life as a child in Armenia is limited and
untainted by the social conditions experienced by my elders. Later in
my life, when I listened to family stories, I knew that there was a
painful difference in the cultural experiences of my parents between
the times they grew up as youth outside of Armenia and later as they
matured during their formative years in Armenia. Upon reflection,
I can only imagine the culture shock witnessed by those who grew up
in the late 1940s in the United States, where the sounds of Count
Basie, Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra were popular, and the faces of
Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Lana Turner and Loretta Young dominated
the silver screen. To understand and to retell the story, I turned
to ethnographic research and to my art. In 2010, I began personal
interviews and the collection of family photographs, memoirs and travel
papers. Based on these sources along with historical documentation,
my interest was to capture this multi-faceted story through paintings,
drawings and installation art, as an expression and interpretation
of social experiences. When author and family friend Tom Mooradian
visited Fresno in the Fall of 2009 (and then later in 2011), during
the promotion tours of his memoir, Repatriate: Love, Basketball
and the KGB, I found that we shared each other's understanding that
there were more personal histories that needed to be documented. But
as I indicated to Tom, my goal was not to write people's individual
biographies, but to use imagery and text to narrate the story of the
late 1940s repatriation within the manifold of twentieth-century
Armenian history. Not only would I better understand my own early
personal story, but I would be able to collect oral history to
artistically interpret the culture shock, loss of freedom and the
ideological turmoil that shaped the historical time of the akhbars.
In December 2011, I traveled to Paris, France, to make contact with
old family friends who had repatriated in 1947 and left Armenia in
1966. Stories about the post-war departures from France to Armenia
were convoluted, depressing and at times surreal. Over six decades
have passed since a bizarre stand-off at the Marseilles port just days
before the Russian repatriation ship set sail on December 24, 1947.
Stranded aboard the Pobeda, 300 French-Armenians awaited their travel
plans. They were denied permission by French authorities to sail from
Marseilles and subsequently told to disembark. The ship eventually
set sail with 1,122 Armenians, without the 300 French-Armenians who
the French considered part of their citizenry. Twelve-years old at
the time, Virginia (Hekimian) Antaramian, who was born in France
to foreign born parents, recalls several sketchy events of that
day. She remembers being surreptitiously guided to the ship by her
communist Uncle Hagop Chiljian like many other French-born children
of French-Armenians, then waiting in hiding onboard expecting to be
joined later by her parents. For the French, who lost many citizens
in the war, it was a matter of safeguarding their young populace.
Virginia heard about other children who were placed in a similar
situation. They were covertly taken to the main ship in small boats
in the middle of the night to get on board without knowledge of the
French authorities, or were carted in large crate boxes to the Pobeda.
Ultimately, those who were not originally given permission to sail
from Marseilles were allowed to leave France.
In March 2012, I took my second journey to collect stories and
photographs for my project. I went to Yerevan to visit an old family
acquaintance and her family. She was not part of the repatriation,
but during her younger years she had befriended many Armenians who
came from America and France. As we gathered for our evening meals,
neighbors or workplace friends, people who either remembered stories
of repatriates or were themselves children of repatriates but never
had an opportunity to leave the country, came to tell stories. The most
interesting stories shared were those of the unrecognized contributions
in technology and specialty trades that Armenians from the diaspora
made to Armenian society. All in all, the cosmopolitanism of Yerevan
was born from those Armenians who came from the outside.
I have just begun my artistic journey of the postwar Armenian
repatriation. From my visits thus far I have collected over 45 black
and white photographic images of repatriate children and families
taken in Armenia from 1947 to 1966. The photographs collected are
to be complied in a database for my artistic interpretation as well
as archival documentation. In a melange of drawings, paintings and
installation art scheduled for exhibition in Spring/Summer 2013, the
imagery will be used to interpret the cultural, social and economic
situations of that period. I am also documenting short stories that
narrate the circumstances and emotions of the people who experienced
the events during this particular episode in Armenian history.
Clearly, it is another facet of the social aftermath of the Armenian
Genocide.
