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NEVER FORGET, NEVER TELL
The Christian Century
June 23 2014
An Armenian American's dilemma of memory
Jun 23, 2014 by Rachel M. Srubas
"I want to go home," declared the tattoo on the German shopkeeper's
forearm, "but I haven't found it yet." I had spent the week in Berlin
with my husband, and now we were scheduled to fly on to Istanbul. I
had never been to Turkey, yet that message of longing and search on
a stranger's arm could have been written on my own.
My maternal grandfather, Puzant Tarpinian, was an Armenian who grew
up in the KarataÅ~_ neighborhood of Smyrna (now called Izmir), an
Aegean seaport city on the western shore of Anatolia, Turkey. After
immigrating to the United States in 1912 with his older brother Caspar,
Puzant settled in Chicago. For years he worked as a comptroller for
Blum's Vogue, a fashionable women's clothier on Michigan Avenue. He
died at age 68 in 1958. I was born six years later. At age 49, never
having met my granddad, I found myself missing him, missing all the
dead Tarpinians so deeply that I set off on a pilgrimage to Turkey.
In Berlin I had visited Holocaust memorials and other monumental
symbols of national repentance. I knew I would find no atoning
monuments to ethnic and religious minorities exterminated in Turkey.
In 1915, zealous nationalism and militarism--embraced by the so-called
Young Turks, or Committee of Union and Progress--led to the systematic
deportation and slaughter of 1 million or more Christian Armenians of
Turkey, as well as other ethnic and non-Muslim minorities, including
Greeks and Kurds. Secular and religious American newspapers such
as the New York Times and Missionary Review of the World reported
the war crimes. In the United States, Puzant and Caspar Tarpinian,
college-educated émigrés fluent in English, surely learned of the
grave threats to their home community, although Smyrna's Armenian
population remained remarkably intact as late as 1921. That was that
year that Caspar left Puzant in Chicago and went back to rejoin his
family in Smyrna.
The Greek army had landed on Smyrna's shores in 1919. In September
of 1922, Turkish military forces invaded and regained control of
the city. Soon a massive fire, reportedly set by Turkish soldiers,
swept through Smyrna's Armenian and Greek neighborhoods, destroying
buildings, killing thousands, and forcing survivors to flee. Armenian
and Greek men were arrested and deported to Turkey's interior. Those
women and children who escaped sought refuge in neighboring nations.
Among my mother's belongings, I recently discovered a postcard that
her aunt, Takouhy Tarpinian, sent from Athens, Greece, to a Chicago
address. It's dated November 4, 1922. Her father had tucked the card,
message side down, into an album of mementos that remained unopened
in a dresser drawer. My mother Alice never read it.
My Dear Puzant, What has happened to you dear and you do not write. Are
you sick? We are anxiously waiting every day. Write often to mother. We
have heard nothing from C. since he was taken what he must be suffering
poor Caspar what luck. Sometimes I have no hope at all & other times
I feel different. With love from all and myself, yours, Takouhy
While descendants of the murdered Jews of Europe have learned
the imperative, "Never forget," diaspora Armenians seem to have
internalized a dilemma: "Never forget, never tell." In Redeeming
Memories, Armenian-American theologian Flora Keshgegian observes, "The
Armenian-American community can best be characterized by preoccupation
with the memory of the reality of the genocide, but silence regarding
personal narratives and the impact of it on people's lives."
Puzant Tarpinian coped with the impact of the genocide by forging
a new American family. He married Ione Wyse, an educated former
Mississippian of Scots-Irish, Presbyterian lineage, who had taught
music and managed a tearoom in Chicago's Hyde Park. In 1934, when
their only daughter Alice was born, Ione devoted herself to raising
the child in a hushed, protective environment. Though Puzant spoke
rarely of Caspar to his wife and daughter, Alice grew up knowing that
her father had written to the U.S. State Department pleading for help
in finding his brother and that he had received no reply.
