Litchfield County Times, CT
Jan 4 2007
Search for Roots Takes Kent Author on a Remarkable Journey
By: Kathryn Boughton 01/04/2007
KENT-When Georgianne Ensign Kent opened the e-mail from her publisher
and saw the completed cover of her new book, "Vartanoosh," she wept
with emotion. It represented the end of a task begun nearly four
decades earlier in an effort to capture the immigrant experience of
her dynamic Armenian grandmother.
The story of Vartanoosh-"Sweet Rose" in Armenian-is the tale of
America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when floods of
immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia swept into the country. It is
a story of struggle against the odds and of the ultimate success of
men and women who had little to work with other than their
determination for a better life.
Ms. Kent, who makes her home in Kent, began her research on the book
in 1970 when she visited her grandmother in Florida. "I stayed with
her for a month and taped her, and she was absolutely wonderful,
candid and frank," said Ms. Kent this week. "Then all that had to be
transcribed-which took a lot of time-and researched."
In addition to work in American archives, Ms. Kent’s search for her
grandmother’s and her own background led her to twice visit the
Middle East, traveling to Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon,
as well as Greece. It also resulted in a fascination with T.E.
Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia," introducing her to a number of people
who had known him, and a correspondence with English poet Robert
Graves, a friend and early biographer of Lawrence.
Her work on Lawrence and his contemporaries led to more than two
years of residence in England and interviews with Borys Conrad, son
of Joseph Conrad; Dame Sybil Thorndike, Bernard Shaw’s original "St.
Joan"; Maura Budberg, H.G. Wells’ last companion; Mrs. George
Bambridge, Rudyard Kipling’s daughter; Nicholas Davies, one of the
surviving "adopted" boys for whom James Barrie had written "Peter
Pan" and Angela DuMaurier, the sister of Daphne and daughter of famed
actor Gerald DuMaurier, among others.
Ms. Kent, a 1961 graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School
of Journalism, was often sidetracked during the years she researched
her grandmother’s past and wrote three other books in the interim.
Her first, a young adults’ book, "The Hunt for the Mastodon," is the
true story of the excavation of a mastodon in Hackensack, N.J., by
the American Museum of Natural History. "Great Beginnings: Opening
Lines of Great Novels," and "Great Endings: Closing Lines of Great
Novels" followed. Most recently she revisited her Lawrence research
and presented a paper on his relationship with Robert Graves at a
Graves conference in Majorca last summer.
In between, she has delved into her grandmother’s past, verifying the
stories she told and learning more about the experience of the poor,
illiterate but stalwart people who established her family in America.
"I began working on it for real four years ago," she said. "When I
had finished transcribing the tapes I had about 275 pages, which I
used as the backbone of the book. Then I did a lot of research."
She learned that Vartanoosh had come to this country as a young child
in 1903. Her family escaped in the late 1890s from Turkish massacres
in their province of Erzeroum, Armenia, to Beirut, with the little
girl and her brother riding in saddlebags on a camel. She was left in
Syria in the care of a bachelor uncle while her mother emigrated to
America and her father traveled to England before finally rejoining
her mother in New York City.
The missionaries working with the Armenian refugees had sent her
great-grandfather, who had eye problems, to Manchester, England, for
treatment, but her great-grandmother had "decided the streets of
America were paved with gold," according to Ms. Kent.
"She left her daughter and an older son in Syria and came to New York
with a nursing baby on her knee," said Ms. Kent with admiration. "She
couldn’t read or write and didn’t speak the language, but in a matter
of years she owned a lot of apartment houses. I went to Newark to the
Hall of Records [to research] and ended up spending the whole day.
Then I had to go back because I found she had more than 21 land
transactions."
Vartanoosh did not arrive in this country until she was 7 or 8 years
old, however. And, when she came, she did not stay with her mother.
"They were little ragamuffins running around the streets of Beirut
until they came over with their uncle," said Ms. Kent. "When she got
here my great-grandmother didn’t want her living on that awful
Washington Street in lower New York, so she was placed in The
Sheltering Arms, an Episcopal home for ‘half-orphans,’ children that
had one parent who had to work to support the family. There she
learned to speak and read English and was taught American customs and
hygiene.
"It was a beautifully run home," Ms. Kent continued. "It had a lot of
backing from very wealthy New Yorkers from various Episcopal
churches. She was living in a fabulous place, where she was taught
English by the superintendent of the school, Miss Sarah Richmond,
whose father and uncle were rectors of St. Michael’s. Grandmother
thanked God for being sent to Sheltering Arms because she learned
things that stayed with her for her whole life."
Returning to her parents’ home as a teenager, she got to know Thomas
Alva Edison while working in her parents’ tailor shop in Orange, N.J.
"Edison would come by in his car," Ms. Kent related, "and would throw
a wad of clothes at the door. His vests were all covered with wax
because he was working on wax cylinders for phonographs at that time.
She’d have to scrape the wax off. When he came to pick up his
clothes, she’d say, ’25 cents,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s too much, 15
cents.’ He spent a lot of money on a house for his second wife and on
his laboratory and he wasn’t much of bookkeeper-he made and lost
large amounts of money. One of the most amazing things my grandmother
said was, ‘He was a white-headed man and he’s in front of my eyes
right now.’ Imagine being able to call up the image of Edison in
front of your eyes."
Although Vartanoosh longed to become a nurse, her parents insisted
that she marry. "My grandfather also came from Armenia, from Harpoot,
and they met over here in a kind of arranged marriage," Ms. Kent
said. "They moved to Ridgefield, N.J., where she raised six children.
It was really was my grandmother who got them through two world wars
and the Depression. Grandfather was a machinist and had trouble
getting work. She did everything-sewing, taking in boarders, selling
vegetables … .
In 1945, she moved to Florida on the advice of her doctors. "There
were a lot of veterans returning from the war and Miami was the hot
place to live," Ms. Kent said. "She got there at just the right time.
She discovered the Greyhound Bus Company, and she would just take off
and tour the country. My grandfather was not adventurous, but she did
a lot of traveling. Once she got on a bus going through North Dakota
and she said to the bus driver, ‘When you see a nice farmhouse, I
would like to see what it is like.’ She got off the bus in front of a
house, went up to the door with her little suitcase, knocked and said
she wanted to stay the night. In those days, you traveled in a suit,
with a hat and gloves-imagine finding that at your door. They let her
sleep on the couch over night and wouldn’t take any money-maybe 50
cents."
On another trip she was in San Francisco in 1951 at the conference
that signed a treaty between the Allies and Japan. "She was there on
opening day, third in line behind Andre Gromyko," said Ms. Kent. "She
wanted to see what a Russian was like. She wasn’t pleased."
Ms. Kent said that she has self-published this fourth book because it
is meant largely for family members, "and my mother is now 91. I
didn’t want to wait to try to find a publisher." Having distributed
the book to family members, she is now marketing it to others. It can
be purchased at the House of Books in Kent and online through
www.barnes&noble.com, or www. iUniverse.com and is
priced at $21.95 in paperback and $31.95 in cloth
With "Vartanoosh" behind her, Ms. Kent is poised to return to
writing, this time revising a play she wrote previously. "I will take
another look at that because I think I know what I can do with it,"
she said.