now

When I was in third grade our new teacher was different from any teacher we had ever seen at the Hosmer Elementary School in Watertown. Mrs. DeVoe was young and beautiful, with shoulder-length blond hair that flipped up at its ends. She wore mini-dresses with leather boots, and some days after school her handsome husband picked her up in a red sports car with a convertible top.

Each morning we started the day standing in a circle, holding hands and reciting proverbs. Things such as, “A stitch in time saves nine,” “When the cat’s away the mice will play,” and “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

I loved this activity and tried to find unusual sayings to share. I was particularly proud to offer this one: “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Most of the other children didn’t know what a gander was.

We never discussed what a proverb was or why this might be a good way to start each morning. We rarely talked about their meanings. But the ritual provided a connection to communal wisdom. There was also something solemn and vaguely religious in it, although God was never mentioned.

A few years later I made a list of synonyms for proverb: adage, aphorism, axiom, dictum, maxim, and saw. Saw was the best one because it was a simple word with an esoteric meaning. There was another synonym—platitude—hinting at the fact that while proverbs might convey moral lessons and general truths, they could also be truisms that should be questioned.

At home we had other sayings. My mother’s favorites were, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” “If you want something done well, you have to do it yourself,” and “There’s no such thing as an ugly baby.” My grandmother instructed, “Shut the light. Edison is richer than me” so frequently that it became a family mantra. My father was known to say, “That’s about as funny as a submarine with screen doors.” And he frequently quoted my Armenian grandfather’s motto: “I’m not a miser, I’m an economizer.”

This last was said in English, but it follows a pattern and rhyming structure that is common to Armenian proverbs as I later learned from studying them. Over a decade ago, I purchased a copy of Dora Sakayan’s Armenian Proverbs: A Paremiological Study with an Anthology of 2,500 Armenian Folk Sayings Selected and Translated into English, and it has been a source of endless interest and delight. I have since then sought out other sources—a 1932 bilingual anthology by an Armenian priest in Venice, short sections in books about Armenian folk tales and village lore, and of late many online compilations. My rudimentary Armenian language skills are good enough that I can read the original and compare different English translations. With the help of a dictionary I can even do my own.

I used Armenian proverbs as chapter headings in my second novel. I made lists of proverbs to deploy as I was creating a character in my third novel—Garabed Pegorian, a Genocide survivor, cobbler and father who makes sardonic comments about the Nazi Occupation his family suffers through in Paris. I’ve taken to posting Armenian proverbs on my Facebook author page and to Twitter, where they generate much response.

Here are some of my favorites:

You cannot erase what is written on your forehead.

The hungry dream of bread, the thirsty of water. 

A lost rope is always long.

Be neither sweet and swallowed, nor sour and spurned.

Toss your good deeds into the sea and the waves will carry them back to you.

The fool’s tongue is always long.

Literacy is a golden bracelet.

The lid rolled and found its pot.

From heart to heart there is a path. 

A mother-in-law should be blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.

Walk with the devil, but don’t let go of his tail.

In a foreign place, the exile has no face.

Land of Armenians, land of orphans.

Land of Armenians, land of sorrow.

Heaven and hell are in this world.

If they send two baskets of shit to our city, one will come to our house.

It’s better to carry stones with a wise man than to eat pilaf with a fool.

It’s better to go into captivity with the whole village than to go to a wedding alone.

The person who looks for a friend without faults will remain friendless.

Grief for the loss of a child is a burning shirt.

Let’s sit crooked and talk straight.

Let it be one and fine.

What does the donkey know of the almond?

If you buy a donkey for the price of a cucumber, one day you will find it drowned.

I have a few ideas about what this last one means, but I’ll leave that to the reader’s interpretation.

Nancy Kricorian

Ras al-Ain, a town on the Syrian side of the Syrian-Turkish border has been in the news lately as the bloody civil war has spread from Damascus and Aleppo to other parts of the country. The fighting has been fierce, the town has been bombed from the air, and hundreds if not thousands of civilians have fled over the border to Turkey. It isn’t a town that is well known in America; I had never seen it referenced in the newspaper until quite recently. But now, each time the town is mentioned, I feel a little shock of recognition and hear a voice saying, “The name of this place is Ras al-Ain.”

