Armenian-Americans Keep the Memory of 1915 Genocide Alive

The lunch rush was over at Marroosh Sandwiches, an Armenian restaurant on Allen Avenue.

The last telephone to-go order had been filled, the last falafel fried, the last shawerma slices rolled in pita bread. At the window table remained only two dark-suited, elderly men who lingered over their plates, chatting in animated Armenian.

Cook Garo Krikorian took his afternoon break, sipping a demitasse of strong, black Armenian coffee and smoking a cigarette to fortify him for the remaining five hours of business.

“I’ll be there,” he told Boghos Kozadjian. “We close. We don’t open our business. I don’t send my kids to school on the 24th.”

“Every Armenian in the whole world who has a shop will close that day,” Kozadjian replied.

“That day” is April 24, Tuesday, the anniversary of what Armenians call the Armenian Genocide. The date commemorates the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians who died beginning in 1915 during their relocation from Turkey.

Turkey, however, does not recognize the deaths as genocide and instead calls them casualties of war. Armenians continue to pressure to have the genocide recognized internationally and by Turkey so that reparations may be made to the victims and their descendants.

For Pasadena’s Armenian community, the 75th observance comes at a time of sharp self-awareness. A special count commissioned by the city of Pasadena revealed earlier this month that the city’s Armenian-American population numbers 6,850. The statistics depicted Pasadena’s Armenian-Americans as educated, property-owning, middle-class folk.

But the figures do not reveal the soul of the Armenian community. That comes from the stories some Armenians tell, the memories they revive at this time of year.

For Barkev Magarian, 74, the genocide is a childhood memory of himself as a 4-year-old, riding in a box strapped to a donkey as he fled Turkey with his family in a caravan of 400 other Armenians marching to neighboring Syria.

“On the road, you did not speak Armenian because we were scared that if somebody knew we were Armenian, they would kill us,” Magarian recalled, speaking through a translator in his Washington Boulevard apartment.

As the caravans passed through towns, robbers would set upon the refugees. “Whoever they were able to kill, they did,” Magarian said. “If they saw a good dress on you, they took it away.”

Some Armenians swallowed their gold teeth hoping to hide them from the brigands, he said.

Once they reached Aleppo, Syria, the Armenian refugees lived in makeshift houses and piled blankets on the floor for beds, Magarian said. The Armenians gradually established themselves in Aleppo, where Magarian said he found employment as a shoemaker and started a family.

But in 1960, Magarian became an immigrant again, leaving Syria for Beirut, Lebanon, when political unrest caused economic instability. Magarian said he sold eggs in Lebanon to support his family back in Aleppo. “I used to go to the train station and give the money to someone on the train who would give it to my wife,” he said.

Eventually he brought his family to Beirut, but a civil war beginning in 1975 between the Christians and Muslims heated to the point that life became unbearable for the Armenians who tried to stay neutral. Beirut became a battleground with constant shelling. Normal life again ended for Magarian and his wife.

“It was always scary,” he said. “You didn’t want to go out because a car bomb will explode. We were afraid to go out to get food.”

Magarian and his wife slept in their clothes, trying to find a safe place to hide in their home during the bombing and rushing out during breaks in the bombing to buy food and run errands.

They tuned to the radio to learn where bombs had fallen, and found themselves strangely happy to learn they were alive while others had died, he said.

In July, Magarian and his wife finally left, uprooting themselves for a third time in his life to find peace. He came to Pasadena.

“There are 10 Armenian families in my area, an Armenian grocery, Armenian church, a pharmacy, Armenian doctors and I have a bus pass,” he said, suddenly jumping to his feet to illustrate--with an ancient Armenian dance step--his frame of mind. “I am happy.”

While Magarian is a new, legal immigrant, some of Pasadena’s Armenians fled Lebanon illegally. They include 47-year-old Harout, who asked that his real name be withheld. Harout’s memories do not trace back to the genocide. His are of modern hardships for Armenians in Lebanon.

A former prosperous businessman in Beirut with 32 employees, Harout now calls himself “a humble employee,” who lied to his current boss about his illegal status in order to get a job to support his wife and teen-age daughter.

In Beirut, Harout’s home was in the city’s Christian sector and his work in the Muslim sector, so he found himself confronting armed men from both camps. Some nights he couldn’t cross the lines and was forced to spend the night in a hotel.

Four times he was taken into custody during the civil war. Soldiers from both camps tried to pressure neutral Armenians to take a side. “They said, ‘Why aren’t you fighting in the war?’ ”

Three times bombs knocked out the windows on his car and home. He tried to sell a vacation home in the mountains only to discover it had been stripped of its contents, and was being occupied by the Syrian Army.

“They stole everything. It was empty,” Harout said. “Even the wallpaper, they stole that.”

Harout fled Lebanon with his family in 1986 and applied for legal American citizenship. But that procedure, already complicated, was made more so by the closure of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. All the embassy files were shifted to Athens, so Harout and his family had to travel to Greece to fill out papers to stay in the United States.

“Do you know how much money we spent making phone calls, telexes to get the documents, airplane tickets and hotels?” he said. “A green card cost my family $12,000.”

While Harout appreciates his opportunities here, he knows of others who still remain illegal, unable to afford the high price of sanctuary.

“I still have two friends who don’t have their green cards,” he said. “They are scared.”

For Joy Sarafian, a fourth-generation Californian of Armenian descent, the memories at this time of year are mainly historical.

“I don’t feel I represent most Armenians,” Sarafian said. “But if you ask me the Armenian values, I can tell you what it meant to be my grandmother’s grandchild or my father’s daughter.”

A 37-year-old single woman who owns her own public relations company, Sarafian’s ancestors came from Fresno in the 1890s when the first wave of Armenians fled Turkey and settled in the United States, she said.

Growing up in Pasadena, Sarafian said she never experienced discrimination, but she also never felt the strong identification with the Armenian culture that is now springing up. Assimilation was the goal.

“When we were growing up, there was no such thing as an Armenian school, no such thing as an Armenian college,” she said.

She jokes that if Armenia, now a part of the Soviet Union and Turkey, were ever to be re-created as an independent country, she couldn’t leave the United States because there are “no Nordstroms.” Yet she takes pride in the accomplishments of her father, Armen Sarafian, founder of the American Armenian International College in La Verne and a past Pasadena City College president.

Still, she finds herself puzzled as to what makes her an Armenian and what compels her to strongly identify with her heritage.

“That’s my question: What makes us Armenian? I don’t know,” she said. “Is it the culture, the books or just pride in family? Even though I’m fourth-generation Californian, I can honestly say that my sense of being Armenian has never left.”

ACTIVITIES MARKING ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Area observances of the 75th anniversary of what the Armenian-American community calls the “Armenian Genocide” include the following.

Lunch for the homeless, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday, Union Station, 412 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena.

*ll-night vigil beginning at 8 p.m. Monday, Aghajanian Hall, 2215 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena.

* Video presentation, 7 p.m. Monday, Pasadena City Hall, Board of Directors’ Chambers, 100 N. Garfield Ave., Pasadena.

* Commemoration Day observance, 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Bicknell Park, 901 Via San Clemente, Montebello.

* Lecture by historian Christopher Walker, 6 p.m. Tuesday, 1901 N. Allen Ave., Tekeyan Cultural Assn., Altadena.