(Hazel Antaramian-Hofman is interested in collecting more
photographs and interviewing more people for their stories. If
readers are repatriates or know of others, they can contact her at
[email protected], with "repatriate project" in the subject
line.)
http://www.mirrorspectator.com/2012/07/24/now-embarking-an-artistic-interpretation-of-the-1947-and-1949-armenian-repatriation/
July 24, 2012 11:05 am
Repatriates in Yerevan 1950-51 with the Antaramian American Nash
Ambassador (known as the car with the visor) By Hazel Antaramian-Hofman
I was born in 1960, in Yerevan, Armenia, yet spoke little Armenian
and what I did speak was Western Armenian. As a young child, I always
wondered why I came from such an exotic place when my father was
born in Kenosha, Wis., and my mother was from Lyon, France. Only
after years of hearing stories did I realize that I was the product
of two Armenian Diaspora post-World War II repatriate children, who
were compelled by their father and mother's emotive sense of hayrenik
to leave one known cultural and ideological ground for another.
The post-WWII repatriation movements uprooted many Armenians from
all over the world: France, Lebanon, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Syria,
Bulgaria, Romania, Palestine, the United States, even some from
Sudan, Iran, Iraq, India, Uruguay, Argentina and China. It was an
orchestrated campaign to repopulate what fraction that remained of
a vast land well-documented as the ancestral home of Armenians from
the time of Darius the Great. But the repatriates were headed not
to the romanticized, vast ancient land of their forebears, but to a
"sovietized" Armenia under Stalin. It was a migratory event complete
with personal and spiritual dispossession and cultural disparity.
The Republic of Armenia was in a state of extreme poverty after
World War II. By November 1945, Stalin authorized the return of
Armenians to Soviet Armenia with the incentive of bringing in new
life in the construction, vitalization and economic development to
a destitute Soviet Republic. Armenian nationalistic organizations,
political parties and religious leadership organized efforts of the
repatriation. The Armenian Repatriation Committee stressed the need
to nationally support the country of Armenia while downplaying the
reality that Armenia was now a Soviet-dominated country.
The basic repatriation story is riddled with individual twists and
turns, but in most cases, there was a common thread: more often,
a nationalistic, or at times, a socialist-leaning decision was made
by a patriarch or a matriarch, who uprooted their family in response
to an emotional global appeal encouraged by Soviet propaganda. The
call to Armenians worldwide was a maneuver to attract young people
of child-bearing ages; to secure skilled workers and professionals
from developed countries; and to obtain new technologies and products.
Encouraged by promises of free housing, land to build upon and job
opportunities, those who left the Diaspora made their life-altering
move with false hope. Upon their arrival, they witnessed unimaginable
social and economic conditions, with no opportunity to leave the
Soviet bloc Armenia or regain their confiscated citizenship papers.
The collective social memory of many hayrenadartsner was one of
betrayal and deceit under the guise of a patriotic call. Those who
survived the times would later tell stories concerning backward social
economics, disease, discrimination, psychological anxiety and physical
brutality encountered under the Soviet system. Zabel (Chookaszian)
Melconian, a 23-year-old New York native left the United States
in 1947, to support her father's decision to move to Armenia. After
experiencing abysmal living conditions, she recalls trying to warn her
relatives in America not to come to Armenia by sending them cryptic
messages in outbound letters, which were routinely censored.
Scholarly articles, lectures and testimonial documentation have
only begun to shed light on this period in Armenian history. Crosby
Phillian, a native New Yorker, who left the United States in 1949,
at the age of 16, says that "survival" was the sole mantra of many
repatriates who when living in Armenia had to sell their personal
belongings on the black market for a few rubles in order to eat for
the week. The sale of goods on the black market became a ritual
every Sunday. Anxiety-ridden akhbars were at the mercy of those
who had some money and knew how to work the system. Phillian, who
currently lives in France, also notes that the unwritten law in the
Soviet Union at the time seemed to be standing in long lines to buy
basic food items, such as bread, meat or cheese. Bursting crowds,
arguments and physical fights were not unusual occurrences in these
lines. There was even an occasional death. Phillian remembers when a
man who was trying to simply buy some cheese was killed by a woman's
shoe heel striking his head.
