These Materials Are Needed For The Book I Am Writing

      When you go to America send me, please, answers to the following questions.

1. Please write down 7 American last names and 5 names of  American streets.

2. Name, please, 8 small ports

3. Name, please, 3 large and 4 medium syndicates, concerns or other capitalist establishments
that own them.

4. Name, please all brands of cars, that there are in San Francisco and which factories they are
made in,what is their speed?

5. What is the brand of the ships that arrive there?

And please send a pack of chewing gum and interesting books--
--Debts will be repaid in full.

When You Go To America

          Inside my grandfather's journal I found this drawing and letter in Russian, written by my brother.  In the late 50's and early 60's, there were already discussions about going to America.  In the late 60's, my aunt Armen would come to LA to visit her cousin Sirarpi, whom she had never met.  At the start of WWI and during the Genocide, the Shishmanian siblings scattered all over the world, yet somehow kept in touch.  Sirarpi was the daughter of Thomas Shishmanian who lived in Romania.

The Brothers Shishmanian

Raphael Shishmanian, the artist, (on the left) was a cousin raised with my grandfather after losing his parents. 

The two brothers pictured on the right (photo taken in 1911) were Jeremiah and  Aleksan.  They ended up in Beirut and New York, respectively.  

"My Grandchildren"

Here my grandfather lists his grandchildren.  It's strange to see my name. The youngest daughter of the youngest daughter, I have inherited this journal.  There is a responsibility that's implied.

Hripsime, my grandmother.

 I never met my grandmother.  She died young and left a hole in her daughter's lives. "She was the patriotic one who wanted to go to Armenia", my mom said.

My Greatgrandparents.

Great grandfather Stephan, died in Romania

Great grandmother Mariam, died in 

Bulgaria. 

A 1911 picture of brothers Jeremiah and Aleksan.  Jeremiah would end up in Beirut and Aleksan in New York.  

My Grandfather's Journal

In the uppermost corner of the drawer where my mother kept her clothes and some some towels, I found this journal.  I'd heard about it and maybe had even seen it, but never looked at the contents.  It was hers and she guarded it.  She could not read Armenian, but knew the stories and would always tell me,

   "It is all in the book".  Amen inchu kirkin mechn e.

 

A Found Letter-- My Sudden Inheritance

SIRO YERK,  SONG OF LOVE

by Medzadur Shishmanian

Yerevan, Armenia  1958

(translated by Anna, Medzadur's granddaughter in 2014)

My heart is like a boiling pot where day by day love grows and grows and as though lit on fire, it wants to tell everyone that there is no pain, sadness, pride or beauty which can diminish the strength of the power that underlies my life and blood.  This well of love has renewed my understanding, thinking and entire existence.  I love without pretense those who are around me and with whom I have shared my life’s bitterness and joy. The sweetness of love has formed my life.  Nothing exists for me other than the world of love.  I have tried to love those who are kind and those who are not.  Love with a whole love. If you want happiness, then love with no exception.  This path has directed me to love persons who have been thought to be uncaring by those around them.  Love, forged inside a celestial pot with the millions of stars and the rays of sun’s light, has received God’s image, because God is love. I would want to see this heavenly pot and plunge inside. To be weaved into a part of the love that has no beginning or end and to then return to this troubled world and place love’s sweetness in people’s hearts. Love is never conquered or bowed. Love is for the ages.  It will continue to absorb the tired, abandoned and hopeless.  Love begets happiness, orders and nurtures people’s lives. It can give strength to the abandoned, wisdom to the weak, hope to the hopeless and breathe in happiness to the saddened.  Oh, I would want to see my beloved family and spend with them ageless years in the love of God’s pastoral presence.

