Silences:
My Mother's Will to Survive
by
Alice Tashjian
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Appendix
Frances' Story-Ch. 1
Four Sons-Ch. 2
ThreeDaughters-Ch. 3
Missionaries-Ch. 4
Deportation-Ch. 5
To America-Ch. 6
Leon's Story-Ch. 7
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Appendix
Frances' Story-Ch. 1
Four Sons-Ch. 2
ThreeDaughters-Ch. 3
Missionaries-Ch. 4
Deportation-Ch. 5
To America-Ch. 6
Leon's Story-Ch. 7
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Appendix
Frances' Story-Ch. 1
Four Sons-Ch. 2
ThreeDaughters-Ch. 3
Missionaries-Ch. 4
Deportation-Ch. 5
To America-Ch. 6
Leon's Story-Ch. 7
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Introduction
The events of the story of my mother, Frances Iskouhi Parounagian Franguelian Frank, come from mother-daughter conversations that, woven together, provided the tapestry I needed to finally understand who my mother truly was. The events of her life are written as I remember her relating them to me, never in any particular order, always with a purpose, always to tell her narrative. "My story," she called her remembrances. Hearing her voice as she spoke gently, often with long pauses, I noted that she carefully evaluated how much she could bear to remember and how much she elected to preserve for those of us who followed.
When I was a girl in the 1930's, I thrilled at the drama of her early life as an Armenian young woman in Sivas, the name the Turkish government gave to the Armenian city in Sepastia (Sebasteia), in North Central Turkey. Her adventure made my mother appear exciting and different from other mothers in our Protestant Anglo-American neighborhood. To keep me working, she usually told her stories when the two of us were preparing dinner. The only girl in the family, I helped with household tasks. My two younger brothers, Edward and Leon Jr. helped in my father's extensive flower and vegetable garden on Hudson Street in Johnson City, New York.
Each afternoon after school, my mother and I sat at the table on the added-on back porch. Together, we prepared Armenian dishes for the evening's dinner. Armenian cooking is not difficult, but often the task requires agile fingers and quick assemblage. "Shud, shud (hurry, hurry)," she admonished in Armenian when I asked more questions than she was ready to answer. "They will be home soon. Your father and brothers will be very hungry."
Such preparations were time-consuming. We prepared individual portions of sarma by neatly wrapping a mixture of rice, onions and parsley seasoned with spices and olive oil in grape or cabbage leaves. These soon resembled little gray sausages, shiny with a rub of olive oil. We children preferred the rice sarma wrapped in grape leaves, but our father liked ground lamb wrapped in cabbage leaves. As a result, we had cabbage sarma more often. My mother took much pride in the fact that our father always complimented her cooking.
Mother never owned a recipe book. She had never cooked or prepared food before her marriage. Whatever she learned about cooking, she learned in America from other Armenian women in the community in upstate New York. She often altered the recipe to fit her budget and the ingredients she had in her kitchen.
She preferred fresh staples and vegetables from our father's garden. At her request, his garden always had two thick rows of parsley. To encourage tender new shoots, my father daily rotated his picking for her. One row was the plain, cut leaf parsley she preferred for flavoring stews which are very common to the Armenian menu. In the fall, she added the heavy, overgrown stalks of parsley to the jars of cucumbers when she made her famous pickles; these added some flavor, but more design to the carefully arranged cucumbers, carrots and celery . The other type of parsley was the curly variety. This she tossed generously in her salads, adding color and nutrition for her family.
Another of her specialties was Manti. With a long slender dowel, she would roll out a small ball of dough into a very thin sheet that often covered the table; I would cut this Armenian pasta into two-inch squares and place a small ball of ground lamb shoulder, kneaded with mint, a touch of onion and a little garlic in the center of each square. These we folded painstakingly into neat triangles, which we placed on a tray and immediately covered with a wet, tightly squeezed, clean dish towel.
Later, when the family gathered for dinner, mother carefully dropped them, one at a time, into a large pot of seasoned lamb broth, brought to a rolling boil. How I enjoyed watching our triangles quickly come to a float! With great pride she would portion them into deep bowls and add generous dollops of fresh, homemade yogurt. Our father always received a generous helping of grated garlic in his. This meal was a favorite of our entire family of five, especially of my younger brothers, Edward and Leon Jr.
Frugality was the essence of my mother's life. This trait I witnessed in her cooking as well as in her daily expenditures. She had been penniless. She had been very hungry. She vowed that she would never allow herself to be in such a position again. She never was. Those of her new friends who had emigrated from Armenia to the United States before the deportation used to smile and poke fun at her frugality, but those who had survived, as she had, understood.
