LOCAL ARMENIANS FORM A CLUB TO HELP PRESERVE THEIR CULTURE
By Mark Baker
The Register-Guard
s/sites/web/news/cityregion/11299072-41/story.csp
April 24 2009
The Register-Guard
Photo: Annette Gurdjian traces her root back to family in Armenia
generations ago, some of whom were killed in the "Forgotten Holocaust."
Photo: Gurdjian holds a photo taken in 1926 of priests in Der-Zor,
Syria, with the bones of people killed by the former Ottoman Empire.
Chris Pietsch/The Register-Guard
"In the last week, I just discovered five more Armenians," says Sophia
Malkasian, pointing to the handwritten names on the back of her typed
club list that has now grown to 30 names. "They’re just coming out
of the woodwork."
It is April 5, and the Eugene native is sitting around a table of
lavash, pilaf, stuffed grape leaves and other Armenian favorites at
the home of Annette Gurdjian and Dennis Clay in south Eugene.
Malkasian and Gurdjian are part of a group they’ve helped start
called the Armenians of Eugene Club. It began last fall when they
and a few other local women of Armenian descent got together for
lunch at Eugene’s Ratatouille restaurant. They have since met monthly
at members’ homes for potlucks, where they share their food, their
stories, their history and a culture they do not want to lose.
It’s a history with an especially painful bond that can be traced
to an event that happened 94 years ago today in the Turkish city of
Constantinople, now Istanbul.
April 24, 1915, is the date Armenians recognize as the beginning of
what some call the "Forgotten Holocaust," the massacre of 1 million to
1.5 million Armenians during World War I and into the early 1920s by
the former Ottoman Empire, now modern-day Turkey. Ottoman authorities
are said to have arrested, and then executed, between 200 and 300
Armenian intellectuals and community leaders that day. Turkey has
acknowledged the killings over the decades, but maintains they were
casualties of war, not a systematic genocide.
The issue has been a political bombshell in recent years. In 2007,
a Democratic-backed resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives
to condemn the killings as genocide fizzled over concerns it would
antagonize Turkey, a U.S. ally and an important member of NATO,
and stall the mending of relations between Turkey and Armenia.
For Armenian-Americans, Turkey’s refusal to acknowledge the deaths
of their ancestors as genocide is a perpetual wound.
"We just want the recognition," says Gurdjian, a Eugene artist. "It’s
like the Holocaust deniers," she says of those who speak with doubt
about the 6 million Jews killed by Nazis in Europe during World War II.
Gurdjian grew up in Providence, R.I., learning to speak and write
Armenian before English, along with her sisters, Ardemis Gurdjian-Walsh
of Eugene and Adrianne Cady of Naples, Fla.
Their father, Antranik Gurdjian, was born in Istanbul in 1904. He came
to America in 1922 with his family through Ellis Island. Their mother,
Alice, was born in New Jersey but was also a descendent of Armenia,
the small mountainous country on Turkey’s eastern border that gained
independence in 1991 after centuries under Ottoman rule and decades
under the former Soviet Union.
Alice Gurdjian’s father, Ohannes Mardirosian, was from what is now
Van, Turkey, in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire, a city whose
population was devastated during the mass killings, Gurdjian says. His
mother, all but one sibling, and nieces and nephews, were killed,
according to family history. Her grandfather survived because he was
out of town working that day, Gurdjian says.
Family stories of the mass killings, how Armenians, usually the men,
were rounded up and taken from their villages, or sometimes just
disappeared, have been passed down through the generations, she says.
"I don’t live in the past, but I think it helps to talk about it
and learn from it," says club member Anahid Bertrand, a Eugene music
teacher whose husband, Eric Bertrand, owns Ratatouille. "I think it
would be nice for people to know about it like they know about the
Jews. And I’m sure Turkey would feel better about it, too."
