Excerpts from "The Prince of Wentworth Street"
"On the day of my birth, the calendar turned over and my family got a fresh start. The date was Jan. 1, 1948 and my family was delivered an antidote for the past. An antidote to that murder in a Turkish village, an antidote to the death of a father just starting to live the American dream, an antidote to two world wars and the Depression.
On that New Year's Day, just two years after the end of World War II, John Thomas Christie offered Nana and my mother and father — and my mother's siblings — a life not forged by massacres, wars and poverty.
Someone had to be the un-victim. Someone was destined to have a life free of tragedy, worry and even much responsibility.
That's how I came to be the Prince of Wentworth Street — where my parents had moved from their small apartment across town shortly after I was born. "
Armenian immigrants to America tried to keep memories of their tragic past to themselves and raise their children and grandchildren safe and secure in their new homeland.
Historical photograph documenting the Armenian Genocide, circa 1915-1916
Somewhere in the 1970s, Americans discovered and reveled in ethnic pride. The melting pot of immigrants who transcended their origins to become full-blooded Americans was replaced by the salad bowl, with its multitude of discrete, individualized ethnicities. America was the bowl into which all these hyphenated citizens had been tossed. There were Irish Americans, Greek-Americans, Italian Americans, German Americans, Chinese-Americans and many other hyphenates in the mix…
In mill towns, you started work early, came home early and ate supper early. The last meal of the day was called supper, not dinner; dinner was what you ate in the middle of day, unless it was at school, then it was called lunch. At 4:15 p.m. every day, my father would emerge from a small door in the south end of the red brick behemoth called Pacific Mills and come home to the house on Henry Law Avenue for supper.
The mill dominated the center of town as mills like it and even bigger did in Manchester, N.H., Lawrence, Mass., Providence, R.I. and other towns large and small across New England, towns powered by an immigrant work force and an abundance of hydro-electricity from the great rivers that slice through the region.
From the mid-19th century to 1940, the mill spun and wove cotton for clothes, sheets, furnishing, even toys, all printed with geometric, floral and other colorful designs under the brand Cocheco. In 1900, Cocheco mills manufactured 50 million yards of printed fabric to be sent all over the world.
In 1937, the cotton mill was closed when cheaper labor and electrification in the South attracted cotton and woolen mills from all over the northeast to move to the Carolinas and Georgia. The city tried to get another large manufacturer to take over the mill, but that never happened. Instead, some sections of the complex were occupied by discrete companies, while other sections remained vacant. One of those smaller companies was called Eastern Air Devices and that's where Dad worked when I was a boy.
Christie family photograph, circa 1950s
Then, a voice I had not heard in more than 20 years, a tender voice, the voice that sang me a German rhyme while I was bounced on her knee, the voice of an immigrant …
…A voice that spoke English words, but with the syntax of a woman who was raised speaking other languages — Armenian, Turkish, German.
Listening to that voice, I could just picture my Nana — Gulenia "Rose" Hovsepian Banaian — sitting in her rocking chair in her tiny subsidized apartment in Dover as she spoke into the tape recorder those first words of her life story …
Hearing her evoked in me a memory beyond the usual scenes from the past we all recall when triggered by a smell or a taste or a sound from the past. This was a memory of an emotion: There was never a time, from my earliest years to the last time I saw Nana, that I did not want to be in her presence, did not want her eyes on me, did not want to give in to her hugs.
When I heard her voice, I was no longer a man in his sixties, a man with responsibilities and worries. No — just for those moments I was all the endearing names she had ever called me: Johnny, John Quincy Adams, Professor Shingle-dingle. It didn't matter what she was saying. What transported me was hearing that voice. For that moment she was alive again, living next door, slipping shish kebab off a skewer and onto my plate.
Modern-day Suedia (Samandağ), Turkey - the author's ancestral homeland
I had come to know that of all the possible motivations of human behavior, the one that drives me most was loyalty. When I was disloyal — or thought others would think I was being disloyal to them — guilt consumed me. If I had not been as loyal as I believed I should be, as true to those to whom I owe so much, then that dark forest looked awfully inviting. Those feelings had been transformed into a yearning to express my gratitude to the people I owe my loyalty to, to express it in these words. And in one final act. That act was to go back to the beginning, go back to where it all began for Gulenia Hovsepian, my Nana. I wanted to go to Suedia. I wanted to go to Nana's home, the home she was forced out of 100 years ago because of her religion, because she was Armenian, and proclaim that I had come in her name.
