MY TURN: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, 100 YEARS LATER

Concord Monitor, New Hampshire
April 5 2015

By JANE WINGATE
Sunday, April 5, 2015

April 24, 1915: Armenians the world over – those in the diaspora,
those in Armenia, and even those Armenians in Turkey who survived the
Ottomans’ genocide of the Armenians and became, if only outwardly,
Turkified – mark that date as the start of the genocide.

For centuries, the Ottoman Turks had imposed restrictions on Armenians
and other Christians. In 1894-1896, under Abdul Hamid, 200,000 to
300,000 Armenians were slaughtered.

Then in April 1915, Turkey’s minister of the interior, Talaat, set
in motion a plan to rid the Ottoman Empire of all the Armenians. On
April 24, Talaat rounded up and killed Armenian intellectuals and
community leaders in Constantinople. Over the next several years,
half the 3,000,000 Armenians in the empire were killed.

My father was a first-generation Armenian-American whose parents came
to this country in the late 19th century, barely escaping the massacres
of 1894-1896. They settled in Watertown, Mass., along with many other
Armenians. My grandparents’ marriage was arranged by a matchmaker.

My father married an odar (a stranger, an outsider). My mother was a
child of French-Canadian immigrants, making her also first generation.

Both my father and my mother were eager to assimilate us kids, so
we never learned either French or Armenian. I have no memory of my
father’s father, and only one of my father’s mother, from when I was
six. She (squat, dark, dark clothes, hair in a bun, slightly scary)
and I were seated next to one another on a sofa. She pinched my cheek
and said, “You love me, Janie?” I nodded furiously in assent.

In 1960, 10 percent of my high school class of 350 were Armenians. In
the main, they were excellent, serious students – pressured by their
parents to succeed academically, and to further their studies in
college. I had several Armenian friends, all brainy, but in general,
I dismissed Armenians as crazy, never able (in my father’s words)
“to shut up about the genocide.”

My father’s medical offices were on the ground floor of our three-story
town house on Mt. Auburn Street, the main drag in Watertown. The
trolleys droned back and forth along the rails in the middle of the
street, connecting Harvard Square in Cambridge to Watertown Square.

The patients’ waiting room was not closed off from the two upper floors
where we lived, so we five kids had to walk right through it, up the
broad stairway to our living quarters, followed by the patients’ eyes.

When my father held office hours, my mother was constantly telling
us to be quiet, “because there are patients downstairs” – not that
we needed reminding. When we could get away with it, we crept down
the few top steps and stared right back at them.

My father had a fair number of Armenian patients, some who survived
the 1915 genocide, others the massacres of 1895. Now and then he would
talk to them in Armenian, and once in a while I heard him scold them,
in English, “For Christ’s sake, forget about the genocide. You’re
here now.”

I recall just one time he talked about the genocide, referring to
a photograph that he said hung in many Armenian homes. It was a
photograph of bodies in one of the killing fields in Turkey. He said
“An arm there, a leg there, even heads cut from their bodies.” In
later years, I came across that photograph, and it triggered in me
a need to learn about what happened to my ancestors.

So I read everything I could find about the genocide, and when I was
exhausted and could take no more, I wrote a piece that ran in Ararat
magazine. The piece, “Shallow Roots: The Armenian Disconnection,”
elicited a number of letters sent to me via the magazine. Many of the
letters were from first-generation Armenian-Americans, including some
scholars. One was from a fellow who, like me, was also a half-breed –
a second-generation Armenian-American, whose mother married an odar.

He said his grandmother, Harkine Hagopian, a genocide survivor,
was still living, in Indianapolis, where she and her husband settled
after coming to this country.

Things happened quickly after that: I flew from Maryland to
Indianapolis twice, was picked up at the airport by one of Harkine’s
daughters, and brought to meet Harkine Pilibosian Hagopian, and over
the course of nine hours, I recorded her account of her deportation.

Harkine’s story

As a girl of 12, living a comfortable middle-class life with her
extended family over her father’s barbershop and dentistry practice,
Harkine was about to graduate from junior high in Adabazar, Turkey,
80 miles east of Constantinople. Then word came down from Talaat
that all Armenians were to leave their homes, and be ready to do so
in three days, taking only what they could carry with them.

It was a moving – and humbling – experience, listening to Harkine
talking about her 2,000-mile deportation into the Syrian desert,
impressively remembering all the stops her convoy made along the way.

First they were rammed into cattle cars, then let out at Konia, where
there were other raggedy, desperate deportees, camping in wretched
little tents, the overwhelming stench of feces everywhere.

Then the Turks moved them on, mostly on foot. As long as he had
money, Harkine’s father, Garabed, could buy them rides in ox carts,
or on donkeys. But soon all were walking. Many ended up in Raqqa,
which Harkine called “the last stop before Deir el Zor.” (Raqqa,
then a dusty desert town, is now claimed by ISIL as its capital.) In
Deir el Zor, the final killing fields for those who survived the long
marches, thousands were crammed into caves and burned alive.

It was in Raqqa that Harkine, along with her sister, her father,
and her grandmother were “saved” by an Arab, Mehmoud Ali, who offered
them protection, provided Harkine’s sister, Arshaloys, agreed to be
the third wife in his harem. Even though unwilling, Arshaloys agreed,
and was called Jemileh – “Beautiful” – by Mehmoud Ali.

During the deportation, Harkine’s mother and her uncle died. Harkine
and her father contracted typhus, and barely survived. And later,
in Raqqa, her sister died from syphilis. Before that, Harkine was
married off to Misak Hagopian, an older man from Everek, whose wife
and children were killed in the genocide. He owned the town’s oven,
and baked bread free for the town’s Muktar (mayor), who in return
took Misak under his wing. Harkine, then only 15, resisted Misak’s
proposal, but seeing no other alternative, she agreed, and they were
hastily married at night, in the dark of Misak’s lodgings. Harkine
had a baby by Misak, and shortly after her sister died, Harkine’s
baby died, likely in the 1918 flu pandemic.

Reawakening

I laid aside the nine hours of tapes, not sure what to do with the rich
material. Finally, in the late 1990s, I turned Harkine’s story into
a screenplay, first calling it Aksor (Exile), then The Luckiest One,
and then set about trying to find an agent. In time, the Charlotte
Gusay agency expressed strong interest, even calling a couple of
times to let me know it was still under consideration.

Eventually, without explaining why, they dropped it. Discouraged,
I laid aside the script and turned to other projects.

In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Leo Hamalian – then editor of
Ararat magazine – and I had a running snail-mail correspondence. Leo,
a generous, patient teacher and fine editor, gave me writing tips,
and always let me have the final word in all the pieces I sent him.

In one of his last letters, Leo said Armenian culture and literature
were about to explode. He was right about that, and now we are seeing
a huge surge, since this April marks the 100th anniversary of the
start of the genocide.

In a speech in which she talks about this revival of interest,
the Armenian-American filmmaker, Carol Garapedian (Screamers),
says that this reawakening is now possible because the second and
third generations of Armenians have established themselves, have
made a name for themselves, are now secure and confident, and able
to address the genocide through the arts.

And they are eager to do so, acutely aware that Turkey still denies
the genocide, and that our Congress, knuckling under to Turkey, our
“strategic” ally, has yet to officially recognize it.

We shall see what April brings.

(Jane Wingate lives in Farmington.)