A Land Divided: The Armenia/Azerbaijan Crisis : Armenia’s Enemies Not Forgotten in Glendale

Edna Petrosyan is only 6 years old, but she knows all about Armenia’s enemies.

“What’s happening in Azerbaijan?” her father asks one recent evening, as the family chats over coffee and cookies with a friend in their Glendale apartment, just five weeks after the Petrosyans arrived from Soviet Armenia.

Edna is tongue-tied. Her eyes dart back and forth from her parent’s faces to the front door. The child of an Armenian neighbor upstairs is having a birthday party, and Edna wants to go.

The mother brings Edna close to her lap, puts an arm around her shoulder and softly asks in Armenian: “What’s that number you write down whenever I draw a cross?” Edna mumbles: “1915,” the year hundreds of thousands of Armenians died at the hands of the Turks, victims of ethnic persecution.

“Now recite that poem I taught you,” Tello Petrosyan instructs her daughter. The child steps out of her mother’s embrace, raises her head, puts her hands in her pockets and, with a face grave beyond her years, begins:

“It’s better that I be a dog or a cat, than a Turkish Barbarian . . . “

The poem promises that “when the Armenian wind blows, it will not leave a single Turk standing in Armenian land.”

Edna’s father asks again about the Azerbaijanis. She says: “They are killing Armenians again, they are torturing them.”

Having said that, she looks to her father, Souren Petrosyan, 33, and finds approval in his smiling brown eyes. “You may go now,” he says, and Edna races up the stairs to join the party.

It’s a strange, bittersweet moment, perhaps impossible for non-Armenians to understand. But for the members of one of history’s most tormented yet resilient races, the child’s dark recital is a reaffirmation of its collective will to survive.

To the Petrosyans, the pogroms in Azerbaijan--in which dozens were recently killed--and the devastating Armenian earthquake of December, 1988, are but the latest sad chapters of their people’s past.

That past, they believe, for good or for bad will mark Edna for the rest of her life.

This is why, perhaps, while immigrants from all over the world try to blend into mainstream America, the approximately 400,000 Armenians in the United States make up one of the country’s most close-knit ethnic communities. More than 80% of them live in Southern California. Upon arriving here, most settle in East Hollywood or Glendale, where many work, attend school, go to church and conduct business without ever speaking a word of English.

About 35,000 Soviet Armenians have arrived in the United States since Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev relaxed immigration policies three years ago.

The vast majority had previously come to Armenia from Middle Eastern counties--only to be disillusioned by the Soviet system--before being allowed to come to the United States. The reason so few Armenians born and raised under Soviet domination leave is that they don’t have relatives living abroad to sponsor them, immigration experts say.

The Petrosyans, for example, moved from Iran to Armenia in 1975, as two young high school graduates with the patriotic aspiration of repopulating their homeland. A year later, they met at a Yerevan wedding, and seven months later they celebrated their own.

“In Iran, we kept our language and our culture, and we dreamed of going to Armenia,” said Souren Petrosyan, relishing the thought. “But we had no idea what the Soviet government was like.”

Most of Souren Petrosyan’s family is here, and Tello Petrosyan is planning to bring hers to America as soon as she can.

Four years ago, Tello Petrosyan recalled, her brother was shot to death by Soviet soldiers as he tried to cross the Iranian border to attend their father’s funeral.

“That was the turning point” that made them leave Armenia, she said gravely. Looking into her dark eyes, Souren Petrosyan makes a promise, one often heard throughout the Armenian Diaspora: “We will return to our country when Armenia is free.”

Gorbachev’s reforms, he said, have done little to change his mind. “For things to change,” he said, “it’s not a matter of Gorbachev listening to our questions--he has to answer them, too”--territorial questions, such as Armenia’s claim to Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan; questions of economic freedom for Armenia, of cultural freedom for Armenians in Azerbaijan, of self-determination.

The Armenian community as a whole is widely successful in ventures ranging from politics to academia to real estate development. The newcomers, however, face an uphill battle.

Souren Petrosyan faces the prospect of months of unemployment as he waits for an opening in an English class for Armenians at a local adult school.

In Armenia, he had been a relatively well paid heavy equipment mechanic. Now he has to live off welfare, “sitting around with my arms folded,” he snarls, until he learns the language. He seems unclear about his future, not too interested in what kind of job he lands. Edna will start public school soon, and her mother is worried. Recently, the mother and daughter signed up at the Glendale school district’s “Welcome Center,” where some four to six recently arrived Armenian families sign up their children for classes every day.

Tello Petrosyan wishes they could afford a private Armenian school, where children are taught the language and the history of their people.

“I want my children to grow up Armenian,” said Tello Petrosyan, 27, with staunch determination. “That’s the most important thing in the world for me.”