When I was researching my first novel, I interviewed my grandmother’s friend, Alice Kharibian, who had been in the Syrian desert with my grandmother during what they called The Deportations (now known to most as the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1921). My grandmother had told me what had happened to her family when they were forced to leave their home in Mersin, Cilicia, and after my grandmother died I went so see Mrs. Kharibian. She told a similar tale, but she added a detail that my grandmother had not. Mrs. Kharibian remembered the name of the town that was near the concentration camp where she and my grandmother had found each other among 8,000 Armenian orphans who had survived the death marches. She also told me of how they had walked into town to find something to eat—begging for bread, picking barley kernels out of horse droppings, and cutting bits of flesh off a dead camel by the side of the road. I used all these details in the first chapter of my novel Zabelle.

In 2007, a team of forensic anthropologists conducted fieldwork in Ras al-Ain in the first application of that discipline to supporting historical accounts of the Armenian Genocide. They unearthed a mass grave, or what I have elsewhere called “a garden of bones.”

Below is an excerpt from Zabelle (published in 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Press)

We followed the ones ahead of us and were followed by those behind us, all the Armenians walking together. It was cold at night; sometimes it poured down rain, and we sat holding a blanket over our heads. The donkey died, so we took what we could carry. To keep us moving, Turkish soldiers beats stragglers with whips. Local Kurds traded food for our last coins and my mother’s ruby earrings.

The sun rose and fell like a gold coin. Light and shadow leaped from fires at night. Grown-ups talked in a language that I knew but said things I couldn’t understand. My grandmother whispered to me, “Hush, hush now. Go to sleep.”

My grandfather trailed behind us, hobbling along with a cane. My mother called back to him, “We’ll see you at the resting place.” He would arrive after dark and fall down to sleep without even eating. One morning he didn’t wake up. My grandmother slapped her face and called out to God in a loud voice. She sat in the dust and wouldn’t get up until my mother pulled her to her feet. The next day Grandmother sat down in the dirt by the side of the road and begged us to leave her. She said she couldn’t take another step. My mother kissed my grandmother’s hands and said a prayer. Then she wrapped a scarf over my head so I couldn’t look back.

One morning as we were walking, a rumor passed down the line that the men of Hadjin had been shot on the outskirts of town and buried in a big pit. The women screamed like a flock of starved birds. I put my hands over my ears and hid my face in my mother’s shoulder. She didn’t make a sound. After that, my mother walked like someone asleep, holding the baby tightly and pushing me ahead of her.

There were bodies everywhere I looked. Some were old, some were babies, some were bleeding from the mouth, some were half-alive. The smell was terrible, the flies, the maggots, the animals chewing on an arm or leg while the eyes rolled up, staring at the sky. But we kept walking. Where are we going? I asked my mother. She didn’t know. But we kept walking.

My mother sold the pots, the bowls, the spoons, the knife, even her headscarf, for food. All we had left was a tin cup on a frayed string
around my neck.

We came to a place in the desert where we were told the stay. The baby Krikor died there. At night, under the light of the moon, my mother dug a pit using my cup. She couldn’t dig very deep, but she wanted to hide his body from the birds that followed us. She wrapped him in her shawl and put the bundle in the hole. We closed up the place with sand, and then we said a prayer for his soul. The soul of our baby was a small as a breath. It joined the other dead souls in the night wind and blew across desert sands.

This was to be our home—a stretch of desert. With a large cloth she had taken from a dead woman by the road and some sticks she found, my mother made us a tent. There was just enough room for us to sit up or lie down side by side on a piece of blanket, with our feet sticking out. I heard someone say, “The name of this place is Ras Al-Ain.”

