In December, I “unearthed” the article “Visit to Armenia,” published in The New Yorker in 1963. At the time, I hadn’t read it in its entirety, but I felt it was interesting and sent it for translation.
This week I finally found the time to read the translation – the day after writing this bittersweet column. I had barely gone through a few paragraphs when tears came to my eyes. Sonia Shiragian’s story was so beautiful and moving, so full of love for her father and his friends living in 1930s New York. Maria Sadoyan has translated it in such a way that you simply cannot believe the text was not originally written in Armenian.
We read Sonia Shiragian’s story in today’s Armenia – an Armenia that Pashinyan calls “real” and does not hide the fact that he has launched an uncompromising struggle against memory. Sonia writes about what Armenians living in New York and dreaming of Armenia felt about a hundred years ago:
My father was not religious, but in speaking of Armenia he used the word “paradise” often. There were two paradises. One was a spot in the heavens above us with which the ancestral homeland could favorably be compared; the other, even more remote-I could, after all, see the sky-was Armenia itself. The two pictures blended in my imagination. Paradise descended to earth, and Armenia became a hallowed place on the roof of the world. There Mount Ararat-a lustrous, fragrant, green gold at its base-reached up so high into the heavenly blue that its peak was always covered by the whitest, purest snow. Noah’s ark had come to rest upon that peak, and there life had started all over again-the animals had marched down the mountain, the people had built fires and danced around Lake Sevan.
What would those people do if they knew that a hundred years later the mention and depiction of Mount Ararat in the independent Armenia they longed for would become a problem?
I finished reading, wiped away my tears, and began looking for photos for the material. And then I was stunned: it turned out that Sonia Shiragian was the daughter of Arshavir Shiragian, a participant in Operation Nemesis. The very man about whom our Gohar Nalbandyan wrote an article two years ago for her Special Case series – “The most agile ‘fidget’ of Nemesis, Arshavir Shiragian.”
Even back then, looking at Arshavir’s photographs, I thought that the man who executed Jemal Azmi embodied Armenian nobility. And that article mentioned that Arshavir’s daughter had written a moving piece about her father for The New Yorker in the 1960s. Thus, the circle is closed.
Read Sonia Shiragian’s story. Read it and understand that memory and dreams can be killed only if you are willing to put up with it.
I am more than certain that if Nikol Pashinyan and his teammates read this column, they will first grin, then assume a serious _expression_ and say: “These are emotions, and peace must be built cold-bloodedly.” And I will respond that it is emotions that create states and it is emotions that help states straighten their backs. Study history instead of fighting against it.
Ara Tadevosyan is the director of Mediamax
https://mediamax.am/en/column/121671/
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