Her name was Sonya Aharonian. Many people knew her in Beirut as one of the finest piano teachers available, and, by some streak of luck, we who were new in the country had engaged her to teach our nine-year-old son. All we knew was that we dropped him at her house in West Beirut, ran an errand and picked up him again, and by some magic genuine music began to pour out of our beat-up old piano. She did call once and ask to see him more frequently, because, she said, “I tell him to practice one hand at a time, and in a week he comes back with the two hands put together and the piece memorized, and it is WRONG!” Then we learned that another parent got a different call: “Stop wasting your money and my time. This kid is not serious about playing the piano.”
One day I arrived too early to pick up Tim, and she invited me to sit in the room with them while she finished his lesson. Her maid came in and, speaking Arabic, Mrs. Aharonian instructed her to bring me a drink. When the phone rang she answered and conversed in French, interrupting herself once to say something to Tim in English. Clearly she was employing several skills here all simultaneously, and I sat there thinking, of course she speaks Armenian, too. So, before we left I asked her, “How many languages do you speak?” She added German and another to the ones I already knew and then said, “Six. All of them fluently wrong.”
******
Dr. Peter Manoogian practiced medicine through his own small hospital in the Christian area of Ashrafieh. The middle-aged Dr. Peter looked just like a typical middle-aged Armenian, I guess—somewhat round, with a large nose. What I always noticed was the way his face was dominated by those huge, dark eyes. He was married to an American who had been a single missionary, part of the Near East Baptist Mission before he “stole” her. They had a houseful of beautiful daughters and one fine son. So far as I know, Dr. Peter could do tonsillectomies and appendectomies, set broken bones, heal burns, diagnose allergies and cancer, calm nerves, cure paranoia, and send everybody home laughing. He once told a sick friend of ours, “If you take these pills as directed, you will get well in a week. Otherwise, it’s going to take seven days.” A woman we knew told him that she had fainted. He asked, “Did you fall down?” “Yes.” “And did you wake up then?” “Yes.” “Isn’t that wonderful how God made us?” he said. “If the blood leaves our head, we faint and we fall down. Falling down makes the blood go back, so we wake up and discover we are O.K.”
Dr. Manoogian was generous to the extreme. His objective was to serve not to make money. The war nearly destroyed his little hospital, because he could not, like some did, turn away the penniless. Nobody bled to death on his doorstep. Nobody feverish or in pain was asked if he had money. He even took in a little injured girl nobody knew, brought to him by a stranger who said he found her in a heap of dead bodies.
******
I have forgotten the name of this third Lebanese Armenian, but the story he told I will never forget. He was a man in his sixties, I guess, who had dropped into our publishing office to chat with our editor, Abu Sleiman. There were several people present, and the visitor sat on a desk with his feet swinging. The conversation turned somehow to his memories of childhood in Armenia. He was five years old when Turkish soldiers came to his village. He saw them kill his father. Then a soldier caught him and held him down with one hand, lifting a knife into the air with the other.
“I was screaming, and he shouted, ‘Say, I am a Muslim.’
“But I said, ‘I’m a Christian; I’m a Christian.’ Then he told me, ‘Say I am a Muslim, so I don’t have to kill you.’ I couldn’t say those words; I don’t know why. I cried. I said, I am a Christian.’ I don’t know why he let me go. That’s all I remember.”
Over and over this story has caused me to ponder the meaning of personal identity and its relationship to faith, even an inherited faith. How hard it would be to deny who we are!
******
Armenians around the world are observing this month the 100th anniversary of the great disaster that befell them at the hand of the Ottoman Turks. For so many years they have appealed to the world to name this purge a “genocide.” And all these years Turkey, the successor state of the Ottomans who ruled the Middle East for 400 years, has claimed that 1,500,000 Armenians just happened to die in the fighting.
Historical evidence keeps mounting—memories passed down, letters, old news clippings, excavations, even photographs, all pointing toward a systematic extermination. The world knows that on April 24, 1915, Ottoman authorities in Constantinople rounded up 250 Armenian intellectuals and leaders. Their disappearance was followed by mass murders and deportations. Women, children, the elderly and infirm were marched by soldiers into the desert where many died of hunger and exposure. The New York Times of December 15, 1915, reported that already a million Armenians had been killed or exiled. About 23 nations, including Lebanon, have recognized this catastrophe as genocide.
This is the background story of many in the Armenian community in Lebanon, a people who came as refugees, bringing nothing but their intelligence and talent, their love of art and music, their faith and their memories. Lebanon received them into the fabric of a diverse country that they have enriched both culturally and economically. They are Christians, one of the eighteen faith communities of Lebanon.
For this patient people group, on their anniversary, I have a prayer.
May they always know who they are and never learn to deny it in any language. May God help them to be peacemakers and call them His children.