Alice's limited contact with Armenian culture came by way of food and
friendship. Puzant would take his daughter to dinner in Chicago's
Greektown, where the roast lamb, rice pilaf, and baklava resembled
Armenian cuisine. "Uncle Steve" and "Aunt Kate" Turabian (Kate is the
author of the University of Chicago Manual for Writers, now in its
8th edition) were family friends. Stephen Turabian, a formerly Ottoman
Armenian like Puzant, had emigrated to the U.S. from Turkey in 1908.
Puzant and Steve must have found a sense of brotherhood in their
similar backgrounds and losses, and perhaps in their ethnic resemblance
as well. As the joke has it, ian at the end of Armenian surnames
stands for "I'm all nose."
Freckled, fair, and beset by ailments, Ione Wyse Tarpinian required
years of physical care from her husband, and died of cancer when Alice
was only 14. Ten years later, weakened by ulcers and heart disease,
Puzant died on Thanksgiving Day. To this day my mother prefers
serving roast leg of lamb to turkey. She cherishes her father's
American Civil Liberties Union membership card. She has his dark,
roundish eyes and an Armenoid nose that I see on my own face in the
mirror. I see this same nose on Puzant's face in the photo taken on
his daughter's wedding day, a year before his death. His bodily organs
gave out, but I believe it was unanswerable questions and unspeakable
grief that did him in. He had done his best not to bequeath sorrow
to his daughter, but even the most cautious, secretive parents cannot
protect their offspring from the truths that bloodlines tell.
To be Armenian today is to bear in your being the molecular memories
of the suffering, resurrected Christ in whom the Armenians placed
their faith as early as the year 301. These memories converge with
memories of ethnic and religious persecution that is all too recent
and scandalously prototypical. "Who after all, speaks today of the
annihilation of the Armenians?" Adolf Hitler asked German military
commanders on August 22, 1939, one week before Nazi forces invaded
Poland. Hitler's followers were persuaded to target various European
communities of "subhumans," replicating and elaborating on the
genocidal tactics employed two decades earlier in Turkey.
Today Turkey continues to officially deny the Armenian Genocide despite
pressure to acknowledge it from international leaders and agencies,
including the United Nations and the World Council of Churches. Just
one month before our visit to Berlin, Turkish prime minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan met with German chancellor Angela Merkel. Referring
to the Armenian Genocide, she reportedly told Erdogan, "Turkey must
come to terms with its history." Erdogan countered, "You are forcing
us to accept something we have not done."
In 2005, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was arrested for "insulting
Turkishness" after the Swiss publication Das Magazin quoted him as
saying, "One million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these
lands and nobody but me dares talk about it." International literary
and human rights communities vehemently protested Pamuk's arrest.
Turkish authorities eventually dropped the charges, and Pamuk went
on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
That same year, Armenian-Turkish newspaper editor Hrant Dink wrote
that "people who lived on this territory for 3,000 years, people who
produced culture and civilization on this territory, were torn from
the land they had lived on and those who survived were dispersed all
over the world . . . The experience is already internalized, recorded
on its people's memory, its genetic code." Dink's journalistic
activism eventually led to the arrest of the editors of Agos, the
Turkish-Armenian bilingual weekly that Dink published. In 2007 in
Istanbul, as Dink left Agos offices, 17-year-old ultranationalist
Ogun Samast assassinated him. "I shot the infidel," Samast reportedly
shouted as he ran from Dink's fallen body.
Dink's funeral inspired nearly 100,000 people to protest ethnically
and religiously motivated violence. Many marched carrying placards
that read, "We are all Hrant. We are all Armenian."
Public protests are common in Turkish cities, especially since the
massive 2013 antigovernment uprisings in Istanbul's Taksim Square and
Gezi Park, which resulted in thousands of injuries and an estimated
11 deaths. During our time in Istanbul, my husband and I witnessed
thunderously chanting InterÂnational Women's Day marchers surrounded
by police in riot gear. Days later, thousands of people took to the
streets to mourn 15-year-old Istanbul resident Berkin Elvan, who was
hit in the head by a police officer's tear gas canister during a 2013
protest. The boy died after spending 269 days in a coma. His furious,
grief-stricken mother told reporters, "It's not God who took my son
away but Prime Minister Erdogan."
