Survivors

I am a writer, translator and multimedia film artist born and living in New York City. My ancestry is Armenian on my father’s side: he was born in Zahleh, Lebanon. My mother is Italian from Geneva, Switzerland, a city she moved to as an infant having been born in the small village of Losone, near Lugano.

There is an inescapable spell of grief in the narratives of most Armenians who lived at the dawn of the 20th century. Every family, it seems, has a haunting story of loss. Everyone has a great-grandfather who had stared death in its callous jaws. Everyone has a great-grandmother who had buried a husband, a brother, a child, while resolving to survive with fierce dignity for the sake of the living. My family is no different.

Serge Avedikian has come to epitomize the wealth of the Armenian theatrical world. An master of all mediums – stage, television and film – a director and a filmmaker, this handsome, strong and introverted man with hypnotic eyes has many surprises up his sleeve.

Today, the Ohanian brothers are global leaders in marketing and recycling used garments. For over 30 years, they have been giving old clothing a second life. What humbly began with a mere five employees has grown into an enterprise employing 2,000 people. While Nerses focused on strategic growth targets, Hagop broke into new markets, and this combined approach has allowed the brothers to grow an empire that markets used garments in 90 countries and has branches on six continents.

It is not often that bringing Japan and Armenia together produces a pop music star and actress. Stephanie Topalian was born in Los Angeles, California on August 5, 1987. To date, the young performer has released two albums with Sony Music Entertainment, including the self-titled “Stephanie” in 2008 and “Colors of my Voice” in 2009. She also received the “Best New Artist” prize at the prestigious 49th Japan Record Awards in 2007.

A study room reminiscent of a ship’s cabin witnesses over 100 years of history in one afternoon. As the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean illuminates the window, Hernán Couyoumdjian Bergamali, a man with a 44-year-long career in the Chilean navy who takes pride on his Armenian roots and has an endless love for his homeland recalls his family’s history.

Voted “best actress” at the Armenian National Cinema Awards and recipient of the Celeste Prize for contemporary art, Lucie Abdalian is a striking multi-dimensional artist. She is a person who is who she is because she loves what she does. Her current life as a worldly and free-spirited New Yorker, fascinated by humanity and culture, is more a result of happenstance than of a dogged desire to achieve fame. Despite the ugliness of war and forced migration she experienced in her youth, she has built a life around the beauty of art.

Chris Bohjalian's novels have sold millions of copies worldwide. His stories often take a real-world incident, historical event or “fait divers” as a starting point, from which he weaves intricate and emotionally laden tales that are gripping both for their human aspect and the moral conundra that they present. In “The Sandcastle Girls” he looks back at the Armenian Genocide and asks how such horrifying events are possible, and even more remarkably, how victims survived to form families of their own and thrive in countries near and far.

I am proud that I am Armenian, and that after such a brutal trial, the Armenian people have not lost their faith, humanity and conscience. I will always be an Armenian.

My Armenian heritage is very important to me. I feel the responsibility to continue to teach my kids, as well as my students, about who we are. My biggest achievement besides being a mother is being a teacher. Each year on April 24th I was the one who went to the classroom to teach my students about the Armenian Genocide. I felt that was my biggest contribution. I could have taken a day off and marched, but I felt the need to teach my students about April 24th.