On This Day of Reckoning, the Vision of a Melting Pot Collides With Armenian Legacy

Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was or was not a genocide.

Begun on this very day 74 years ago, it was a calculated program of extermination during which 1.5 million Armenian people perished at the hands of the Turks--or did they? Armenians say it happened, Turks insist it did not. Anguish has ensued ever since.

Armenians are a Christian people--the first, in fact, to embrace Christianity as a national religion. Yet Christian doctrine provided little solace and no definitive answers for my family when we discussed the genocide.

We would square off, each of us staking out our own biblical terrain. “Yes, the Turks committed atrocities. But shouldn’t a true Christian forgive and forget?” one of us would ask. “No,” retorted another, “how can you forgive someone who hasn’t repented? Forgiveness hinges on the realization that you have done wrong, and the Turks have never acknowledged their heinous crime. Why should we forgive them? Besides, we’ll be encouraging history to repeat itself.” “But,” someone else would interject, “didn’t Jesus tell us to turn the other cheek? Wasn’t his ultimate victory to beg forgiveness for his enemies though they knew not what they’d done?” Round and round we’d go, never resolving the controversy to anyone’s satisfaction.

My grandparents and many other Armenians of their generation spoke reluctantly of the horrors they had endured. As a result, the formative events of their lives drifted into their grandchildren’s psyches as random fragments.

There were Grandma Nazely’s haunting eyes. They’d pierce you every time you walked past her faded photo in the hallway. Even as a child I sensed the profound sadness and desolation that lay behind her expression, but it wasn’t until years later that I learned why.

Her first husband was killed by Turks, as were her four brothers and her father. Her sister was carried off and presumed murdered. Nazely’s baby died of starvation during the death march from Armenia; my grandma had just barely buried the child wrapped in her apron before Turkish soldiers prodded her to move on. Her mother fell in the dirt, literally dying of thirst, but the soldiers refused to let my grandmother relieve her mother’s parched throat. Grandma Nazely was forced to march, leaving her mother behind to die alone, by the wayside.

Some survivors kept quiet and busied themselves with creating a new life in a strange land. Others could not contain their rage.

There was the man in my hometown of Racine, Wis., who named his son Vrezh, the Armenian word for revenge. He christened his next child, a daughter, Vrezhouhi.

Then there was the old Armenian woman in a nearby Wisconsin town. During the massacres of 1915, she’d been found wandering, naked, having been stripped not only of her clothes but of her 2-year-old child, who’d been stolen from her side as she slept. And now, decades later, she would still scream, “If you fed me their blood with a ladle, it wouldn’t quench my thirst!” We listened, aghast, to these stories--we couldn’t comprehend such grotesque agony.

For young Armenian-Americans, there has never been any doubt that a genocide occurred. But what prescription for living does that afford us here in the United States?

America is the pot in which ethnic differences melt away. Most of us cherish that vision of unity. Yet occasionally it collides head-on with our ethnic legacy, and we can’t reconcile the two.

It happens, for example, every time I meet a Turkish-American. Don’t reject someone solely on the basis of ethnic heritage, I tell myself. This person wasn’t even alive in 1915. Maybe this person’s family bravely hid Armenians from Turkish troops until the danger had subsided.

Playing this mind game, I often convince myself that I’ve achieved my goal: equal acceptance of everyone. Yet no long ago, while being introduced to other parents at my daughter’s nursery school, I noticed myself sweating as I shook hands with a petite, dark-haired woman. She was sweet and friendly. And--I feared--Turkish. Would her eyes narrow when she heard my last name, immediately recognizable as Armenian by its “-ian” ending? Would I avoid, resent, dislike her in spite of myself? The entire forgive-and-forget, let-and-let-live versus wait-till-they-repent debate sprang full-blown before me again.

I have always thought of myself as someone who lives for the future rather than dwelling in the past. Though perhaps heresy to admit it, I am glad that my grandparents ended up in the United States, particularly when I look at Armenia today, still exchanging blows with a Turkic neighbor, Azerbaijan. Yet here, an ocean away, the battle is subtler, easier to sidestep until April 24, an Armenian’s annual day of reckoning. It’s a battle waged fiercely in the recesses of one’s own mind.