Medzadur Shishmanian

1958, Yerevan, Armenia

A Letter From My Grandfather

Mulberry Tree

      

 

​    The sheet was over my head and for a minute I forgot everything.  There was only that smell, the smell of mulberry—“tut” we called it. White, small, well, not completely white, but very, very pale yellow.  Some were green, not yet ripe. Some were so ripe that they were mushy, about to fall apart.  Mushy to the point where after they fell from the tree and traveled through the air to hit the sheet over my head, and over the heads of the other kids on the street lucky enough to have made under the sheet that day, they would go splat. Splat, like bird droppings. Only, they weren’t bird droppings, they were instead mulberries dropping from a mulberry  tree onto a giant flat canvas sheet held on all sides by neighbors while somebody shook the tree above the sheet.

 

​     Generally, I didn’t find out about such things until were almost over, but that day I happened to be the first to get under the sheet.  This is what you did.  Just stand under it and feel the mulberries drop on your head.  The sound of the dissolution muffled by the canvas sheet over your head.  Generally, you couldn’t’ see the other kids next to you ‘cause your eyes were nearly blinded by the pale yellow light all around you.  You saw the light muffled by the sheet, just as you felt the sweet wetnessof the mulberry splatting on top of your head, muffled by the canvas sheet.  They rained down, down you your head and you were happy, so happy ‘cause all you had to do was just stand there, and all these sweetnesses just came splat on your head.  All these sweet things you’d desired for so long and couldn’t’get to, were raining down you you.  You stood there, with your head up, eyes open, unable to see anything but pale yellow, yet feeling the sticky soft sweetness all over you.  Anticipation.  

New Wine Old Skin

     A couple of days before my wedding, a friend gave me a book titled “On The Way To The Wedding”.  One salient point stood out, and it was that getting married would fundamentally change some relationships and invariably cost a friend or two.  This turned out to be correct.

     I think there also needs to be a book, “On The Way to the Funeral,” and after last year, I now have the expertise to write it.  Having gone through the deaths of my mother, father and aunt in a period of nine months, I am now friends with the staff at the mortuary—granted, they remembered me from the time of my brother’s funeral several years ago.  I threatened them with opening a funeral consulting service across the street.

     “We not allow you to come through the door anymore”, was Harry the funeral director’s response.  Turen ners chi bidi tsekenk kezi  aylevs.
             
     I heard Fr. Vazken talk about one of Christ’s parables.  “You cannot pour new wine into old wineskin,” because the new wine’s acid will eat through the old wineskin, he explained. This is it, I thought, this is me—I have become new wine in the burned out old skin.

     “Wow, you’re all alone now,” my friend Sue said. “I mean aside from everything else, it’s gotta feel weird.”  She has seven siblings, so I understand her bewilderment.  Yeah, I wanted to say but I’m still standing.  For a long time, I had feared this very moment.  I’d imagined how it would be and never considered that this time of loss would also have so much joy. My husband and son were a complete surprise for me.  I had hoped for a family but never counted on actually having one. The question now is how to live with joy in the face of loss. I feel cheated out of the time that my son would have had with his grandparents and that I would have with all of them.  “This is the life,” my mother would often say and so it is. I feel them around me all the time as real, three dimensional people.  I want to spend time with those who remember them, to keep the connection for my son Alek, but something seems off. The reality of last year has burned holes in my skin and a new one has not quite been found.

     I have keys on my keychain that no longer open any doors, phone numbers in my phone that a familiar voice no longer answers and boxes of old photos depicting happy times that no one else remembers.  Nothing is going to change this and there is also something else.  This past “death season” as I call it, has been like a magnifying glass through which I could see the flaws of others.  I cannot pretend that I saw nothing, for I felt the burn of the holes on my skin.  My mother would say, “No pay attention.  Everyone has something, nobody perfect.” I had been able to do this my entire life but now I cannot. Maybe there will be a time to mend relationships in the future, to reminisce with old friends, to laugh at old jokes and to tell stories.  Surrounded by my dead as I am, I know I don’t have the strength for it now no matter how much I may want to.  A voice inside is telling me that now is the time to just stand still and yet this is the hardest thing.  Evolution isn’t a choice and there are few ways to control it. Entropy has its own order and so I must learn to just stand still. Stand still and anticipate.  Anticipation.