Nancy Kricorian

When I was a graduate student, I worked as Susan Sontag’s personal assistant for one year. I went to her apartment on East 17^th Street on Friday mornings to run errands, take dictation, type letters, and retype essays. (My typing skills were not what she expected so I quickly signed up for a class at a secretarial school near Penn Station that enabled me to pick up speed and keep the job.) I was thrilled to be in proximity to so prominent a writer, and she gave me books and tickets to performances. But she had a tendency to make harsh comments that were likely motivated more by obliviousness than by actual malice. One time in particular she said something so disdainful that I felt as though the breath had been knocked out of me. But I’ll keep that anecdote for another time, when I write the narrative of our odd, attenuated relationship over the years.

I went back in my journals and found entries from the summer when I helped her pack her 8,000 books so she could move from a duplex in a large brownstone on 17^th Street to a smaller apartment on King Street. Below is an excerpt from one of those entries.

22 August 1985

I’ve learned a lot about S.S. in the past days packing books with her. Today I came across a photo of Susan as a young girl with her grandfather and her sister Judith. I didn’t even know she HAD a sister—I thought she was an only child. So I asked her about it as we headed out of the house for lunch in Chinatown. She told me that she thought of herself as an only child. She and Judith were three years apart in age, but six years apart in school. The only thing that she remembers about Judith is that she played with paper dolls and she liked jacks. They shared a bedroom until Susan was thirteen years old. Susan felt like she had nothing in common with her family.

Mother: Did you buy the bread?

Stepfather: What bread?

Mother: The bread I asked you to buy this morning!

Stepfather: You asked me to buy bread?

Mother: Yes, I did.

Stepfather: What kind of bread did you ask me to buy?

Mother: I don’t remember. I think it was….

Susan said it was like water torture with this inane conversation dropping on her head. She also commented that she had been very bright, but no one encouraged her, she did it all on her own and who knows what she might have been with more environmental stimulation…She said she had read a lot. She said reading was a wonderful way to travel and to meet interesting people. I suggested, from my own similar experience with reading, that it was also a form of escapism and a way to feel in control, but she does not seem generally interested in the psychological underpinnings of behavior.

Nancy Kricorian

Our family attended the Armenian Brethren (Evangelical) Church on Arlington Street, in Watertown, Massachusetts. My grandfather, Levon (Leo) Kricorian, was one of the founders of the church. Its congregation was made up of survivors—and the children and grandchildren of survivors—of what was called at the time “the Massacres,” “the Deportations” or “the Catastrophe.” Later this tragic chapter in Armenian history became known as The Genocide (1915-1921).

The Genocide was only occasionally openly addressed in our community, but vague allusions and scraps of stories floated around me without my ever gathering them into a coherent narrative. One of these fragments was a line that my grandmother said in passing about one of her close friends, Mrs. Mary Amiralian. In reference to Mrs. Amiralian’s grown progeny, one of whom was my Sunday school teacher when I was in grade school, my grandmother said, “Those are her American children. The first ones died in the desert.”

Years later, after my grandmother and Mrs. Amiralian had died, when I was researching my novel Zabelle and reading voluminously about the Armenian Genocide, this bit of conversation came back to haunt me. In response I wrote the poem “Ghost Children.”

Ghost Children

At lunchtime I stand
at the stove spooning soup
into three white bowls.
My children eat bread
at the table. They laugh
at the milk moustaches that
I wipe from their faces.

On the pantry floor I see
the narrow shadows of the
other children, the ones
whose bones I left in the
desert in a garden of bones.
The sand is still in my hair;
their high voices in my ears.

My American children can’t
see their unlucky brother and
sister who follow close by
my skirt. Mairig, the ghosts
complain, we are hungry. Mairig,
give us something to eat.

Published in ARARAT Literary Quarterly (Spring 1995)
Recording of the author reading “Ghost Children” via The Armenian Poetry Project

* Mairig means Mommy in Armenian

Nancy Kricorian

When I was growing up, my Armenian grandmother hemmed my dresses. And for many years, I would wear only dresses. (Being forced by my mother to wear snow pants when I was in the first grade caused me paroxysms of grief.) I stood on the footstool in my grandmother’s bedroom while she pulled straight pins from a red pincushion and slid them through the fabric folded to the chosen length. Appropriate length was a subject of much discussion between us.

