Gloucester Daily Times, MA
From genocide to gentrified: An author’s Armenian-American journey
By Joann Mackenzie. Staff Writer
Jul 11, 2020
A Gloucester resident has penned a memoir, a familiar story of the American Dream, but also a love letter to a lost Armenia, to ancestors who were butchered in fields, and to those who, like his “nana,”survived.
The official 100th anniversary of the Turkish massacre of an estimated one and a half million Armenians —which, despite a mountain of damning evidence Turkey still denies— was this past April 24. John Christie’s memoir, “The Prince of Wentworth Street; An American Boyhood in the Shadow of a Genocide” — was published to commemorate it.
The 71-year-old was awarded the Yankee Quill for his lifetime contribution to journalism — he is a past editor of the Gloucester Daily Times and the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, and past publisher of the Kennebec Journal in Maine —in 2014 by the New England Academy of Journalists. He has, in other words, done very well in life. Well enough to have found himself, in his 60s, rubbing elbows with the sort of people who might want to gentrify the sort of hardscrabble neighborhood he grew up in.
At one such gathering, the veteran investigative journalist found his mood growing strangely dark. What would these affluent Americans think of his “shabby” roots, of the “tenement” home he shared with his extended family at the dead end of Wentworth Street in the mill town of Dover, New Hampshire? Not much, surmised Christie. Which prompted him to revisit those long ago roots, and embark on what would become a memoir which he describes as “payback, to all of them to all I owe them” — particularly, his grandmother.
Christie, who is half-Irish, originally intended his book to be about both sides of his immigrant family, but the desire to be a voice for the Armenians lost to the genocide took over the story. In it, the author turns his investigative reporter’s skills on his Armenian grandmother’s life to find meaning of his own American life.
His immigrant grandmother Gulenia Hovsepian’s journey to America began one morning when she went out to do some chores, and — to make a long and harrowing story short— barely escaped with her life. It was 1909, and the home she fled was in the little Armenian village of Vakifkoy—Musa Dagh.
Eventually, as a mail-order bride and a mill worker in New Hampshire, Hovsepian would become Christie’s beloved “nana,” a loving, lively woman with sad brown eyes that spoke to her adored American grandson of the genocide she’d escaped inArmenia, where at the start of the 20th century, to be an ethnic Armenian was to be targeted by Turkish death squads.
With the help of a cousin, Christie learns of his “nana’s” journey to the U.S. from her native village, a haunting place to which, as well-heeled Americans, Christie returns with his grown son Nick.
“My grandmother’s town was the subject of a 1933 novel by Austrian-writer Franz Werfel about the beginning of the Armenian Genocide,” says Christie, who, like many Armenian-Americans, believes the genocide remains a somewhat buried chapter in history. “Actually,” says Christie, “the word ‘genocide’ —the intentional extinction of an ethnic race— was first coined to describe what happened in Armenia. Hitler, when questioned about the impossibility of committing genocide against the Jews, was said to have replied, ‘Who remembers the Armenians?'”
Certainly the hundreds of thousands of Americans who, like John Christie, are descended from survivors of the Armenian Genocide.
FINDING THE BOOK
John Christie’s memoir, “The Prince of Wentworth Street; an American Boyhood in the Shadow of a Genocide,” is available at The Book Store, Main Street, Gloucester. You may also purchase it online at www.johnchristiewriter.com, or from Plaideswede Publishing Co., www.nhbooksellers.com, for $19.