Anahid Bertrand was born in Varna, Bulgaria, on the western edge of
the Black Sea. Her Armenian grandparents, Ovanes and Annik Chahbazian,
had fled in about 1920 from their hometown of Ani in what is now
eastern Turkey, she says. Her parents, Harutyun and Agavni, were
also born in Varna, before migrating to New York City in the 1960s,
and then back to Bulgaria.
Bertrand came to the United States when she was 20 to study music at
Sonoma State University, where she received her bachelor’s degree,
and at San Francisco State University.
In summer 2007, a chance meeting between Bertrand, who moved to Eugene
with her husband three years ago from the San Francisco Bay area,
and Gurdjian-Walshplanted the seed for the Armenian Club of Eugene.
Gurdjian-Walsh, a mobile notary, had gone to the Bertrand’s home so the
couple could sign a loan to refinance their home. The women exchanged
phone numbers, then met for coffee, joined by Annette Gurdjian.
Then a mutual friend told Gurdjian-Walsh last year about another Eugene
woman, Malkasian, who grew up in Eugene but had gone to live in Armenia
as a volunteer aid worker with a program called Birthright Armenia.
"It’s stupendous, because I have a certain hunger for my roots,"
says club member Larry Hirons, whose family has operated Eugene’s
Hirons drug stores since 1935.
Hirons’ cousin, Greg Malkasian, is Sophia Malkasian’s father. Hirons’
grandparents, Ardashes and Sophia Malkasian, for whom the younger
Sophia Malkasian is named, left Armenia before the genocide and met
in MassaÂchusetts about 1905, Hirons says. His grandparents lived
in Fresno, Calif., and Seattle before settling in Eugene by the early
1920s, he says.
"We just kind of started getting together," says Gurdjian, who left
Eugene on Easter to travel to Syria and Turkey for three weeks with
her son, Li Gurdjian-Clay, a recent University of Oregon graduate
who is considering volunteering for Birthright Armenia.
The trip, sponsored by a small Armenian tour group in California,
will include a visit to Istanbul, where Gurdjian plans to show her
son where his great-grandfather went to school as a boy. Gurdjian has
twice previously visited Armenia, in 1979, when it was still ruled
by the Soviet Union, and in 2007 when her sister, Gurdjian-ÂWalsh,
joined her.
Gurdjian-Walsh says that when she and her sister went to Turkey in
2007, and young Turks discovered the sisters were of Armenian descent,
they wanted to know what the sisters thought about the genocide,
if it was really true or not?
She says many young Turks are kept in the dark about the genocide,
and those of Armenian descent have lost track of their heritage,
in some cases their families have dropped the "-ian" from the end of
their last names to "blend in."
Annette Gurdjian says she hopes President Obama can help shed light
on the genocide. "He promised in his candidacy to recognize that,
so all eyes are on him in the Armenian community," she says.
Obama spoke before the Turkish Parliament in the capitol city of Ankara
on April 6. But he did not use the word "genocide" during that speech
— in which he sought to bridge the divide between America and much
of the Muslim world — drawing the ire of some Armenian-ÂAmericans.
"President Obama missed a valuable opportunity to honor his public
pledge to recognize the Armenian genocide," Aram Hamparian, executive
director of the Armenian National Committee of America, said. Obama’s
remarks fell "far short of the clear promise he made as a candidate
that he would, as president, fully and unequivocally recognize this
crime against humanity," Hamparian said.
In Eugene, some 6,500 miles from the Turkey-Armenia border, the
Armenian Club of Eugene keeps the flame burning, just like the one that
burns at a holocaust memorial in Armenia’s capital city of Yerevan.
"Armenians are everywhere," Sophia Malkasian says. "We’re called
‘scattered beads,’â~@~I" she says. "So this group, to me, means
bringing it all together. And helping to preserve the culture."
$$$$$$
"I don’t live in the past, but I think it helps to talk about it and
learn from it."
HHHHHH
Anahid Bertrand Armenians of Eugene Club member