I sometimes tell people that I married the first Armenian I ever met – that would be my husband, Donald. If it’s true that you are what you eat, then after twenty-five years of eating kuftas and dolmas, choeregs and pilaf, I should be about 50% Armenian.But then, of course, I’m not.  But my children, my beloved sons, they are – part of an ancient, literate and cultured race that has known centuries of persecution not unlike the Jews. They are Old Testament people, converted to Christianity, who have survived a lot.

 When I walk with my friend Sharon (and her dog Emma), we sometimes discuss our children’s heritage, the good and the bad. Sharon is the child of a Holocaust survivor; my husband’s great-grandfather was murdered during the massacres at Adana, Turkey in 1909, precursor to the Armenian genocide.  Other relatives were lost, and some barely survived the forced deportations.  Our children are loved, cared for, comfortable and perhaps indulged. How much of their family’s awful past do they need to know?

 We have firsthand information about the murder, a letter from Donald’s great-grandmother about the day her husband and two sons attended a church meeting, where they were locked inside the building and burned to death.  The evidence is corroborated by reports of missionaries, many from New England, where their letters remain in church archives and in a collection at Harvard. Many books exist on the subject of the Armenian massacres and genocide, from Franz Werfel’s “Forty Days at Musa Dagh” to Peter Balakian’s “The Burning Tigris”.  Plenty of stories and accounts that can still fire the blood of readers today, especially Armenians – if they are read.

 I am the historian in the family. My husband never cared for the subject, and although he knows the general outlines of his own family’s story,he could not tell you names, dates or places of the massacres or the escape.  Not my mother-in-law either,unless it’s selective forgetting, which is one of the costs of assimilation, or else, a coping mechanism, when your family has narrowly escaped being wiped off the face of the earth. Peter Balakian in his memoir “Black Dog of Fate” writes of this phenomenon, this “elephant in the room” syndrome, where something is so big and so bad it is never discussed.  I understand it on a more personal level – the untimely death of my father, whom my mother could not speak of for many, many years.

 Why visit old pains? Why does anyone need to know, especially children with bright prospects?  There is the argument that the old, buried fears and emotions rule our everyday actions in ways we cannot guess. How is my husband’s heightened concern for security not related to his grandfather’s nightmares heard in the night?  But is the unexamined life really not worth living, compared to examination of lives that contain unfathomable tragedy?  Mainly, I fear that history is our problem, like it or not, as present-day Turkey continues to deny the fact of genocide, attributing the deaths to war-related incidents.  If enough people do not inform themselves and do not protest, could history be written to minimize the sufferings of innocent people?  Isn’t there a debt there, of one generation to the next?

   I know that readiness is all, and that I hope the day will come that my sons will want to know more about their family’s story. If those who were too close to the events and the consequences are not able to tell them about it, I am prepared. I have read the letters and stories; I know their names, names my children carry.