The sultan hanged his grandfather in prison… The Young Turks killed his father in 1915. A photograph of the orphanage boy’s mother was sent to distant shores, in the hope of “shipping” the widowed mother after it. But the mother, sheltering near the orphanage, still faithful and forever faithful to her ruined hearth, did not leave for America. She did not make a fatherless boy an orphan without either parent. She destroyed a young woman’s future and, out of its fragments, built the refuge from which the orphan would enter the world as the son of a prosperous home and a sturdy line of men.
I do not name him yet, because there are hundreds whose grandfathers went to the gallows, hundreds of thousands whose fathers were killed in 1915. Countless, too, are the mothers who sheltered what remained and once again cherished the hope of a bright, flourishing future for humanity and the Armenians.
Each of our lives, each of our years wrested from the genocide—that is, not hanged, drowned, stoned, shot or converted to Islam—certainly deserves applause and a place on the pedestal of an honoured anniversary. Yet we celebrate the seventieth birthday of Andranik Tsarukyan of Kyurin, Aleppo and Beirut—Andranik of Nairi, of A Letter to Yerevan and Old Dreams, New Roads, of People without a Childhood, Dreamlike Aleppo and The Last Innocent, the first-rate prose writer, journalist, brilliant commentator and editor—not simply as the birthday of a survivor, nor even of a gifted writer. We celebrate a strong individual who tears us from the web of despair and doubt about the diaspora, who dares to look present and future reality in the eye and wrest light and hope from it for us.
Such people command even an enemy’s respect; in their presence, evil stays in the shadows.
There is a luminous spirit of Tumanyan, Saroyan and Saryan in this man. And if these men, from different times and realities, draw close and come to resemble one another so strongly, we must say that this luminous spirit is Armenian identity itself.
May he have many sunlit years: this youthful poet moving from work to work, from undertaking to undertaking, from issue to issue of his weekly; this witness and chronicler of tragic times, political thinker and theorist; this true Andranik, whose grace and generosity have filled the gulf between diaspora and homeland. The warm light in his eyes bears witness that we shall celebrate his eightieth birthday too. And yet it is painful that Andranik is already reaching these milestones of age.
Of course, greater strength than winning requires is needed to withstand victory, to avoid being deformed by its weight. But to remain untainted, to remain human, not to become a captive at hatred’s threshold after a crushing defeat, but lovingly to take responsibility both for your hatred and for your fathers’ unpaid debts—this superhuman effort is demanded of the defeated. That is why, and in what way, we cherish Levon-Zaven Surmelian’s light-drenched narratives, Saroyan’s commanding appeal that “the indomitability of our spirit must become the world’s”, the impartial, unresentful writings of Michael Arlen Junior and so many others, and Tsarukyan’s life and work.
All of them seem to have been among those book-loving orphans who, in 1919, gathered around Hovhannes Tumanyan. He had seen the valleys of the Armenian genocide from Mesopotamia to the Hellespont, had lost a son and his people, had offered his terrible Requiem as a funeral service; and they heard his incomprehensible injunction: “Look upon the world and people as the sun does.” All of them are Tumanyan’s emissaries: the emissaries, that is, of a great, whole, impartial, universally human culture. This is no incidental lesson about an artist’s outlook and stance before the world. It is a plain acknowledgement of Tsarukyan’s achievement as thinker and writer. More than that: before this achievement, this life and work, one begins to grasp the full depth of Tumanyan’s injunction.
It is, of course, incomparably easier for a Saint-Exupéry or a Nansen—for any son of a nation that has not suffered such a wound—to become such a person. To do so amid the ruins of both aspiration and reality, still under daily threat of total extinction, is impossible; what is possible is to go mad. What great minds and consciences those of our people must possess who nevertheless are such people!
Tsarukyan has a political documentary novel about a son emptied of the ideas his father instilled in him, who has witnessed the terror of his distinguished father’s collapse and now, futile and powerless, sways between conflicting political currents and forceful individuals. It is about a man whose heart has died, who has lost the horizons of a personal and national future, who has furled the sails of self-assertion and struggle. Sometimes it is simply a debate, sometimes a report on Armenian political life in the diaspora. Often the language sheds its passions and becomes a confessional murmur; sometimes it grows into malicious, partisan mockery. It always concerns particular people and their time, of course: a little knowledge and effort, and those people will recover their passport names. In other words, Tsarukyan’s compassion and ridicule are not directed at us or at himself, Tsarukyan the public figure and writer, especially since he argues, explains, informs and grieves in the novel under another name. Yet through some hidden agency of literary art—perhaps an involuntary association with the epic fate of the orphan Mher, pleading for counsel and protection from his dead father; perhaps our human weakness (our strength!) for pitying all the unfortunate, guilty and innocent alike, I do not know—anguish catches in your throat. This fifty-year-old man in the approaching dusk seems an abandoned, bewildered child. It seems your own child has lost his way in the future world, and you wish, but are unable, to help him from your grave. Or your grandfather has gone astray in the past world and cannot find a way out. Or you yourself are the motherless orphan of today’s world. And again, the torment is so clear and palpable, the dead end so precisely shown, that as you read, the image of quarry being driven into a pen unfolds in your mind. It seems these are Tsarukyan’s own wanderings and pen, that the author has worked the diary of his hopes and despair into his novel. But never.
Reality never takes people like Tsarukyan by surprise, because they measure reality by one thing alone: reality. Charents’s name often appears in Tsarukyan’s works. In the words of his beloved Charents: “Our spirit cannot be captive to memorised words, to castrated thoughts.”
Ideas once whole, seemingly eternal and all-embracing, cannot contain a life that expands and changes its thousand faces every day. And collapsing frameworks must not take living human lives with them. We must survive, survive each day, survive continually. That is what Andranik Tsarukyan’s life and work teach; that is the healthy instinct of the people to which Tsarukyan has opened the doors of his life.