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Bezjian: A Walk Through Dante's Inferno
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2014/01/12/inferno/
By Nigol Bezjian // January 12, 2014
Special to the Armenian Weekly
I was recently asked to help a journalist from a Prague-based radio
station do a report on the Syrian-Armenian refugees in Beirut. She
wanted to meet all sorts of folks - wealthy, poor, young and old - who
were trying to make a go of it with what was left from a fragmented
life. I took her to Bourj Hammoud - Little Armenia - where many of them
could be found, and to a restaurant serving the much-cherished Aleppo
cuisine.
An Aleppo street before the war in Syria.
We met one of the owners, a young, charming man with the freshly
acquired acuteness of a businessman. He quickly invited us to a table
and asked about our preferred drink from a list of American/global
soft drinks. We settled for cold bottled water with a local name,
though it was surely owned by some international conglomerate.
The journalist was originally from Stepanakert, the capital of the
Nagorno Karabagh Republic (NKR), which was born from a brutal war with
Azerbaijan that saw more than 30,000 killed on both sides. She had
been born in the midst of that war, during the unfolding of the Soviet
Union. And here she was covering a new war with its own displaced
Armenians.
While she was preparing her recording device, I had already begun to
engage this man, almost a third my age: Which neighborhood of Aleppo
was he from? How did he make it to Beirut safe and sound? What school
had he gone to?
His words took me back, step by step, to my youth in Aleppo.
He had attended the Haigazian kindergarten and elementary schools, and
the Karen Jeppe high school. When I told him that a generation ago, I
had lived in the same vicinity and had attended the same schools, a
sparkle shined in his eyes, followed by an unwilling smile of comfort:
He had at last met someone who could relate to his demolished past. It
was a moment of consolation between familiar strangers.
He asked when I had left our beloved Aleppo. During the 1973
Arab-Israeli War, I said, but didn't hear his response as my mind was
spectacularly taken back to my own war and departure. I'm not sure how
the meeting with the young reporter took shape. I was fixated on the
notion that in this part of the world, every generation has had a war
and has felt its mark.
My generation witnessed the many internal upheavals that gave us
nothing but panic and fear every day, as coup d'états spread young
army conscripts like ants through our streets and alleys. Then we had
the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when we
moved to Beirut and then the U.S., leaving my grandmother and aunts
behind. They, in turn, survived the Lebanese civil war, which began in
1975 and lasted 15 bloody years.
My grandmother had been a survivor of World War I, which gave us the
infamous Armenian Genocide. As a four-year-old, she was forced to walk
from her ancestral village in Sepastia through the scorching Syrian
desert of Der Zor, to the unwelcoming streets of Aleppo. All this,
with her younger brother, orphaned, thirsty, barefoot, and with hardly
any clothes on, witnessing horrors that made their generation
speechless for decades.
My father, who was born in Aleppo, lived through the wars of Syrian
independence from the French mandate, and then the internal wars over
control of the city among various armed groups, until it was time for
World War II. As a young man then, he joined the British Army. He was
first sent to Palestine, then Egypt, and eventually to Bologna to
fight to liberate Italy. He returned to Aleppo as a handsome,
war-experienced 19-year-old with limited knowledge of Italian, which
he had acquired from his girlfriends, and a mark of being westernized.
This same man, now with a wife and three boys, had to take up arms
again in the early 1960's to defend Armenian neighborhoods when the
short-lived Egyptian-Syrian union was being dismantled.
`Every generation has his war in the Middle East,' I heard myself
saying to no one in particular as I came back from my mental tour of
the past century.
The young restaurateur turned to me in a gentle move from the
reporter's microphone, as if continuing his interview. `This is a
destiny we have, to live out wars and upheavals, genocides and
massacres in the Middle East. This century has been bloody for us, in
Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, where we settled after the
Turkish massacres and found a life from the start. Yet we have to deal
with being killed again and again. For a century now, we have not
found peace and calm,' he said, sipping from his glass of a soft drink
overfilled with ice.
The ensuing, dense silence in noisy Bourj Hammoud was broken by his
conclusion, uttered in the humblest of voices: `Me and my other two
partners had a great life and spent every night in restaurants and
clubs in Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo, and Beirut. We were entertained as
if we were kings. Now in Beirut we work day and night to make our
customers feel like royals. This is the reversal of events, if you
survived at all. We are lucky and thankful, but thankful to whom and
why is what I do not know.'
I had no words, no ideas, on how to soften his pain when teardrops
fell from his eyes, while he insisted that we choose anything from the
menu as his guests. Only someone who has experienced a walk through
Dante's Inferno and come back alive could offer such generosity.
The journalist had to make another appointment to complete her
interview, this time without my presence, my personal interjections
and musings.