A 3,000-year-old city of over 13 million inhabitants, Istanbul is
palpably tense. Often aided by the kindness of locals, we made our way
through its ancient but thriving dynamic neighborhoods. Once we had
passed the metal detector and armed guard at the door of the Dutch
consulate, we were warmly welcomed by worshipers at the ecumenical
worship service. The vast majority of Turkey's citizens, however,
are registered Muslims. Five times a day the adhÄ~An, the call to
prayer broadcast from the minarets of mosques, urges the faithful to
hurry to worship.
These loud, lyrical Islamic recitations reminded me, a Christian in
Turkey, that mine is only one path that people walk in seeking God.
While many Muslims of Turkey continue about their secular business
as muezzins call them to prayer, some drop everything to enact their
submission to Allah. In a rank gas station restroom I encountered
a devout woman performing her ritual ablutions at a sink. Minutes
later she was kneeling in prayer on the sidewalk behind the building,
her forehead pressed to the pavement. I was reminded of the prophet
Joel's words read on Ash Wednesday--that God had beckoned us to
"return to me."
I had returned to a land both strange to me and known in my bones. We
traveled to Izmir, once called "Infidel Smyrna" by Ottomans hostile
to its Greek and Armenian Christian populations. We had decided to
stay in local homes. When the transmission in our flimsy rental car
gave out just as we arrived at our Izmir guest apartment, our host
swiftly phoned the rental agency and arranged for a new vehicle to
be delivered. Then she served us tea, offered us house slippers,
and introduced us to her boyfriend Kemal. "He hates the Kurds,"
she mentioned at one point. "Don't ask him why."
We didn't ask. We were acquainted with bigotry's virulent logic. My
Ash Wednesday visit to Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe--its undulating concrete acreage, corridors of sarcophagal
pillars, and "emergency exit" stairwells leading to dead ends--had
a solemn, nauseating impact on me. Now I was at the social mercy of
people native to the city from which the Armenians had been driven
a century earlier. I knew I could not stomach Kemal's reasons for
hating an entire, comparably persecuted ethnic minority. I kept the
acquiescent silence that well-meaning Christians have been known to
keep in the face of racism.
I also kept silent about the former Armenians of Karata. I knew that
no one would remember where the Armenian Church Cemetery was; it had
been next to the Tarpinians' house, but the neighborhood had burned
and its residents had perished or fled. Our photocopied antique Ottoman
land deed took us to a sloping, seaward street that may have been the
right one. The vacancy I sensed despite the street's modern, overbuilt
excess seemed to confirm that we had homed in on a paradox that only a
seer in exile could express. "I know your affliction and your poverty,
even though you are rich," John the Revelator once wrote to the church
in Smyrna. His words were also true here on the street of my people,
near their incinerated house of worship and paved-over graves.
We left Izmir for ruined, excavated Ephesus, and Ephesus for
Cappadocia's frescoed cave churches, where Christians had found
refuge and fellowship centuries earlier. We sang "Amazing Grace"
in one of these hallowed places, just the two of us lost-and-found
wretches. We bought cups of fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice from a
sunburnt vendor who pointed the way back to town, and we walked for
miles followed by a desert dog hungry for the salty, braided cheese
in our packs. We rented a furnished cave to sleep in.
Home, it turned out, was not a place in Turkey. Home was not
some surviving ethnic remnant of the "infidel" city from which
Puzant and Caspar Tarpinian had set sail in 1912. Nor was it the
postcard-picturesque scenes of Smyrna that had carried Takouhy's
messages to her brother in faraway America. Home, the home of God,
was and is among mortals, as the book of Revelation could have told me.
This meant that God was with us no matter where we traveled, where
we lived or died. We were home. We are home.
Late in Lent my husband and I were back in Tucson, Arizona, and I
attended Palm Sunday worship at a friend's church. Following the
service she introduced me to a woman named Esther, who was about
my mother's age and petite, with an elegantly prominent nose. She
told me her maiden name, which ended with the familiar Armenian ian,
which means "issued from." She explained that in 1915 her Armenian
mother had been rescued from "the death march road" and housed with
a Kurdish family until a Greek orphanage took her in.
