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Rising up within the Seventies and ’80s, I spent Sundays and holidays at my medzmama’s home in East Hollywood. 20 years in the past, the town designated my grandmother’s neighborhood as “Little Armenia,” the place the primary important wave of Armenian immigrants settled within the mid-Twentieth century.
Most arrivals had roots in western Armenia, Armenians’ homeland for a lot of 1000’s of years till a genocidal marketing campaign left greater than 1 million lifeless, and a whole bunch of 1000’s displaced ― my medzmama, Herminé, amongst them.
Each of my dad and mom have been Armenian. In a marked departure from many first-generation Armenian immigrants, nevertheless, I wasn’t raised in an Armenian group. I didn’t develop up talking the language. I didn’t attend Armenian colleges. I went to public college and my pals have been non-immigrant Individuals.
My dad and mom despatched a blended message: Being Armenian was central to our identification but obscured. Between cultural continuity and belonging, they selected the latter.
My medzmama’s home and her neighborhood returned a few of what was misplaced. I caught the sights, smells, tastes of my tradition. Grizzled previous males in trousers smoking cigarettes and enjoying Tavlou (backgammon) of their driveways. Mournful dirges resounding at St. Garabed’s Armenian Apostolic Church companies, and recordings of males singing sentimental ballads, siroones, siroones (“my love”) spilling out of automobiles and outlets. Za’atar and basturma wafting the second we opened the door to Bezjian’s Market, and the khorovats smoking from yard barbecues, together with ours. My medzmama expertly and lovingly making dishes: manti, yalanche, yogurt soup, dolma, kufte and kadayif.
Nonetheless, it may really feel like visiting a overseas nation, unusual and typically uncomfortable, like when previous individuals would tsk their tongues and wag their fingers at me. “Amot,” they’d say, “disgrace,” once they discovered I didn’t communicate the language.
As a teen, I had moments of curiosity. I requested my father why I didn’t develop up talking Armenian. He stated he’d wished me to talk English with out an accent. After I expressed curiosity in studying my mom tongue, he stated: “Why be taught Armenian? We’re not going again.”
My father got here to America to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise in 1950. Maybe having a overseas accent wasn’t such a boon and talking Armenian was of no assist to his profession ambitions.
This isn’t a finger wag, an amot to my dad and mom. I can not remorse their decisions with out regretting who I turned out to be, which I don’t. I acknowledge the loss inherent in my assimilation. Now with younger youngsters of my very own, I’ve come to see their decisions as pushed by a parental want to protect your youngster from ache and to offer to them what you lacked.
I misplaced my dad and mom early ― my father died of a coronary heart assault once I was 23. When my mom handed away from most cancers, I used to be 33 and unmoored by my sudden parentlessness. Haunted by a sense that one thing was lacking in my life, and a lingering sense that I hadn’t recognized both of them in addition to I may have, I immersed myself in all issues Armenian.
I moved from a studio house in Silver Lake to a one-bedroom in Glendale and began volunteering as a mentor to Armenian youth. For the primary time, I made Armenian pals and took Armenian language lessons at Los Angeles Metropolis Faculty. I even traveled with a younger professionals’ group to the Republic of Armenia. I all the time stood out as completely different and sensed that I wasn’t Armenian sufficient for some. However I discovered the individuals who accepted me and finally, settled on a strategy to combine my Armenianness into my life in a approach that felt proper for me.
The fragmented items of my households’ histories lastly fashioned right into a narrative, as I started to understand every era’s losses and discover my place within the story.
“After I was 40 days previous, we bought out,” my medzmama used to say, in her succinct type. Her household fled Aintab, an historical metropolis now in Turkey, to flee violence. My grandfather, who died earlier than I used to be born, was from Kessab, in present-day Syria. They met in Jerusalem, Palestine, and when the Israeli-Palestinian struggle started, they misplaced every little thing ― once more. My maternal grandparents and their 4 youngsters ― my mom, the oldest ― went to Beirut and finally secured passage to the U.S. by means of a particular refugee quota. My father was born and raised within the Armenian group of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. His dad and mom had ended up in Africa after escaping massacres and genocide.
We bought my medzmama’s Little Armenia home a couple of years in the past. The neighbors are gone too. Bezjian’s Market and different shops have closed. It’s not the hub it as soon as was. I do what I can to offer my youngsters a bit of of Armenia, together with visits to the previous neighborhood and to new facilities of Armenian tradition, like Glendale, the place latest waves of Armenian immigrants have settled.
Final summer time, I took my youngsters to an Armenian church close to us to have fun Vardavar, a life-affirming vacation the place individuals soak one another with water. I didn’t develop up celebrating it, and solely heard of it as an grownup. They absorbed the sounds of the language, the smells of the khorovats and the sight of males enjoying Tavlou. I felt the lack of all that was erased by violence and assimilation — the final 150 years of Armenian historical past marked by impermanence. And but, watching my youngsters additionally renewed my hope that the tradition will endure even when the locations don’t.
Lori Yeghiayan Friedman is a author dwelling in Oregon.
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