My own personal memory of life as a child in Armenia is limited and
untainted by the social conditions experienced by my elders. Later in
my life, when I listened to family stories, I knew that there was a
painful difference in the cultural experiences of my parents between
the times they grew up as youth outside of Armenia and later as they
matured during their formative years in Armenia. Upon reflection,
I can only imagine the culture shock witnessed by those who grew up
in the late 1940s in the United States, where the sounds of Count
Basie, Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra were popular, and the faces of
Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Lana Turner and Loretta Young dominated
the silver screen. To understand and to retell the story, I turned
to ethnographic research and to my art. In 2010, I began personal
interviews and the collection of family photographs, memoirs and travel
papers. Based on these sources along with historical documentation,
my interest was to capture this multi-faceted story through paintings,
drawings and installation art, as an expression and interpretation
of social experiences. When author and family friend Tom Mooradian
visited Fresno in the Fall of 2009 (and then later in 2011), during
the promotion tours of his memoir, Repatriate: Love, Basketball
and the KGB, I found that we shared each other's understanding that
there were more personal histories that needed to be documented. But
as I indicated to Tom, my goal was not to write people's individual
biographies, but to use imagery and text to narrate the story of the
late 1940s repatriation within the manifold of twentieth-century
Armenian history. Not only would I better understand my own early
personal story, but I would be able to collect oral history to
artistically interpret the culture shock, loss of freedom and the
ideological turmoil that shaped the historical time of the akhbars.
In December 2011, I traveled to Paris, France, to make contact with
old family friends who had repatriated in 1947 and left Armenia in
1966. Stories about the post-war departures from France to Armenia
were convoluted, depressing and at times surreal. Over six decades
have passed since a bizarre stand-off at the Marseilles port just days
before the Russian repatriation ship set sail on December 24, 1947.
Stranded aboard the Pobeda, 300 French-Armenians awaited their travel
plans. They were denied permission by French authorities to sail from
Marseilles and subsequently told to disembark. The ship eventually
set sail with 1,122 Armenians, without the 300 French-Armenians who
the French considered part of their citizenry. Twelve-years old at
the time, Virginia (Hekimian) Antaramian, who was born in France
to foreign born parents, recalls several sketchy events of that
day. She remembers being surreptitiously guided to the ship by her
communist Uncle Hagop Chiljian like many other French-born children
of French-Armenians, then waiting in hiding onboard expecting to be
joined later by her parents. For the French, who lost many citizens
in the war, it was a matter of safeguarding their young populace.
Virginia heard about other children who were placed in a similar
situation. They were covertly taken to the main ship in small boats
in the middle of the night to get on board without knowledge of the
French authorities, or were carted in large crate boxes to the Pobeda.
Ultimately, those who were not originally given permission to sail
from Marseilles were allowed to leave France.
In March 2012, I took my second journey to collect stories and
photographs for my project. I went to Yerevan to visit an old family
acquaintance and her family. She was not part of the repatriation,
but during her younger years she had befriended many Armenians who
came from America and France. As we gathered for our evening meals,
neighbors or workplace friends, people who either remembered stories
of repatriates or were themselves children of repatriates but never
had an opportunity to leave the country, came to tell stories. The most
interesting stories shared were those of the unrecognized contributions
in technology and specialty trades that Armenians from the diaspora
made to Armenian society. All in all, the cosmopolitanism of Yerevan
was born from those Armenians who came from the outside.
I have just begun my artistic journey of the postwar Armenian
repatriation. From my visits thus far I have collected over 45 black
and white photographic images of repatriate children and families
taken in Armenia from 1947 to 1966. The photographs collected are
to be complied in a database for my artistic interpretation as well
as archival documentation. In a melange of drawings, paintings and
installation art scheduled for exhibition in Spring/Summer 2013, the
imagery will be used to interpret the cultural, social and economic
situations of that period. I am also documenting short stories that
narrate the circumstances and emotions of the people who experienced
the events during this particular episode in Armenian history.
Clearly, it is another facet of the social aftermath of the Armenian
Genocide.
(Hazel Antaramian-Hofman is interested in collecting more
photographs and interviewing more people for their stories. If
readers are repatriates or know of others, they can contact her at
[email protected], with "repatriate project" in the subject
line.)