Perhaps, I was proud she was my mother. Perhaps, I enjoyed the variations of her cooking. Perhaps, I was very young, but throughout mother's lifetime, I remember that I enjoyed her cooking the best. With no recipes to follow, I recall and experiment until I can now give her recipes, and her practical philosophy of life, to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
The preparation time of these dishes might have been long and tedious had it not been for her telling stories from her girlhood. On one afternoon such as this, making paghach together, while we were waiting for the dough to rise, I noticed her hands. They were ordinary hands, small, yet in proportion to her small body. But on the surface, they were covered with pox-like scars. Once, I asked why the scars were only on her hands and not on her arms or the rest of her body, as I noticed on many of mother's friends who had suffered from the smallpox epidemics. She was silent for several minutes. Speaking more quietly than usual, she related an incident that occurred when she was in her late teens.
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In the beginning of the First World War, the Turkish government had been making secret plans. In January 1915, Ghani Beg came to Sepastia from Constantinople and brought the provincial governor Muammer with the secret authorization for the deportation and massacre of the Armenian people.
In the months of May and June 1915, the Turkish authorities deported all the Armenian families living in the Ottoman empire and marched them to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. A million and a half Armenians died along the way, some from exposure, many at the hands of marauders.
The deportation of the Armenians of Sepastia began on Monday, June 22, and ended on Sunday, July 5. Mother began,
I was one of the 2,000,000 who had been forced to leave home and flee to the hills and deserts, while I was still in my teens. Many months had elapsed since I had been separated from my mother during the Armenian exodus of 1915. Orphaned, I found myself roaming in unfamiliar places. I was hungry and wanted a safe place for shelter.
A Turkish housewife found me on the street. "Can you speak English?" she asked me.
"Yes," I answered.
"Will you say Muhammadan prayers with me?"
"Yes," I answered.
I felt no guilt. My mother (grandmother Elmas) had died praying useless prayers to a Christian God who provided neither food nor water nor life for her or for most of her children. I was alone and I had not eaten for several days. I said a Muhammadan prayer for her. She gave me a new Turkish name and took me to her house. I don't know why I can't remember the name she gave me.
Her Moslem husband did not approve; sheltering any Armenian was dangerous. Inevitably, he would be in trouble with the local authorities who threatened families who patronized or helped in any way these now homeless Christian infidels. The Turkish government had decreed that all Armenian women and children who did not renounce their Christian beliefs and adopt the faith of Mohammed must be forced to die of starvation or exposure. I had studied English in school. This served in my favor many times during my deportation. In this instance, the Turkish woman wished that her fifteen-year-old daughter learn the now popular English language. I would teach in exchange for food and shelter. I liked the lady and I stayed at her home many months. I slept in the stable with the animals; I did not mind. I was safe and Khanum always gave me good food to eat.
Her daughter had no desire to learn from this teacher any morethan she had from any of the teachers of the schools she hadchosen not to attend. No matter how I tried, she rebelled. Not onlywas she defiant and uncooperative in learning the language, shetook demonic delight in putting out her cigarettes on my, the gavour's (non-believer's), hands.
The father came home one day and said the Armenian must go. Turks who harbored these Armenian children faced possible threats of jail. "I do not want this yawehachi (infidel) in my house. I promise you, wife, I will give her to the killers."
Finally, the lady (and she was a very kind lady) said, You must leave or we will give you to those who will kill you."
"Where can I go?" I pleaded. "What can I do? I don't know anybody."
I knew the fate that awaited me; I found it hard to leave shelter and promise of bread tomorrow. Again, I wondered where I would sleep that night and the nights that followed. I asked her to take me to a big city where I might join another caravan or group of Armenians forced to march. She did. Together, we walked and walked. I don't know how far we walked. I remember I was very,very tired. We found a group of young girls, and she left me with them. How hard it was to watch her walk away.
This was my first introduction to a story of the early life of my mother, a young girl in her teens who survived many of the cruelest events of an attempted genocide in this century.
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After she arrived in the United States, she married Levon Franguelian, and her own American family grew. She always felt that living in a free country was a privilege. Never would she leave this haven where freedom was as promised, where policemen existed to help and protect.
"I wanted an American name," she said. "I chose 'Frances'." She changed her name when she became an American citizen. Conscious of her responsibility as a citizen she enjoyed the privilege to vote. Our mother had not wanted her sons to go to war. Both Edward and Leon Jr. fought in World War II. Like all mothers, she waited for their return. At this time she was not silent. Yet, her grieving was very painful. The three of us graduated from college, married and started families of our own. Grandchildren were bornwho asked questions that none of us could answer. Her stories were selected remembrances of events she chose to tell.