“How long?” she asked.

I pointed to a spot mid-way up my thigh, which was at the time the fashionable length but a little shorter than was comfortable for me. I had learned from experience that no matter what length I indicated, and no matter what length we agreed upon, the finished product would be at least two inches longer. So I asked for too short, knowing she would make her own adjustments for the sake of modesty.

“What?” she asked. “You want the whole world to see your vardik?”

“No one will be able to see my underwear. It’s not that short.”

She shook her head. “These are the last days. Everyone is walking around showing their vodik and everything else.”

This last bit of dialogue about panties, Biblical end times and public display of private parts was repeated each time I stood on the footstool for a dress fitting. Sometimes my grandmother digressed into a discussion of bikinis, which she considered to be a true sign that Christ’s Second Coming was at hand.

I finally outgrew my hatred of slacks when I was about twelve years old, and my grandmother and I moved on to a new frontier in hemming. By some logic that I never quite understood, my grandmother believed that while skirts should be long, pants should be short. It took several pairs of slacks that bared my ankles before I recognized the system and asked for them to be at least two inches longer than I actually wanted.

Nancy Kricorian

When my grandmother first arrived in the United States as an immigrant bride, she worked sewing buttons on shirts for a local manufacturer. In the bottom drawer of her bureau there was a dented cookie tin filled with buttons. Some of them dated from her time at the shirt factory, and the rest she had saved slowly over the years. When a shirt was torn beyond repair or frayed beyond wearing, she snipped off the buttons and added them to the tin. I spent hours playing with the buttons, sorting them by color and arranging them into patterns and shapes.

In my third novel, ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, Maral Pegorian’s mother is a vest maker who does piecework at home. Like my grandmother, Azniv Pegorian has an old cookie tin filled with buttons. When Maral wants to entertain a little girl she’s babysitting one afternoon, she pulls out the tin. She says, “There were buttons with two holes and those with four, plus metal and leather shank buttons. The colors were varied: shiny gold, red ones, all shades of white and brown, and thin disks made from shimmering mother-of-pearl.” This is a description of my grandmother’s buttons.

My favorite in my grandmother’s collection was a dark brown shank button that had come from an old cloth coat. The button was made of plastic, decorated with silver filigree, and had a green rhinestone in its center. After my grandmother died, I used a safety pin to attach this button to the lapel of a vintage black gabardine jacket that I wore all the time.

Nancy Kricorian

For he had been dedicated to the cult of the plane trees at Aramaneak in Aramvir. The murmuring of their foliage and the direction of their movement at the gentler or stronger blowing of the wind were used for divination in the land of the Armenians, and that for a long time.

Moses Khorenatsi, History of the Armenians  (5^th century A.D.)

According to historian Moses of Khoren, Anushavan Sosanver, grandson of the legendary Armenian king Ara the Beautiful, was dedicated to the cult of the plane trees at the sacred grove in Aramvir.

Sos is the Armenian word for plane tree, and the word for rustling is sosapiun. Anushavan’s name—Sosanver—means “dedicated to the plane tree” and also evokes the rustling of the tree’s leaves. Plane trees were planted in churchyards until the 10^th-13^th centuries. Christian religious authorities discredited the plane trees because of their relationship to pagan practices, but people still designated specific trees near holy sites as sacred.

To this day, near many ancient churchyards and small roadside chapels, you can see a tree that is festooned with rags. Armenians go to tie a piece of cloth on these “wishing trees”; each rag represents a wish or a prayer that the supplicant hopes will be granted by God.

Nancy Kricorian

During my first research trip to Paris, I went to the Librairie Orientale Samuelian not far from the Luxembourg Gardens. Alice Aslanian, whose father had founded the bookstore in 1930, remembered me from a previous visit and pointed out a copy of Zabelle they had among their wares. She pulled from the shelves a number of books that she thought would be germane to my research, and then went to the back to find a yellowed paperback copy of a book that was out of print and difficult to find: L’Armenien by Clément Lépidis, originally published in 1973. (It has since been reissued by Desmos.) This she generously offered to me as a gift.