Finding My Legitimate Faith

    “Do you believe in God?” I asked my mother.  She was at this point in kidney failure and on hospice at my house.  She had weeks to live. 
    Chem kider, axchigs, kichmu shat hekyatayin paner en, she responded. "I don’t know, my daughter, it is all a bit too much like a fairy tale."
     That she would say this, came as no surprise. The woman had avoided any form of organized religion her entire life.  Martun xijn e iren astvats, she’d say.  "Your conscience is your God."  Simply the most generous person I know, she never wanted anything and did not like gifts.  When she’d hear that someone was in need, she’d ask me for money to give to them. Yes, kezi verch gudam, she’d always say.  "I’ll give it back to you."  However, she never had any to give back. She grew up with her father, a Protestant preacher, travelling and proselytizing in Bulgaria and there are pictures of him with a group of newly baptized Gypsies. I don’t know for sure that they were Gypsies, but that’s what my brother told me. Maybe it was this childhood or maybe it was the fact that many proper, religious people turned away from her when she needed help, but my mom had a “go it alone” attitude to all things, including religion. She’d often say that after my grandfather and aunt were imprisoned in the USSR after repatriating from Bulgaria to Armenia, everything turned upside down. Yerpek ches kider ov e lav mart yev ov vad, she’d say. "You never know who is good or bad."  You cannot make that judgment because when the time comes, you will be rejected by most, but help will come from those you least expect. I’ve found this to be true.
    My father’s faith was never in doubt.  Yes kidem ki dghais bidi noren desnam, he said after my brother’s death. "I know I will see my son again." He’d been an altar boy in Alexandria, Egypt and never outgrew it. After repatriating to Soviet Armenia, he did not go to church. No one did. He did, however, make a point of taking me to be baptized at the age of eleven.  After we came to America in 1976, we would often go to St. Garabed on Alexandria Ave in Hollywood.  He never asked me to go with him.  It was I who asked.  On Easter—his name day, we had our ritual. We’d go to church as my mom would stay at home, making chorek.   We would sit side by side, he would sing along during Mass and afterwards, we would light candles together. When he went by himself, he always brought mas --communion-- with him. It was for me, indeed, for all of us.  I can’t say that he was taken seriously, because for a long time we all thought of his actions as relics of a past time. We did not see his faith’s relevance to us and to our lives.  I know I didn’t. It was ritual, something I shared with my father and loved, but didn’t understand how it related to our lives or the anchor it would become.
    It wasn’t until my brother’s illness, that faith became at all important. Both of my parents were dealt the toughest hand that could be dealt to anyone. I watched how their faith, so different and yet so similar, sustained them. My father went to church regularly and would light a candle for my brother and our family. My mom was angry with God and had no patience for any of it, but I believe that she needed for my father to believe the way that he did.
    Where did I come into all of this? I don’t think that I believe as solidly as my father but I also know that I cannot do it alone like my mother did. I need the community, the ritual, the language.  I need all of it. To be in church, to participate in rituals thousands of years old, to know that each step I take has been taken by so many before me  gives me a sense of peace and a  continuity that leads directly to my own vulnerability. I wish I believed as simply as my father. Mine is a belief system riddled with doubt—I overthink things, I know. I once asked Fr. Vazken about this.  Don’t worry about it, was his response. Connect the other dots, focus on action because that’s the hardest part. 
This is very much like the advice given by my grandfather to my aunt. At fifteen, she told him that she was an atheist and didn’t believe in God. Lav, aghjiks, tun miyayn naye lav mart ullas.  Ure inch pes kogin xighj gu badvire. Bayts Astvats ga. Tun naye lav mart ullas.   "It’s ok, daughter, try to be a good person and do as your conscience demands, but God does exist. You just be a good person."  In fact, when my own father was in the hospital, talking to my son Alek, he stressed the same words-- Dhags, lav mart ullas.  "My son,  may you be a good person."
     So, I suppose, for me that’s what is truly legitimate. Trying to be a good person, following my conscience and being in a place that provides a connection to my past, to my father’s faith and that has meant finding my home in the Armenian Apostolic church.  More specifically, it has meant committing to and being embraced by the community of St. Peter’s—the little church on the corner.