This is just one story of too many to be told, and so it goes...
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2014/01/12/inferno/
By Nigol Bezjian // January 12, 2014
Special to the Armenian Weekly
I was recently asked to help a journalist from a Prague-based radio
station do a report on the Syrian-Armenian refugees in Beirut. She
wanted to meet all sorts of folks - wealthy, poor, young and old - who
were trying to make a go of it with what was left from a fragmented
life. I took her to Bourj Hammoud - Little Armenia - where many of them
could be found, and to a restaurant serving the much-cherished Aleppo
cuisine.
An Aleppo street before the war in Syria.
We met one of the owners, a young, charming man with the freshly
acquired acuteness of a businessman. He quickly invited us to a table
and asked about our preferred drink from a list of American/global
soft drinks. We settled for cold bottled water with a local name,
though it was surely owned by some international conglomerate.
The journalist was originally from Stepanakert, the capital of the
Nagorno Karabagh Republic (NKR), which was born from a brutal war with
Azerbaijan that saw more than 30,000 killed on both sides. She had
been born in the midst of that war, during the unfolding of the Soviet
Union. And here she was covering a new war with its own displaced
Armenians.
While she was preparing her recording device, I had already begun to
engage this man, almost a third my age: Which neighborhood of Aleppo
was he from? How did he make it to Beirut safe and sound? What school
had he gone to?
His words took me back, step by step, to my youth in Aleppo.
He had attended the Haigazian kindergarten and elementary schools, and
the Karen Jeppe high school. When I told him that a generation ago, I
had lived in the same vicinity and had attended the same schools, a
sparkle shined in his eyes, followed by an unwilling smile of comfort:
He had at last met someone who could relate to his demolished past. It
was a moment of consolation between familiar strangers.
He asked when I had left our beloved Aleppo. During the 1973
Arab-Israeli War, I said, but didn't hear his response as my mind was
spectacularly taken back to my own war and departure. I'm not sure how
the meeting with the young reporter took shape. I was fixated on the
notion that in this part of the world, every generation has had a war
and has felt its mark.
My generation witnessed the many internal upheavals that gave us
nothing but panic and fear every day, as coup d'états spread young
army conscripts like ants through our streets and alleys. Then we had
the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when we
moved to Beirut and then the U.S., leaving my grandmother and aunts
behind. They, in turn, survived the Lebanese civil war, which began in
1975 and lasted 15 bloody years.
My grandmother had been a survivor of World War I, which gave us the
infamous Armenian Genocide. As a four-year-old, she was forced to walk
from her ancestral village in Sepastia through the scorching Syrian
desert of Der Zor, to the unwelcoming streets of Aleppo. All this,
with her younger brother, orphaned, thirsty, barefoot, and with hardly
any clothes on, witnessing horrors that made their generation
speechless for decades.
My father, who was born in Aleppo, lived through the wars of Syrian
independence from the French mandate, and then the internal wars over
control of the city among various armed groups, until it was time for
World War II. As a young man then, he joined the British Army. He was
first sent to Palestine, then Egypt, and eventually to Bologna to
fight to liberate Italy. He returned to Aleppo as a handsome,
war-experienced 19-year-old with limited knowledge of Italian, which
he had acquired from his girlfriends, and a mark of being westernized.
This same man, now with a wife and three boys, had to take up arms
again in the early 1960's to defend Armenian neighborhoods when the
short-lived Egyptian-Syrian union was being dismantled.
`Every generation has his war in the Middle East,' I heard myself
saying to no one in particular as I came back from my mental tour of
the past century.
The young restaurateur turned to me in a gentle move from the
reporter's microphone, as if continuing his interview. `This is a
destiny we have, to live out wars and upheavals, genocides and
massacres in the Middle East. This century has been bloody for us, in
Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, where we settled after the
Turkish massacres and found a life from the start. Yet we have to deal
with being killed again and again. For a century now, we have not
found peace and calm,' he said, sipping from his glass of a soft drink
overfilled with ice.
The ensuing, dense silence in noisy Bourj Hammoud was broken by his
conclusion, uttered in the humblest of voices: `Me and my other two
partners had a great life and spent every night in restaurants and
clubs in Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo, and Beirut. We were entertained as
if we were kings. Now in Beirut we work day and night to make our
customers feel like royals. This is the reversal of events, if you
survived at all. We are lucky and thankful, but thankful to whom and
why is what I do not know.'
I had no words, no ideas, on how to soften his pain when teardrops
fell from his eyes, while he insisted that we choose anything from the
menu as his guests. Only someone who has experienced a walk through
Dante's Inferno and come back alive could offer such generosity.
The journalist had to make another appointment to complete her
interview, this time without my presence, my personal interjections
and musings.
This is just one story of too many to be told, and so it goes...