Lépidis, who was born in 1920 and died in 1997, was a French writer of Greek descent. His immigrant father had fled Anatolia during the anti-Christian massacres and ended up working in the shoe trade of Belleville. (In Paris between the two wars Greeks and Armenians dominated fine shoemaking.)

The protagonist of L’Armenien was Aram Tokatlérian, an Armenian Genocide survivor trained in an orphan school as a shoemaker, who had come to France to start a new life. He found work in a Belleville shoe atelier in the thirties. In this novel, Belleville was alive with vibrant characters, the scents of spices in the Armenian food shop, the smell of the tannery where the shoemakers procured the leather they used, the sounds of the cobbler’s hammer and accordion music from dance halls.

Lépidis wrote two memoirs–Des Dimanches à Belleville (Sundays in Belleville) and Je me souviens du 20e arrondissement (I Remember the 20^th Arrondissement)—that evoked in loving detail the neighborhood of his childhood, which was more like a village than an urban enclave. Reading these books was a way to immerse myself in the atmosphere of Belleville during the 30’s and 40’s, and was immensely helpful in my imaginative creation of Maral Pegorian’s world.

Nancy Kricorian

While doing the research for All the Light There Was, I read memoirs by French singer and actor Charles Aznavour and his sister Aida Azanavour-Garvarentz. Aznavour, a son of Armenian immigrants, was born Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian in Paris in 1924. Both memoirs briefly covered the war years, during which Charles and Aida were aspiring young entertainers. Their parents, who were Communists, participated in a circle of friends and political activists that included Missak Manouchian and his wife Melinée.

Late in the Occupation, some Soviet Armenians appeared in Paris in German uniform. They were Soviet soldiers who had been captured on the battlefield and then held in P.O.W. camps in Poland under terrible conditions. They were pressed into the German Army, choosing the Wehrmacht over probable starvation. The Germans didn’t trust them on the Eastern Front, so they were sent to France to work on the Atlantic wall. When these Armenians were given leave, they often came to Paris where the local community held cultural evenings to welcome them.

The Aznavourian family’s contribution to the Resistance was inviting these soldiers to their home and trying to convince them to desert the German Army. If they agreed, the Aznavours would give them civilian clothes and help them to go underground. Charles Aznavour, who was nineteen at the time, was responsible for the nighttime task of dumping the deserters’ boots and uniforms into the sewers of Paris.

Nancy Kricorian

During World War II, food was rationed in France. People were issued ration tickets for bread, vegetables, meat, milk, and wine. (There were also ration tickets for non-food items such as tobacco and fabric.) Often, however, even if you had the tickets, the food items were not available on the market shelves. The German war machine was using France as its breadbasket. One of the nicknames local Parisians called the occupiers was doryphores (potato bugs) because most of France’s potatoes were shipped off to Germany. But it wasn’t only the potatoes that the Nazis requisitioned: they also took the best of French wheat, bread, butter, cream, cheese and vegetables.

If you cash to buy things at exorbitant prices on the Black Market, if you were a farmer or had friends or family who were farmers, you would be able to get your hands on decent food. Poor and working class city dwellers, and even the middle class, were left to subsist on what the Germans didn’t take. Root vegetables such as rutabagas and turnips, which had before the war been fodder for cattle, were staples. There were ersatz foods, such as jam made from what remained after grapes were pressed for wine, and instead of coffee or tea, people made do with chicory.

In the novel, the Pegorians supplement their meager war rations through ingenuity and resourcefulness. Teenaged Missak uses his slingshot to bag a duck or two in the park. Maral is dispatched by bicycle to cousins outside the city who have a backyard vegetable garden and later a chicken and egg business. The Pegorians plant tomatoes in window boxes, they barter, and eventually they risk using forged ration tickets. But during the war, they are often hungry. After another meal of bulgur and rutabagas, Maral complains that they all are suffering from “rutabaga-itis.”

Nancy Kricorian