"Come to my home for lunch," she said. I arrived at her doorstep with
two apricot roses in a vase and the postcard that Takouhy Tarpinian
had mailed to her brother Puzant a century earlier. Esther showed
me an heirloom rug and recounted her father's childhood memories of
picking silkworm cocoons from the mulberry trees in his village near
Istanbul. Her father and mother had refused to share other, bloodier
memories with their children. All that Esther knew of the deportations
and slaughters, the escapes and sanctuaries, she had learned from a
cousin whose mother had been willing and able to speak of them.
The day after my visit with Esther was April 23, the eve of Armenian
Martyrs' Day. Turkish prime minister Erdogan made international
news with a carefully crafted statement that stopped short of
acknowledging the Armenian Genocide while calling for the creation
of a Turkish-Armenian commission to study the events of 1915. Erdogan
expressed respect for "all Ottoman citizens who lost their lives in the
same period" and offered condolences to the grandchildren of "Armenians
who lost their lives in the context of the early 20th century."
As the grandniece of Caspar Tarpinian, whose family never heard from
him again after he was taken from their home, I find little comfort
in Erdogan's remarks and am skeptical about his motives for saying as
much as he said. I am cautious and ambivalent like Takouhy, who said
in her postcard to Puzant, "Sometimes I have no hope at all and other
times I feel different." My faith in the crucified, risen Redeemer
dares me to imagine that some day Turkish officials will call the
Armenian Genocide by its true name and help set my people free from
the cycle of futile remembrance and rage.
photo caption: HISTORIC MASS: Armenian women pray outside the
1,000-year-old church of Surp Khach, or Holy Cross, on Akdamar Island
in Turkey. The church is one of the most precious remnants of Armenian
culture. In 2012 several hundred Armenian Christians celebrated a
mass there for the first time since the expulsion of the Armenian
people in the World War I era. AP photo/Burhan Ozbilici
http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2014-06/never-forget-never-tell
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
The Christian Century
June 23 2014
An Armenian American's dilemma of memory
Jun 23, 2014 by Rachel M. Srubas
"I want to go home," declared the tattoo on the German shopkeeper's
forearm, "but I haven't found it yet." I had spent the week in Berlin
with my husband, and now we were scheduled to fly on to Istanbul. I
had never been to Turkey, yet that message of longing and search on
a stranger's arm could have been written on my own.
My maternal grandfather, Puzant Tarpinian, was an Armenian who grew
up in the KarataÅ~_ neighborhood of Smyrna (now called Izmir), an
Aegean seaport city on the western shore of Anatolia, Turkey. After
immigrating to the United States in 1912 with his older brother Caspar,
Puzant settled in Chicago. For years he worked as a comptroller for
Blum's Vogue, a fashionable women's clothier on Michigan Avenue. He
died at age 68 in 1958. I was born six years later. At age 49, never
having met my granddad, I found myself missing him, missing all the
dead Tarpinians so deeply that I set off on a pilgrimage to Turkey.
In Berlin I had visited Holocaust memorials and other monumental
symbols of national repentance. I knew I would find no atoning
monuments to ethnic and religious minorities exterminated in Turkey.
In 1915, zealous nationalism and militarism--embraced by the so-called
Young Turks, or Committee of Union and Progress--led to the systematic
deportation and slaughter of 1 million or more Christian Armenians of
Turkey, as well as other ethnic and non-Muslim minorities, including
Greeks and Kurds. Secular and religious American newspapers such
as the New York Times and Missionary Review of the World reported
the war crimes. In the United States, Puzant and Caspar Tarpinian,
college-educated émigrés fluent in English, surely learned of the
grave threats to their home community, although Smyrna's Armenian
population remained remarkably intact as late as 1921. That was that
year that Caspar left Puzant in Chicago and went back to rejoin his
family in Smyrna.