No matter how I tried, I found it difficult to connect the episodes to form some sort of narrative. I wanted to record her life on paper to be read by the children who know her as the beautiful Great-Granny in the wedding portrait we all love.
The year was 1977. Mother was almost 80 years old. I begged to hear the story of her escape from the Turks. Some remembrances I taped in conversation with her; others episodes, Manooshag Seraydarian, a family friend, and Mrs. Michelle Morrison from Roberson Center for the Arts, a city museum, taped. A young journalist, Gary Rejebian, featured our mother in a display depicting immigrants in the Triple Cities. Much of the historical material I found in books. These, I have recorded in the bibliography.
Mother never wanted to tell of her experiences on the march; Axor, she called the deportation. It was difficult for her to recount the story. She had tried to forget. The past was now behind her.
Many times after one of our mother-daughter talks, she awoke in the night drenched in perspiration from bad dreams. She wished to talk no more of that life or recall the pain of those experiences.
"It is over. I am in America. I am free now until I die. Let me forget," she pleaded with me.
When I told her the Turkish press was denying the persecution of the Armenians, her eyes, now nearly blind, seemed to glisten,
"How can they lie?" she questioned. "There were so many of us, an entire nation. In every generation, they would come to kill and weaken the numbers of our people," she bristled. "After the massacre of 1894, they cut down all our trees and used them for their firewood. They stole all our possessions. After many arrests, they killed my grandfather."
"Alice, don't be naive," mother chided. "It happened to me, to my family, to our entire Armenian neighborhood."
"They tried to get rid of us all. They killed the men, and then sent the women and children on the march. Their religion told them to do that. Their God is Mohammed. He teaches that all Christians are their enemy. He who kills an Armenian is blessed. We are infidels who must be annihilated." Mother continued,
I remember that five times every day from the minaret, a high tower attached to a mosque, the mullah would call the faithful to prayer, God is most great; there is only one God, and Mohammed is his prophet.' Every Moslem would stop his day's activities and kneel in prayer.
I especially did not like the prayers after the four o'clock call. We Armenian students would hurry home from school to be away from the taunts and acts of aggression by Turkish students incited by this call. The Moslem children would yell profanities and throw stones at us.
In reality, it was more than that. They wanted our money, our gold, and our jewelry. There were many jewelers in Sivas much of whose work were pieces of art, precious and semiprecious jewels wrought in gold and silver. Many escaped and fled to Europe and the Americas where they set up successful businesses delighting their new clients with their creative artistry. They traditionally handed down the profession from father to son.
It was difficult, but after each massacre, the Armenians worked to buy again or rebuild their homes and businesses. They replanted trees for shade and for fruit. Family life became important again. They sought out lovely artifacts and gifts for their wives and children. The ordinary Turkish man of that time did very little work. He spent much of his time in the coffee houses. Consistently, he tended to envy the Armenians who seemed to prosper, even after they had been subdued generation after generation. They killed my mother, my father, my brothers, and my sisters.
Mother would speak no more. She rose from her chair and went quietly into the kitchen.
She was born sometime around 1897 or 1898, never certain of her birth date. I do not remember honoring the day. Late in her life, when she was in Woodland Village Retirement Home, in Vestal, New York, where they celebrated birthdays, she decided she wanted a birthday and selected August 27. Now, there would be a cake for her, as there had been for all the other residents and her friends would sing,
"Happy birthday, dear Frances,
Happy birthday, to you."
One of my deepest regrets is that I never sang "Happy birthday, dear Mother." She never let us. "My birth records are lost," she would say. "It would have been better if I had never been born." At the silence that followed, all three of us children became quiet, worried and very sad. She repeated this wish many times.
Our daddy's birthday was May 1. They recorded men's births and they had remembered their birthdays; however, I never remember his having a birthday cake, either.
I would usually start our conversation with what interested me. What was their home like? What did they wear? I would spend hours looking at the only possessions she had brought with her, pages of favorite poems, beautifully copied and treasured, and a tiny worn book illustrated with even tinier forget-me-nots. I wish I could find that book again.
I spent hours studying pictures of the members of my grandmother's and grandfather's family in the photograph Uncle Hamazasb brought to the United States with him. What lovely dresses they wore! What interesting hair styles! Little by little, the stories that had been a mystery to me began to unfold.
Alice Frank (Franguelian) Tashjian
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