The Greek army had landed on Smyrna's shores in 1919. In September
of 1922, Turkish military forces invaded and regained control of
the city. Soon a massive fire, reportedly set by Turkish soldiers,
swept through Smyrna's Armenian and Greek neighborhoods, destroying
buildings, killing thousands, and forcing survivors to flee. Armenian
and Greek men were arrested and deported to Turkey's interior. Those
women and children who escaped sought refuge in neighboring nations.
Among my mother's belongings, I recently discovered a postcard that
her aunt, Takouhy Tarpinian, sent from Athens, Greece, to a Chicago
address. It's dated November 4, 1922. Her father had tucked the card,
message side down, into an album of mementos that remained unopened
in a dresser drawer. My mother Alice never read it.
My Dear Puzant, What has happened to you dear and you do not write. Are
you sick? We are anxiously waiting every day. Write often to mother. We
have heard nothing from C. since he was taken what he must be suffering
poor Caspar what luck. Sometimes I have no hope at all & other times
I feel different. With love from all and myself, yours, Takouhy
While descendants of the murdered Jews of Europe have learned
the imperative, "Never forget," diaspora Armenians seem to have
internalized a dilemma: "Never forget, never tell." In Redeeming
Memories, Armenian-American theologian Flora Keshgegian observes, "The
Armenian-American community can best be characterized by preoccupation
with the memory of the reality of the genocide, but silence regarding
personal narratives and the impact of it on people's lives."
Puzant Tarpinian coped with the impact of the genocide by forging
a new American family. He married Ione Wyse, an educated former
Mississippian of Scots-Irish, Presbyterian lineage, who had taught
music and managed a tearoom in Chicago's Hyde Park. In 1934, when
their only daughter Alice was born, Ione devoted herself to raising
the child in a hushed, protective environment. Though Puzant spoke
rarely of Caspar to his wife and daughter, Alice grew up knowing that
her father had written to the U.S. State Department pleading for help
in finding his brother and that he had received no reply.
Alice's limited contact with Armenian culture came by way of food and
friendship. Puzant would take his daughter to dinner in Chicago's
Greektown, where the roast lamb, rice pilaf, and baklava resembled
Armenian cuisine. "Uncle Steve" and "Aunt Kate" Turabian (Kate is the
author of the University of Chicago Manual for Writers, now in its
8th edition) were family friends. Stephen Turabian, a formerly Ottoman
Armenian like Puzant, had emigrated to the U.S. from Turkey in 1908.
Puzant and Steve must have found a sense of brotherhood in their
similar backgrounds and losses, and perhaps in their ethnic resemblance
as well. As the joke has it, ian at the end of Armenian surnames
stands for "I'm all nose."
Freckled, fair, and beset by ailments, Ione Wyse Tarpinian required
years of physical care from her husband, and died of cancer when Alice
was only 14. Ten years later, weakened by ulcers and heart disease,
Puzant died on Thanksgiving Day. To this day my mother prefers
serving roast leg of lamb to turkey. She cherishes her father's
American Civil Liberties Union membership card. She has his dark,
roundish eyes and an Armenoid nose that I see on my own face in the
mirror. I see this same nose on Puzant's face in the photo taken on
his daughter's wedding day, a year before his death. His bodily organs
gave out, but I believe it was unanswerable questions and unspeakable
grief that did him in. He had done his best not to bequeath sorrow
to his daughter, but even the most cautious, secretive parents cannot
protect their offspring from the truths that bloodlines tell.
To be Armenian today is to bear in your being the molecular memories
of the suffering, resurrected Christ in whom the Armenians placed
their faith as early as the year 301. These memories converge with
memories of ethnic and religious persecution that is all too recent
and scandalously prototypical. "Who after all, speaks today of the
annihilation of the Armenians?" Adolf Hitler asked German military
commanders on August 22, 1939, one week before Nazi forces invaded
Poland. Hitler's followers were persuaded to target various European
communities of "subhumans," replicating and elaborating on the
genocidal tactics employed two decades earlier in Turkey.
Today Turkey continues to officially deny the Armenian Genocide despite
pressure to acknowledge it from international leaders and agencies,
including the United Nations and the World Council of Churches. Just
one month before our visit to Berlin, Turkish prime minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan met with German chancellor Angela Merkel. Referring
to the Armenian Genocide, she reportedly told Erdogan, "Turkey must
come to terms with its history." Erdogan countered, "You are forcing
us to accept something we have not done."
In 2005, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was arrested for "insulting
Turkishness" after the Swiss publication Das Magazin quoted him as
saying, "One million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these
lands and nobody but me dares talk about it." International literary
and human rights communities vehemently protested Pamuk's arrest.
Turkish authorities eventually dropped the charges, and Pamuk went
on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
That same year, Armenian-Turkish newspaper editor Hrant Dink wrote
that "people who lived on this territory for 3,000 years, people who
produced culture and civilization on this territory, were torn from
the land they had lived on and those who survived were dispersed all
over the world . . . The experience is already internalized, recorded
on its people's memory, its genetic code." Dink's journalistic
activism eventually led to the arrest of the editors of Agos, the
Turkish-Armenian bilingual weekly that Dink published. In 2007 in
Istanbul, as Dink left Agos offices, 17-year-old ultranationalist
Ogun Samast assassinated him. "I shot the infidel," Samast reportedly
shouted as he ran from Dink's fallen body.
Dink's funeral inspired nearly 100,000 people to protest ethnically
and religiously motivated violence. Many marched carrying placards
that read, "We are all Hrant. We are all Armenian."
Public protests are common in Turkish cities, especially since the
massive 2013 antigovernment uprisings in Istanbul's Taksim Square and
Gezi Park, which resulted in thousands of injuries and an estimated
11 deaths. During our time in Istanbul, my husband and I witnessed
thunderously chanting InterÂnational Women's Day marchers surrounded
by police in riot gear. Days later, thousands of people took to the
streets to mourn 15-year-old Istanbul resident Berkin Elvan, who was
hit in the head by a police officer's tear gas canister during a 2013
protest. The boy died after spending 269 days in a coma. His furious,
grief-stricken mother told reporters, "It's not God who took my son
away but Prime Minister Erdogan."
A 3,000-year-old city of over 13 million inhabitants, Istanbul is
palpably tense. Often aided by the kindness of locals, we made our way
through its ancient but thriving dynamic neighborhoods. Once we had
passed the metal detector and armed guard at the door of the Dutch
consulate, we were warmly welcomed by worshipers at the ecumenical
worship service. The vast majority of Turkey's citizens, however,
are registered Muslims. Five times a day the adhÄ~An, the call to
prayer broadcast from the minarets of mosques, urges the faithful to
hurry to worship.
These loud, lyrical Islamic recitations reminded me, a Christian in
Turkey, that mine is only one path that people walk in seeking God.
While many Muslims of Turkey continue about their secular business
as muezzins call them to prayer, some drop everything to enact their
submission to Allah. In a rank gas station restroom I encountered
a devout woman performing her ritual ablutions at a sink. Minutes
later she was kneeling in prayer on the sidewalk behind the building,
her forehead pressed to the pavement. I was reminded of the prophet
Joel's words read on Ash Wednesday--that God had beckoned us to
"return to me."
I had returned to a land both strange to me and known in my bones. We
traveled to Izmir, once called "Infidel Smyrna" by Ottomans hostile
to its Greek and Armenian Christian populations. We had decided to
stay in local homes. When the transmission in our flimsy rental car
gave out just as we arrived at our Izmir guest apartment, our host
swiftly phoned the rental agency and arranged for a new vehicle to
be delivered. Then she served us tea, offered us house slippers,
and introduced us to her boyfriend Kemal. "He hates the Kurds,"
she mentioned at one point. "Don't ask him why."
We didn't ask. We were acquainted with bigotry's virulent logic. My
Ash Wednesday visit to Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe--its undulating concrete acreage, corridors of sarcophagal
pillars, and "emergency exit" stairwells leading to dead ends--had
a solemn, nauseating impact on me. Now I was at the social mercy of
people native to the city from which the Armenians had been driven
a century earlier. I knew I could not stomach Kemal's reasons for
hating an entire, comparably persecuted ethnic minority. I kept the
acquiescent silence that well-meaning Christians have been known to
keep in the face of racism.
I also kept silent about the former Armenians of Karata. I knew that
no one would remember where the Armenian Church Cemetery was; it had
been next to the Tarpinians' house, but the neighborhood had burned
and its residents had perished or fled. Our photocopied antique Ottoman
land deed took us to a sloping, seaward street that may have been the
right one. The vacancy I sensed despite the street's modern, overbuilt
excess seemed to confirm that we had homed in on a paradox that only a
seer in exile could express. "I know your affliction and your poverty,
even though you are rich," John the Revelator once wrote to the church
in Smyrna. His words were also true here on the street of my people,
near their incinerated house of worship and paved-over graves.
We left Izmir for ruined, excavated Ephesus, and Ephesus for
Cappadocia's frescoed cave churches, where Christians had found
refuge and fellowship centuries earlier. We sang "Amazing Grace"
in one of these hallowed places, just the two of us lost-and-found
wretches. We bought cups of fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice from a
sunburnt vendor who pointed the way back to town, and we walked for
miles followed by a desert dog hungry for the salty, braided cheese
in our packs. We rented a furnished cave to sleep in.
Home, it turned out, was not a place in Turkey. Home was not
some surviving ethnic remnant of the "infidel" city from which
Puzant and Caspar Tarpinian had set sail in 1912. Nor was it the
postcard-picturesque scenes of Smyrna that had carried Takouhy's
messages to her brother in faraway America. Home, the home of God,
was and is among mortals, as the book of Revelation could have told me.
This meant that God was with us no matter where we traveled, where
we lived or died. We were home. We are home.
Late in Lent my husband and I were back in Tucson, Arizona, and I
attended Palm Sunday worship at a friend's church. Following the
service she introduced me to a woman named Esther, who was about
my mother's age and petite, with an elegantly prominent nose. She
told me her maiden name, which ended with the familiar Armenian ian,
which means "issued from." She explained that in 1915 her Armenian
mother had been rescued from "the death march road" and housed with
a Kurdish family until a Greek orphanage took her in.
"Come to my home for lunch," she said. I arrived at her doorstep with
two apricot roses in a vase and the postcard that Takouhy Tarpinian
had mailed to her brother Puzant a century earlier. Esther showed
me an heirloom rug and recounted her father's childhood memories of
picking silkworm cocoons from the mulberry trees in his village near
Istanbul. Her father and mother had refused to share other, bloodier
memories with their children. All that Esther knew of the deportations
and slaughters, the escapes and sanctuaries, she had learned from a
cousin whose mother had been willing and able to speak of them.
The day after my visit with Esther was April 23, the eve of Armenian
Martyrs' Day. Turkish prime minister Erdogan made international
news with a carefully crafted statement that stopped short of
acknowledging the Armenian Genocide while calling for the creation
of a Turkish-Armenian commission to study the events of 1915. Erdogan
expressed respect for "all Ottoman citizens who lost their lives in the
same period" and offered condolences to the grandchildren of "Armenians
who lost their lives in the context of the early 20th century."
As the grandniece of Caspar Tarpinian, whose family never heard from
him again after he was taken from their home, I find little comfort
in Erdogan's remarks and am skeptical about his motives for saying as
much as he said. I am cautious and ambivalent like Takouhy, who said
in her postcard to Puzant, "Sometimes I have no hope at all and other
times I feel different." My faith in the crucified, risen Redeemer
dares me to imagine that some day Turkish officials will call the
Armenian Genocide by its true name and help set my people free from
the cycle of futile remembrance and rage.
photo caption: HISTORIC MASS: Armenian women pray outside the
1,000-year-old church of Surp Khach, or Holy Cross, on Akdamar Island
in Turkey. The church is one of the most precious remnants of Armenian
culture. In 2012 several hundred Armenian Christians celebrated a
mass there for the first time since the expulsion of the Armenian
people in the World War I era. AP photo/Burhan Ozbilici
http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2014-06/never-forget-never-tell
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress