armenian stories

Letters to Barbra

2026-03-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

2026-03-25T12:04:00.000-07:00

FOX 11 Los Angeles Celebrates Armenian Heritage Month with a Special Showcasing Culture, Travel, and Inspiring Stories

By Paul Chaderjian

LOS ANGELES — KTTV FOX 11 is marking Armenian Heritage Month with a powerful new special that brings viewers closer to Armenia and the vibrant Armenian American community across Southern California.

This year’s broadcast features a virtual journey through Armenia, offering viewers a vivid look at historic landmarks, rich traditions, and everyday life. The special is hosted and reported by the talented, long-time FOX 11 anchor and personality Araksya Karapetyan.

The Armenian travelogue at the beginning of the FOX 11 Armenian Heritage special highlights Armenia’s ancient monasteries, welcoming streets, and a culture built on resilience. It also shows how affordable food and drink, street safety, and deep hospitality make Armenia an inviting destination for travelers.

“This special really opens a window into Armenia,” says Karapetyan. “You see the history, the beauty, the culture, and you realize how accessible and welcoming it is for anyone thinking about going.”

The special includes an update on the Armenian American Museum in Glendale, a landmark cultural project designed to celebrate Armenian heritage and serve as a global hub for education and community. The museum’s design emphasizes connection, identity, and shared history, with architects and builders working to create a space that reflects both tradition and modern vision.

“This museum is about preserving who we are and sharing it with future generations,” Karapetyan says. “It’s a place that connects our past with what comes next.”

Viewers will also meet Tro Khayalian, a mechanic turned artist who transforms scrap metal and discarded car parts into striking works of art. His creations blend Armenian identity with elements of pop culture, turning industrial materials into symbols of pride and storytelling.

Another featured voice is Dr. Andre Panossian, a Los Angeles-based, board-certified plastic surgeon who leads humanitarian missions to Armenia. Specializing in pediatric reconstructive surgery, including cleft lip and palate repair, he works with organizations like Mending Kids to provide life-changing care to children in need.

The special also highlights the new TUMO Center in Los Angeles. Originally founded in Armenia, TUMO has grown into a global education model focused on technology and creative learning. The program offers young people hands-on training in fields like animation, filmmaking, and coding, combining self-directed learning with mentorship in a model now replicated around the world.

As part of the celebration, Karapetyan welcomed the Gevorgian Dance Academy to Good Day L.A., FOX 11’s eight-hour morning show she co-anchors, for a live performance that brought traditional Armenian dance to large morning audiences across Southern California and beyond.

Good Day L.A. also featured Armenian American basketball player Gary Chivichyan, who made history as the first Armenian drafted into the NBA G League. Known for his scoring ability and international play, Chivichyan continues to build a professional career while representing Armenian athletes on a broader stage.

Karapetyan, a long-time voice for the community, shared her pride in the month-long celebration. She says she was extremely pleased that, for the first time this year, she was able to take her production team and shoot the special on location at the Armenian American Museum.

“This is more than a broadcast. It is a chance to share who we are with the world,” she says. “All month long, we’re highlighting our music, our food, our art, and the strength of more than one million Armenians in California.”

“I’m also incredibly proud of the team behind this,” she added. “From our newsroom to our creative services department, our videographers, editors, and the entire FOX 11 management team, this was a true group effort to bring these stories to life.”

FOX 11’s Armenian Heritage Month special continues to connect audiences across Los Angeles and beyond, offering a meaningful look at a culture rooted in history and alive in the present.

The special will stream regularly on FOX 11’s YouTube page: Celebrating Armenian Heritage, on FOX 11’s website at https://www.FOXla.com/live, and on the FOX Local Los Angeles app on all your devices: https://www.foxlocal.com/.

Three Apples: Stories Matter

2025-12-22T07:19:00.000-08:00

How an Armenian film brought me back to writing

By Paul Chaderjian

The keys on my MacBook click in the quiet of my West Los Angeles apartment. I have not written an essay like this since the Palisades and Eaton fires. Nearly a year has gone into medical appointments, surgery, fatigue and wondering how much more treatment my body could take. Most days, I had little energy left for writing.

Tonight, after a weekend by the ocean and a movie at home, I find myself at the keyboard again.

My niece Ani insisted on treating me to a stay at Terranea in Rancho Palos Verdes so we could celebrate the holiday together. I needed the change of scenery. In Room 5124, I had a few days to steady myself between surgery and another round of chemotherapy.

Stage IV colorectal cancer, with metastasis to my liver, had rearranged my life. It also made me persistent about urging the people I love to discuss their own risks and screening needs with their doctors.

The ocean gave me a few hours each day when my body felt less like a battlefield and more like a place I still recognized.

I knew that coastline from my student days, when I shot Super 8 film there with Kim Crawford. Decades later, I found myself recording it again, this time on my phone. Nune Yesayan’s “Qamuts Qshvats Husher” came to mind as I watched the water. Her voice has always brought me closer to home, wherever I happen to be.

When I returned to my apartment on Sunday evening, I picked up the remote and pressed the Prime Video button. I wanted to watch A Winter’s Song, by Angela Asatrian, a young Armenian-American filmmaker whose name I had only recently learned. Watching during its streaming debut weekend seemed a small, useful way to support her work.

Krista Marina plays Liana, a singer with three weeks to make a demo. She travels to Armenia looking for inspiration and finds music, romance and a connection to the country. Krista also wrote original music for the film, including “Yeraz.”

I knew Krista from the Armenia Fund Telethon. I knew Edgar Damatian and Kev Orkian from those broadcasts, too. Watching them brought back my final Telethon: Edgar’s open, steady presence, Krista’s warmth, Kev’s chaotic, deeply Armenian comedy. Now they had parts in a feature film I could call up from my couch.

Outside my window, lights cover the new apartment and office buildings in Sawtelle. A few steps from my driveway is the former home of KSCI Channel 18. Years before streaming, we had driven our videotapes there so Armenian families could watch them on television.

I could not watch this film without thinking about those tapes.

Before I could borrow a camera

My father kept his Super 8 camera in a brown case that smelled of new leather. He did not let me touch it. Film cost money, and the camera itself seemed too valuable to entrust to a child.

I wanted to record things long before I had the means to do it.

In high school, Fresno Cable’s community access Channel 14 gave me my first chance to work with a studio camera. Later, at USC, cameras and lighting kits sat behind counters and in storage rooms. Access required admission, enrollment, identification. Even editing depended on getting time at a station. Wanting to make a film and having the equipment to make one remained separate problems.

There were people who made the distance seem smaller. Seeing Stefani Booroojian on Fresno television helped me imagine an Armenian name in an American newsroom. Filmmakers Ara Madzounian, Vahe Babaian and Nigol Bezjian made their work with 16-millimeter film and improvised sets. I watched Sarky Mouradian’s films featuring Adiss Harmandian. Each gave me something I could point to, something beyond my own wish to do this.

At USC, Carol Sobieski called me “kiddo” and taught me to account for every word. T. Coraghessan Boyle taught me to listen for rhythm and pay attention to the pace of a story. Journalists at KCBS and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner showed me how much an apparently small detail could reveal.

Carol’s insistence that each word earn its place followed me from screenplays into newsrooms. It has given me plenty to reconsider on this page, too.

I also remember how little we needed to recognize ourselves on television. Armenian Teletime aired on Saturdays. A green curtain. A microphone. A cassette tape. For a boy searching the screen for Armenian faces and Armenian words, that modest production offered something I could find almost nowhere else.

Other communities bought airtime at KSCI, too. We shared a station while trying to reach our own people across a sprawling city.

The Saturday tapes

At Horizon TV, we began sending cameras out to report on Armenian life. Garbis Titizian led the effort, with Salpi Ghazarian and Roxanne Makasjian helping guide the work. Our studio occupied a conference room.

The Vatche and Tamar Manoukian family donated cameras and editing systems. Their gift helped us cover the Spitak earthquake, the Sumgait massacres and the war in Artsakh. These were stories we needed to tell, and now we had equipment we could use to tell them.

Families with their first camcorders recorded April 24 commemorations and sent us their tapes. Some arrived with Levon Travel customers carrying them across the diaspora. The recordings made their way to our conference room in Glendale, where we prepared them for broadcast.

Stepan Partamian, Chris Guldalian, Albert Kodagolian and I took turns driving the edited programs to KSCI’s control room in West LA each Saturday. Getting our work onto television included this very ordinary task: somebody had to take the cassette across town.

I live near that destination now. Back then, I knew it as the place where we handed over the week’s work.

Other people preserved the community on audio. Seta Harboyan-Simonian and Hratch Simonian carried reel-to-reel recorders and reels of tape into churches, school halls and basements. They recorded for Hamazkayin radio. Long before their son Sebu reached his own audience, his parents were collecting the voices and music around them.

When I hear Sebu Simonian bring Armenian folk music into his work, I think of Seta and Hratch with those machines. I hear a related impulse in Sirusho’s “Pre Gomesh,” with its use of Komitas’ voice. The music has changed, as it should. Knowing something about the people who preserved it makes listening a different experience for me.

The filmmaker I imagined

In February 1991, at the keyboard of my first personal computer, I invented an Armenian-American filmmaker named Sev Minassian.

He appeared in my short story “The Beautiful People,” published in Asbarez. Sev wanted to direct a new version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I gave him an Armenian executive producer named Siranoush and a reporter, Michael, to follow his setbacks and successes.

I chose those names deliberately. I wanted Armenians making the decisions, directing the film, taking up space in the story. On paper, I could put them there without asking anyone’s permission.

Decades later, I found myself following the work of a real Sev. Sev Ohanian, another USC film school graduate, co-wrote and produced Searching and went on to produce Sinners. The name caught my attention, but the work held it. Here was the ambition I had given a fictional character, finding an audience beyond our community.

I had spent years wondering whether there would be room for people like the ones I invented. Watching his films, I could stop wondering about that much.

My own attempts took a different course. One screenplay followed a Hollywood actor captured during the early war in Artsakh. Another, CNN Reporting, which I wrote with Chris Guldalian, followed a journalist searching for a connection to the homeland.

Sessions dealt with AIDS and homophobia in the young Armenian republic. We reached the U.S. production stage with commitments from Jeremy Sisto and Marisa Ryan. Albert Kodagolian planned to direct it.

Albert had left his pre-med classes and come to Horizon to ask me how to get into the business. Later, he produced and directed million-dollar Super Bowl commercials. Then illness ended his life. I still think about the work he did not get to make.

Allan Yekikian, another colleague we lost too soon, co-wrote an essay with me in 2010 calling for a new Zartonk, an awakening. We urged young Armenians to use cameras, digital tools and social media to tell their own stories.

Watching younger filmmakers now, I think about both men. I am glad to see work we hoped for. I would have liked to watch it with them.

Angela’s film joins work by Atom Egoyan, Arsinee Khanjian, Michael Goorjian, Alek Keshishian and many others. There are more Armenian filmmakers to follow now than the boy watching Armenian Teletime could have imagined.

The names I knew

During my cancer treatment at UCLA, I encountered the Manoukian name again. It appears on the Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Medical Building. The family that helped put cameras in our hands had also supported the institution where I now depended on other people’s skills.

At UCLA, my colorectal surgeon, Dr. Kevork Kazanjian, and my liver surgeon, Dr. Vatche Agopian, took on the work of treating my cancer. I knew what the Manoukian family’s generosity had meant when I needed equipment. I came to understand it differently as a patient.

Araksya Karapetyan helped me through another difficult return.

Years earlier, I had asked her to co-host the Armenia Fund Telethon with me. She accepted without hesitation. I spent years working on that broadcast, helping connect people across the diaspora with projects in Armenia and Artsakh: roads, homes, hospitals, schools and water systems. The loss of Artsakh remains painful. It does not erase the people those projects served.

At Al Jazeera, covering the loss of Artsakh and the genocide in Gaza left me questioning what my work could accomplish. I kept describing the destruction of communities and wondering how much difference another story could make.

By November 29, 2025, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported more than 70,000 people killed in Israel’s offensive, according to Reuters. A number could establish the scale. It could not convey all the lives inside it.

After leaving Qatar and returning to California, I still carried the exhaustion of that work. Araksya helped bring me into the FOX 11 newsroom. She had survived the Spitak earthquake, the same disaster we had covered at Horizon when my own connection to Armenia was taking shape.

I had once invited her into a broadcast that mattered to me. Now she helped me return to a newsroom when I needed direction.

Working alongside her gave me renewed purpose. I could not undo what had happened in Artsakh or Gaza. I could work with someone who understood why those losses followed me home.

After the film

A Winter’s Song sent me back through these memories without offering an answer to all of them. Albert and Allan are still gone. My treatment continues. Some of the films I wanted to make remain part of an earlier life.

Yet there is Krista, acting and singing in a film set in Armenia. There are Edgar and Kev, people I remember from a television set, now reaching viewers I will never meet. Angela has made something of her own, and I can watch it here.

I had hoped to make films, too. Watching other people do it does not erase that wish, but their work gives me pleasure I would not have understood when I was younger. Some of what I wanted for myself, I also wanted for us. I can see it happening without my name in the credits.

When the film ended, I stepped outside and looked toward the old KSCI site. I thought about the programs we delivered and the families who watched them. I remembered how much effort it took to get an hour of Armenian television on the air.

Back at Terranea that weekend, I had lifted my phone and recorded the coastline. As a boy, I could not touch my father’s camera. Now I carried one in my pocket.

After everything, I still wanted to record what I saw.

Paul Chaderjian is a Los Angeles-based broadcast journalist and the author of the novel “Letters to Barbra.”

Follow Paul on YouTube: @pchadNEWS.

An additional reference from the original essay

Sayat Nova — background on the poet and musician.

Armenian Stories

2025-10-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

Features:
Cher the Armenian
ABC News' Lara Setrakian
Vahe Berberian profile
The World Wide Web of Nune

Book Reviews:
The Daydreaming Boy
The Bullet Collection
My Brother's Road

Columns:
Three Apples, Asbarez Newspaper
Belonging & Belongings
Diasporas Can Disappear
The Seat of the Armenian Soul
Cycles of Life

Novel:
Letters to Barbra

Essays from Artsakh:
On the Road for Armenia Fund

Reporting from Armenia:
Tatev aerial tramway
Doctors to perform 50 life-changing surgeries
A new smile, and a new life for a 16-month-old
Surgeons heal broken smiles, deliver hope

Reporting from India:
Armenians make pilgrimage to Kolkata
Karekin II reconsecrates Armenian church in Chennai
300th anniversary of Kolkata church
Deacon becomes priest

Producing Reels

2025-10-12T20:51:00.000-07:00

Documentaries/Newscasts:

KTTV Fox 11's Good Day LA @ 10 A.M.

Al Jazeera Inside Story: Western Media Bias

Al Jazeera Inside Story: War on Gaza

Al Jazeera Inside Story: New Armenia PM

Al Jazeera: The Stream: Decades of Displacement

Al Jazeera: Talk to Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera: Nepal in Ruins

KITV ABC 11 Honolulu: News at Ten

KITV ABC 11 Honolulu: News at Six

KITV ABC 11 Honolulu: News at Five

KSEE 24 Fresno We Are Fresno LIVE

KSEE 24 Fresno: We Are Fresno LIVE

KSEE 24 Fresno: We Are Fresno LIVE

KSEE 24 Fresno: Stefani's Armenia

TV Reporting

2025-10-03T20:51:00.000-07:00

TV Reels:
Reporter Reel
2013-2019 Al Jazeera YouTube playlist
2003 Reporter Reel (KSEE)
1998 Reporter Reel (KJEO)

Al Jazeera/CNN/Fresno:
AJE: Civilians Killed in Douma
AJE: Armenian Genocide 100th

CNN International: Russia Gas Line Explosion

KSEE, Fresno: Vice President Al Gore Visit Preps

AJE: Desperate Times in Syria

AJE: Lebanon's Trash Crisis
KSEE, Fresno: Rehab Graduation
AJE: Refugees Stuck in Croatia
CNN International: Armenian Priests Study Abroad
AJE: Fighting in Aleppo
AJE: US Sanctions over Sony Hack
AJE: Staying Warm in Douma
AJE: Banksy in Gaza
AJE: Deadly Clashes in Guinea
AJE: Leopard Mauls Five People
CNN International: Sumgait Massacre Anniversary
KITV, Hawaii: Midway Island Refuge

Dance Channel TV: Tango Argentino

CivilNet, Armenia:
Golden Apricot Film Festival Preview
The Revolution That Wasn't
Bus Protests Continue
Bus Fare Hike Protests
Gyumri Fishery-Restaurant
Aznavour Interview
Ancient Water Festival
Daily Digest 10/24/13
From Madrid to Yerevan on Foot
50,000 Tom's Shoes Donated
Village School Renovated
Film Festival Closing Night
Film Festival Begins
Fuller House Build

Anchoring:
CivilNet Daily Digest 10/25/13
CNN Fellowship World Report
Armenia TV News 9/19/2006
Armenia TV News 9/18/2006

Documentaries/Newscasts:
Post Soviet Media in Armenia
Stefani's Armenia
Recently Produced Daily Newscasts

Soft News Producing Reels
We Are Fresno LIVE

Three Apples: Nothing burns alone

2025-04-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

Three Apples: Nothing burns alone

California to Artsakh, a journey through fire, memory, and Armenian exile

By Paul Chaderjian

Photos by Areg Balayan

A FIRE THAT NEVER GOES OUT

A single, dangerous ember finds its way onto a dry, shingled rooftop, silent, unnoticed. It glows for just a moment, then vanishes into the vast emptiness beyond. But embers do not truly disappear. They settle, sinking deep into the dry earth, into history, drifting like forgotten thoughts, but threatening to stain the history of every generation.

I am sitting on my balcony in West Los Angeles, watching the hills to the north. The city lies beneath a heavy sky from enormous loss, but it’s the hills I cannot stop staring at, the landscape that still bears the memory of something lost. The smoke is long gone from the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. The flames that tore through the Palisades have been subdued. Yet, in their wake, they leave a silence more profound than the fire itself.

Wildfires in California are the new normal, but the recent ones assaulted us with unfathomable death and destruction. The Palisades Fire swallowed 23,448 acres, turned thousands of homes into fleeting memories, and claimed 12 lives.

FLEEING INTO THE NIGHT

Somewhere in the foothills and valleys of the Caucasus mountain range, more than 120,000 people fled. Some had a moment to pack hurried suitcases, cramming essentials into cars with trembling hands. They grabbed their children, their photo albums, pieces of their lives they hoped might survive the unthinkable. Then, they fled. They ran, leaving behind everything they had built.

Others ran for their lives without even grabbing documents or toothbrushes. Some abandoned their cars when streets jammed, running on foot as flames raced toward them.

We know this story. We know the weight of stuffing a suitcase when forced to flee from civil wars, political chaos, and natural disasters like the 1988 Spitak Earthquake. I remember the night we packed our suitcases, the weight of uncertainty pressing down on us as Beirut burned.

FROM L.A. TO ARTSAKH, ECHOES OF BURNING HOMES

Not far away from the hills above Brentwood, which lie just miles from my balcony, the Eaton Fire tore through Altadena and Pasadena. 14,021 acres were erased. 17 more lives stolen. The toll beyond numbers: fathers, daughters, neighbors, lovers, friends, entire lifetimes burned away.

The fires are out, yes. But their ghosts remain.

I didn’t see the Eaton Fire from my balcony the way I saw the flames from Palisades. Instead, I saw it on two screens on my desk in the FOX 11 newsroom, hour after hour, night after night, as we worked around the clock for nearly three weeks. I wrote scripts for anchors. I edited video from the field. I wrote about human losses, homes reduced to embers, families who would never return.

Among the 16,255 structures lost, one stood out: Sahag-Mesrob Armenian Christian School. It had been a place where Armenian children once learned their language, their faith, their history. It had been reduced to ash. A different fire, but the same story. Another home, homeland. Another history erased.

And somewhere in the chaos of breaking news and final death counts, I thought of Artsakh. I thought of another fire, one that burned far away but felt intimately close.

THE FIRE THAT SWALLOWED ARTSAKH

That fire erased Artsakh, forcing 120,000 Armenians to flee their homes, their history, their identity. The loss reopened wounds long thought healed. Just as 1.5 million Armenians were lost in the Armenian Genocide, Artsakh became another chapter in our long cycle of displacement.

This was the land where the Armenian alphabet was first taught in the 5th century, where ancient monasteries stood for centuries. This land was on fire.

The people of Artsakh, who had fought for their right to self-determination, were forced to abandon everything.

Just a decade before, 48,000 perished in the liberation war before Artsakh’s fall. The 2023 fires burned while Russian peacekeepers watched.

THE SAME FIRE, THE SAME EXILE

Fires in California. Fires in Artsakh. Fires in Gaza. Fires in memory, history, exile. The names change, the faces change, but the story does not.

Since my first newsroom job at Horizon Armenian Television, I have scrolled through millions of images: a burnt baby held over flames in Sumgait; the civil war in Syria; the Houthis fighting in Yemen; the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan; North Koreans deployed in Russia’s war on Ukraine; the Taliban in Afghanistan; Islamist uprisings in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad; war between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front; and the criminal military junta in Myanmar.

Families wailed over shrouded bodies, pointing to destroyed homes. Their faces were grief-stricken, their eyes vacant. Their futures gone in flames. Behind them, what was once home was now a blackened husk.

A FIRE BURNING THROUGH HISTORY

I have seen these faces before. In black-and-white photographs from Sepastia and Erzurum, where the fire of genocide had already come decades before these flames. I see them in color photos of my parents in Beirut. People becoming refugees, displaced, still carrying the weight of their own losses. In grainy home video footage of Artsakh, where the fire had never fully left, the lingering ember would not go out. It was not allowed to go out by sociopaths, criminals, world governments, and even the United Nations.

The stories do not change. Only the years. Only the places. Yesterday, there was a house. Today, there is nothing. Yesterday, there were twin Armenian republics. Today, there is exile.

The green hills north of Brentwood burned, and I thought of Artsakh. The thick, ancient trees with roots tangled deep in the soil, their branches reaching skyward, until the moment the bombs came. The phosphorus fell into the Black Garden, Karabakh, Artsakh, a place where there was civilization dating back to antiquity.

The skies turned red, thick with blood, thick with fire. The air reeked of loss. The fire took everything.

A HOMELAND TURNED TO DUST

They call it Karabakh, the Black Garden. But before it was Karabakh, it was Artsakh, one of the 15 provinces of the ancient Kingdom of Armenia, a land with a people older than the names forced upon it.

1,700 square miles of Artsakh, gone. Hundreds of thousands of acres of historic Armenia, stolen. The phosphorus fell. The skies turned red, thick with blood, thick with fire.

The Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones descended like locusts, hunting, circling, dropping death. Men burned where they stood. Soldiers, whose bodies had been melted by white phosphorus. 18-year-olds, whose lungs were scarred from inhaling fire. The sons of Armenia with skin peeled off, their last moments spent breathing in their own burning flesh.

The hills of California glow red, and I see the villages of Artsakh, torched, abandoned, turned to dust in the wake of forced surrender. The Santa Ana winds howl through these canyons, and I hear the voices of my grandparents whispering stories of Sepastia and Erzurum. And I hear my father, my mother, my sisters, too.

We lost our home in Antelias, a suburb of Beirut and the seat of the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia. The civil war began. School shuttered. The power went out. Arab brothers turned against one another. Israel instigated and killed more of the people it had exiled during the Nakba, their catastrophe, now our collective catastrophe. The bombs fell. The city burned.

We packed what we could, handed the keys to a family who had lost their home, thinking we would return when the fighting was over.

THE WAR CAME, THE EXILE FOLLOWED

The war came. Arab brothers turned against one another. An extremely low-flying Israeli jet shook our homes, destroying the abundance that the “Paris of the Middle East” had once enjoyed. The place that united religions and sects in one parliament, a destination, gateway to the Arab world, the air and seaports to the Middle East were destroyed as the world watched.

We packed what we could, handed the keys to a family who had lost their home and rented ours, walked out the door thinking we would come back when the fighting was over. The fighting never stopped. The nation’s statehood collapsed. Business centers shifted to the Gulf states. Another fire. Another exile.

My family also walked away, drove to Syria, the land that Mark Antony gave as a wedding present to Cleopatra. Their story lived in history books while ours and many others became ghosts until this writer put them into words, saved as bits and bytes in the algorithm of the internet of all things.

A PRINTING PRESS SILENCED

And I think of my father’s publishing house on Mono Street Saht in the Al-Dabass (صحّة الدبّاس) neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon.

The giant, basement-level presses once hummed, printing books in Western Armenian, books that would now never be read. Those books sat in stacks of boxes in warehouses after the start of the Civil War. They then were loaded into cargo ships and sat in our final family home in Fresno, waiting for hands that would never turn their pages.

The words, the western dialect of our language, the history, locked away in darkness, forgotten, collecting dust. Another kind of loss. Another kind of fire.

A HOMELAND BUILT AND LOST, AGAIN: DOING MY PART BEFORE THE FALL

I did what I could to build something new. I went to Artsakh to report on the roads, the schools, the homes we built from nothing. I stood in the dirt and felt something I had never felt before: a homeland not in exile, not theoretical, but real. I gave what I could. I have my voice, my words.

I went to Artsakh year after year. I reported on the roads we paved, the homes we built, the schools we opened. I walked the halls of the hospitals funded by donations, where the sick, who had been forgotten by the world, found healing.

I watched as doctors flown in from Yerevan and Glendale set up temporary clinics in remote villages where families who had never seen a physician received exams, medications, basic care.

I spoke to mothers waiting in lines stretching outside village halls, hoping for antibiotics, vitamins, a diagnosis, a cure. I saw the relief in their eyes when they were handed medicine, a bandage, a promise that they had not been abandoned.

ARMENIA FUND TELETHON, A GLOBAL MISSION

Every Thanksgiving, I stood next to Alina Dorian, Salpi Ghazarian, and Artak Herikian, then Tatevik Ekezian, Arsinee Khanjian, Mark Geragos, Maria Mehranian, and Araksya Karapetyan, under studio lights on Hollywood soundstages, speaking from the heart, asking the world to help.

I hosted group after group of schoolchildren who came with scripts explaining why they held bake sales. I heard the names of my parents’ friends, forgoing vacations, skipping home renovations, writing checks so families in Artsakh and Gyumri could have homes of their own.

With executive producer Mike Levin at the helm, I introduced Antranik “Anto” Baghdassarian, who matched donations with million-dollar checks that rebuilt whole communities. I talked to Hacop and Hilda Baghdassarian, who with their sons built community centers and schools, not for prestige, but out of love and duty.

THE ROAD TO TALISH, THE LAST DEFENDERS

We believed. We raised millions. We rebuilt. We thought we had outrun the fire that was to come. We built hospitals, cultural centers, highways that cut through mountains to connect our scattered villages.

Backstage, we shared Jhingyalov Hats, the traditional Armenian flatbread stuffed with a medley of 31 different greens, a taste of home amidst the studio’s sterile lights. I went along with one of the medical missions funded by the telethon, accompanying doctors from California’s Adventist Health Glendale, led by Dr. George Mutafyan.

In Stepanakert, the selfless doctors forgoing vacations performed brain and knee surgeries. In Tavush, they helped farmers, treated people for cholesterol and high blood pressure, and gave them medications villagers couldn’t afford.

In Noyemberyan, we met Grisha Khachigian, a man who worked with his hands until he couldn’t. “The pain was so bad that I couldn't do physical work," he told me. "I had a business and an orchard to run and worked in construction. But everything came to a grinding halt. I couldn’t move. And then the doctors came.” He spoke of them as if they were angels.

THE SOLDIER WHO NEVER LEFT

In 2019, I met Leova, a soldier who stayed in Talish after the 2016 war when everyone else had left. His village was abandoned, his home, his school, his neighbors gone, but he refused to leave. His neighbors didn’t leave by choice. They left because snipers took shots at them as they tried to tend to their farms, to live in peace. They left because the enemy wouldn’t let them plant, wouldn’t let them farm, wouldn’t let them walk outside without fear of being killed. But Leova stayed.

His village was abandoned, new houses built by the telethon left unoccupied, but he refused to leave. I remember the road he led us down, roads built by the generosity of Antranik Baghdassarian.

Leova took us deep into the forests above Talish, through tall grass and stone paths, leading to a 5th-century monastery and the castles of the Armenian Meliks, noble rulers who governed semi-autonomous regions from the 12th to 18th centuries.

There, among the ruins, he showed us the graves of his children. A 12-year-old daughter, Ani, who died because there was no way to get her to a hospital. A 3-month-old son, Hayk, lost to a medical mistake in a candlelit room during the war.

Leova did not cry. He did not blame. He just stood there, strong as the mountains, telling us, “I will never leave. I will never give up my home.”

As the Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, Kenneth, and Hughes fires burned, I wondered if Leova had stayed behind during the exodus, if he had fought to his death, or if he was in a prison cell in Baku right now, along with philanthropist Ruben Vardanyan, who donated a million dollars to the telethon.

Mr. Vardanyan, the last State Minister of Artsakh, is withering in jail after his arrest by Azerbaijan on September 27, 2023, as he attempted to cross back into Armenia. He has been absurdly charged with financing terrorism, creating and participating in illegal armed groups, and illegally crossing Azerbaijan's border. And I thought of Monte Melkonian, my Fresno neighbor's nephew, idealist, fighter, dreamer. He had left the safety and abundance of the West to fight and protect Armenians in Lebanon and then in Artsakh.

INVOLUNTARY SILENCE AND FORCED COMPLICITY

Then there was another kind of erasure. One not of bombs or phosphorus, but of silence.

I sat in many international newsrooms, watching, waiting, pitching stories about the blockade of Artsakh. Day after day, I asked, pushed, fought for coverage. But no one wanted it. They wouldn’t allow it. Not yet. Not until it was too late. Not until the people of Artsakh were already gone.

And when they were gone, the pathetic reporter from the scene said without explaining that the Armenians had left. Nothing about the threat of death and burning skin and inhaling one's lung tissue. He said the Armenians had left. It was called ethnic cleansing when Palestinians were forced out; but my people were billed as having the luxury of staying or going when the brutal enemy rolled into town.

I worked in newsrooms where we weren’t worth 15 seconds on the evening news. In one newsroom, a schedule coordinator told me his Turkish wife once warned him, “Watch out for Armenians. They're cheats, con artists, troublemakers.” And that is how he saw me: the Armenian hustler, the shyster, the charlatan. Not the man my parents raised, a disciplined, loyal, generous, honest man.

Some fires never die. They burn for centuries inside those whose ancestors were taught to hate in the old world, and brought those hatreds to the new.

And then, in October 2023, the war in Gaza began. I watched raw videotapes of burnt babies, toddlers shaking in pain, unable to make a sound because there were no painkillers left. Families shredded by bombs. Children undergoing amputations without anesthesia. Hospitals flattened. Homes turned to bone and dust.

I had written about genocide my entire career. I had written about Artsakh. I had written about how the world ignored our suffering. I had written about our people shouting “Never again” for 110 years. And there I was, watching it happen again. Everywhere.

In Artsakh. Gaza. Sudan. Myanmar. Ethiopia. Ukraine. It was happening everywhere, including to my own people.

THE LIE OF NEVER AGAIN

The world watched 1.5 million Armenians murdered in 1915 and said “never again.”

An Azeri coworker smirked as her government rewrote our history, insisting Armenians were Albanian Christians who stole music, heritage, food, land. She said Yerevan was Western Azerbaijan.

She had not read one page of real history, not even on Wiki, but knew the truth, so she’d spend her time not reading or asking but smearing her lips with extremely red, blood red lipstick. She was the holder of the truth in that organization. She was promoted, fired and rehired again.

The world watched the Holocaust and said “never again.” The world watched Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and said “never again.”

But “never again” was a lie. Silence is another form of complicity.

And I wrote death tolls again as the numbers climbed past 47,000 Palestinians. Children buried under rubble. Hospitals bombed. Civilians massacred.

I wrote until my hands ached, until my rotator cuff tore, until breathing felt heavy.

I wrote about people I would never meet, in places I would never go, and I grieved for them as if they were my own. Because, in a way, they were.

THE DAY IT ALL FELL APART

And then, we lost it all. 120,000 people forced out of Artsakh.

They left keys in their doors, just like we once did. Others were too human and burned what they were leaving behind. The latter is what made headlines, not the 119,000 who didn't destroy what they had built.

The images of fleeing Armenians, cars lined up for miles on the lifeline highway we built, mirrored the scenes from my grandparents’ and parents’ exiles. The same fear. The same desperation. The same loss.

For decades, we poured our lives into building a homeland. We hosted telethons. We donated. We built highways, schools, hospitals, cultural centers, homes.

I traveled to Artsakh in 2019 to document these accomplishments for the annual report — the “Blue Book,” our testament. And now it was gone. Taken by a regime that used phosphorus and suicide drones to empty a land older than their own identity.

And on that same day, I lost my sister, Maral.

She fought like Artsakh fought. She fought for every breath. She fought until her lungs collapsed.

A lung transplant offered hope. But her immune system, like a wildfire consuming itself, turned against her. She died as Artsakh fell. Two collapses. One world ending.

A SONG FOR GRIEF, A TESTAMENT TO MEMORY

In my grief, I turned to Nune Yesayan’s “Hangist Togheq Indz Aysor.” Its longing for stillness matched the ember I saw on my rooftop, the fire in Artsakh, the loss of Maral.

This song, yearning for solitude and memory, mirrors the emotional core of this essay. The ember. The fires. The losses. Tragedies interwoven across time. Impermanence as inheritance. And yet, amidst the ashes, we rise... again and again.

A LEGACY OF LANGUAGE AND RESISTANCE

We honor the memories of those we lost, the homes abandoned, the dreams shattered. We are a people forged in fire; our resilience is tempered by generations of loss. From ashes, we lay the first stones of renewal.

Long before these tragedies, Mesrop Mashtots and Sahak Partev gave us language. They brought the Armenian alphabet to Artsakh, founding schools at Amaras Monastery, embedding identity into stone.

Their work protected us from erasure. And so, like Sahag-Mesrob Armenian School lost to the Eaton Fire, we rebuild. We rise. We restore what was taken.

THE FIRE ALWAYS COMES BACK

Some fires never truly go out. They return. They reset. They clear the land for something new. In spring, the hills will be green again. Shoots will rise from scorched soil. The wind will whisper in a language older than memory.

And we rebuild. We honor. We remember. We survive. Because the fire always comes back. And so do we.

# # #

Paul Chaderjian is a journalist, author, and storyteller with over 35 years of experience in breaking news, content production, and newsroom management. He has worked in influential newsrooms, including American networks and international news channels, covering major global events. He also teaches journalism in the Cal State University system.

As a writer, Paul explores themes of identity, displacement, and the Armenian diaspora. His novel, ‘Letters to Barbra,’ delves into memory, trauma, and resilience, resonating with readers worldwide. Blending personal and universal narratives, he continues to craft compelling stories that inform, inspire, and connect audiences.

Paul may be reached via social media platforms @pchadNEWS

# #

Letters to Barbra press clippings

2025-03-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

Promotional Video

Asbarez, March 24, 2026

TV Interview - KSEE 24, Central Valley Today

TV Interview - Pan-Armenian TV

Radio Interview - Trik Trak Armenian Radio, Canada

Radio Interview - Australia's SBS Radio, Armenian Program

Podcast - 3 Way Podcast with the Kazarian Brothers

Review - Dr Rubina Peroomian

Review - Dr Kay Mouradian

Book Release - Asbarez Armenian Newspaper

Book Release - Armenian Weekly

Order Letters to Barbra →

Review: Letters to Barbra, a Novel

2025-01-20T01:19:00.000-08:00

A Journey Across Borders and Dreams: Letters to Barbra

Paul Chaderjian’s Letters to Barbra is a poignant meditation on identity, displacement, and the enduring power of hope amidst chaos. Anchored by a young boy’s letters to Barbra Streisand, the novel juxtaposes the harsh realities of war-torn Beirut with the luminous allure of Hollywood, weaving a narrative as fragmented as its protagonist’s psyche—an evocative reflection of trauma and its lingering effects.

At its heart is Adam Terzian, a ten-year-old boy living through the horrors of the Lebanese Civil War. His letters to Streisand, filled with both desperation and childlike optimism, offer an escape from the bombs and blackouts that define his days. “Can you stop the war before I die?” he pleads, a heartbreaking request that lays bare the stark contrast between his reality and his dreams of a Hollywood that promises laughter, beauty, and peace.

Chaderjian’s decision to present the novel through a fragmented timeline mirrors Adam’s internal disarray, a hallmark of post-traumatic stress. The narrative jumps between Adam’s childhood in Beirut, his coming-of-age in California, and his struggles as an adult seeking purpose in Los Angeles. This structure—seemingly disjointed but deeply intentional—parallels the fractured memories and scattered thoughts of someone grappling with displacement and unresolved trauma.

The prose is lyrical and evocative, capturing both the sensory overload of war and the quiet, reflective moments that define Adam’s search for identity. Chaderjian masterfully contrasts the noise and chaos of the outside world with Adam’s internal turmoil. From the claustrophobic tension of a bomb shelter in Beirut to the sprawling freeways of Los Angeles, the novel is a study in contrasts, where every moment of stillness feels hard-won and every dream is laced with longing.

While Adam’s character is richly drawn, the secondary figures—particularly Kristine and Eve, women who shape his journey—feel more symbolic than fully realized. Yet this, too, may reflect Adam’s difficulty in truly connecting with others, as he remains haunted by the shadows of his past.

The novel also explores the complexities of cultural identity. As Adam navigates his Armenian heritage and the expectations of his immigrant parents, he grapples with what it means to belong in a world that often feels foreign. His father’s idealistic devotion to preserving Armenian culture contrasts sharply with Adam’s Hollywood dreams, creating a poignant tension between tradition and ambition.

Chaderjian’s episodic storytelling is both a strength and a challenge. For readers accustomed to linear narratives, the fragmented timeline may feel disorienting. But for those willing to embrace it, the structure offers a profound insight into the ways trauma disrupts not only memory but the very way we experience time and construct our identities.

Verdict

Letters to Barbra is a love letter not just to Barbra Streisand but to the resilience of the human spirit, to the power of art as refuge, and to the complex interplay between heritage and selfhood. Paul Chaderjian’s novel reminds us that the stories we tell—whether in letters, films, or memories—are a vital means of survival. It is a deeply reflective and achingly human work that lingers long after the final page.

Kirkus: Letters to Barbra

2020-10-13T12:50:00.000-07:00

LETTERS TO BARBRA

by Paul Chaderjian ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 7, 2018

An engaging, fragmentary tale about longing and memory.

Kirkus Reviews

An Armenian immigrant’s Hollywood dreams run up against American realities in this debut novel.

Beirut, 1975. As the Lebanese civil war rages outside his window, 10-year-old Armenian Adam Terzian composes fan letters to his favorite movie star, Barbra Streisand. “At night in my bed and I cannot sleep because there are bombs,” writes Adam to the star of the film What’s Up, Doc? "I am scared. Then I think of you and Mister Ryan O’Neal going backwards down the hill on a bicycle….I laugh and laugh. You are very funny. Then I can sleep. I forget about the bombs and that I am going to die.” His family is eventually able to immigrate to Fresno, California, where Adam grows up as an outsider obsessed with American music and movies. He’s able to attend film school in Los Angeles, though he still carries a fear of violence left over from the trauma of the war. Adam does his best to break into Hollywood, working low-prestige industry jobs and pecking away at his scripts at night, but his dreams of becoming a celebrated director keep failing to materialize. Finally, at 32, he takes a journalism job at Horizon, the English-language magazine of the Armenian diaspora, published by his own father. Horizon sends Adam to Yerevan for a story on the new “style” of post–Soviet Armenia, but what he finds is Eve Kalashyan, a talented singer. She is quickly building a fan base in the Armenian world. Adam joins Eve on tour to cover her for the magazine, but will she prove just as aloof and distant as Streisand was all those years ago? Leaping across multiple timelines—1970s Beirut, ’90s LA, even a future city known as the Metropolis in 2308—the tale shows the development of a would-be artist against the obstacles of war, history, commercialism, and the isolation of a diaspora.

Chaderjian’s prose hews closely to Adam, deftly capturing the nuances of his ambitions and emotions, as here when he lands his first minor job at a film studio: “He is now on their team, Team Hollywood. He is eating with them, walking their studio lots, taking a piss in the same bathrooms. Who would have imagined that he, Adam Terzian, could be on the payroll of a major Hollywood studio? But he is. He is alive. He is young. And he can dream.” The novel is divided into short chapters that leap unpredictably through time, offering vignettes of Adam’s life at different ages. These accumulate into a portrait of an archetypical immigrant with dreams of telling his own story, even as that tale is tied up in the thorny history of the Armenian people. Though Adam’s unanswered fan letters to Streisand are a recurring element in the narrative—he continues to send them into adulthood—the actor is not much of a presence. Instead, she becomes a sort of totem for Adam’s aspirations, a dream of success and artistry that continues to elude him. The author never quite delves as deeply into these ideas as the novel wants him to, but the structure and themes keep the book feeling exciting and relevant.

An engaging, fragmentary tale about longing and memory.

Three Apples: The Relic

2017-08-23T21:11:00.032-07:00

Once there was and there was not … that place 100 years ago that my ancestors survived, where teenaged boys were dressed as girls, young women married off to foreigners and infants given up to Kurds so that they would all be spared. That handful of survivors, who wanted to live at any cost, did just that so that I could be here, typing on a Mac, having you as my audiences, living in a clean, well-lit room and enjoying a front row seat to world history.

When those survivors lost their parents, siblings, homes, mental health and happiness, they found themselves in orphanages in Aleppo or Karantina, the quarantined garbage dump in Beirut. They found themselves with no belongings, no sense of place or self, and with no closure for the crimes they witnessed. But they marched ahead, rebuilt their lives and made us promise to be ‘Armenian.’

My grandparents didn’t have anything to show for their lives before the death marches. They had no photographs, no gold crosses, no physical, tactile, tangible remnants of their past or the pasts of the generations that came before. Somehow their forced detachment from material things became part of my DNA, leaving me overwhelmed and uncomfortable with the idea of owning or collecting things.

The younger of my two sisters started a bullet collection after fighting began in Beirut. She scoured the streets for spent bullet shells and exchanged them with friends from the neighborhood. My collection was of Matchbox model cars I would buy for 10 Lebanese pounds when I was given an allowance.

When there was no electricity, when cow carcasses were floating in the sea across the street from our home, when school was cancelled and there were shortages of food and fuel, I abandoned my model cars and my sister abandoned her bullet collection the day our parents spared us from an uncertain future and moved us temporarily to safety in the U.S.

In my new life in Tennessee and then California, I didn’t start collecting things like others my age. I didn’t save stamps or coins or souvenirs. I didn’t buy comic books or make mementos of ticket stubs from the movies that were like religious experiences in my youth.

Before there was MTV and CNN, I would get lost in the world of make-believe through the silver screen and then write about those experiences in spiral-bound journals. These volumes of meticulously handwritten, artful penmanship piled up over the years and became the only collection I had for decades.

I began journaling on Pearl Harbor Day in 1979 — long before the date became synonymous with the Gyumri Quake — as an assignment for Mrs. Dias’ English class at Hamilton Junior High School. I kept these notebooks as my only keepsakes from my existence before there were personal computers, blogs, the internet and Facebook.

Decades later, in New York City, as a wiser and self-critical, self-aware adult, I couldn’t carry the burden of notebooks full of childish musings with miniature doodles in the margins. I didn’t want to have these carton boxes traveling the world with me, so I forced myself to tear the pages from the notebooks and throw them down the garbage chute of a building owned by the man who is now making a mockery of the place that for millions of refugees like me was a haven from the chaotic world of war. Had I known this man with his Twitter vitriol and verbal diarrhea would be the leader of the free world, I wouldn’t have rented a room from him or dumped my personal history into the 9th floor garbage chute of one of the buildings on Riverside Blvd that used to bear his name.

This diatribe about the separation of self from belongings, for me, is rooted in how my ancestors walked away with only the clothes on their backs, and how my family left Beirut with only one suitcase. Not wanting things is not unique to me. It’s a shared trait by millions, including one Vietnam veteran whom I interviewed on the streets of downtown Fresno in the mid 1990s. He explained how vets like him couldn’t stand the idea of being boxed in a room and how they preferred the streets.

Standing outside a soup kitchen in Fresno, the vet told me he had been diagnosed with “shell shock.” This was the term used before the acronym PTSD entered pop culture. The vet explained those suffering from shell shock are in a constant fight or flight mode, a state in which millions in the postmodern world are living because of hypercompetitiveness and hyperconnectivity, a state that millions of refugees and displaced people are being forced into because of terror attacks and wars in places like Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and South Sudan. In this state, there is no room for belongings. Survival, crossing borders into Europe, not drowning in the Mediterranean leave no room for thinking about owning things.

The journals I threw down the Trump Place garbage chute contained the stories of my first years in a new country, my attempts to understand my place in a large, complicated world and my aspirations to shape the clay that was my life.

Chronicled in those pages were the crass interactions with my racist peers in public school, the Saturday nights I helped Gloria Moraga at Channel 30 write the evening news, three years of accelerated university life in Los Angeles, breaking into mainstream broadcast news in Fresno and begging to be allowed to tell stories.

For the adult who was writing the headlines at ABC News in the Big Apple, proof of aspiring to be more than a hack responsible for 20 second summaries of the news was too humiliating and too unforgiving. I could not face the child who wanted to be legendary like William Saroyan or Peter Jennings, the man whose empty office I walked past every morning as I left work after overnight shifts and hours before he would appear. So down the chute went what had been my only collection of things. Erased from history were the decades between Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day in 1979 and Labor Day in 2004.

The lightness of not having more than two suitcases of clothing and a few books was what allowed me to leave New York for Yerevan, Yerevan for Honolulu and Honolulu for the Arabian desert. I was able to travel the world and found myself in seat 14A last weekend with sweaty palms and great anticipation. My flight from the 21st century metropolis called Daw’ha was about to land in a place that had been populated since the 13th Century Before Christ — that place.

Here I was, stepping off a plane in a city, where a blood relative, a physician, had been a member of parliament until April 24, 1915, when he was arrested. Those who had survived to give birth to me ran from this land, and I wasn’t sure what I would experience stepping back on it. Would I feel a connection? Would I feel at home? Would I belong?

The faces of the strangers on the street of this modern cosmopolitan city were familiar. I could see my reflection in the men and women walking around the Sisli neighborhood, on Taxim, and in the Armenian restaurant called Jash in Cihangir, in Beyoglu and Bebek. I saw my reflection on the faces of strangers who were pacing up and down busy streets, sitting in cabs, dining on the patios of restaurants and shopping in antique stores and modern malls.

The colorful, hilly city surrounded with turquoise waters was alive, dynamic. Scooters zipped by, the beautiful people laughed out loud and the speakers of at least two car stereos and one sidewalk cafe blared the thumping beat of Mi Gna, an Armenian rap song that had gone viral in this part of the world.

Observing a city full of life made me think what it would’ve been like had it not been for the ‘events of 1915.’ In another dimension, on another tangent of history, I could’ve been one of the hipsters with carefully groomed beards, parading around with sculpted chest muscles and tight shirts and pants.

If what was done was undone, I would have most likely migrated to the big city from my grandparents’ villages in Anatolia, if my parents hadn’t already moved themselves. I would’ve been a sixth generation business owner, a landlord with a getaway summer cottage in the east. I would’ve shared in the bounty from centuries of hard workers and possibly felt at home and belonged to at least one society.

But I wasn’t home; that had been robbed from me. I had never found a home and would probably never find one. I was a migrant worker standing at the front desk of a hotel, stunned for a second when the woman checking me in asked me if I was Armenian.

She was holding my passport and asking the obvious question having read my surname. Her people had dictated the surname of my ancestors, the 14th century travelers from Van who journeyed to Sepastia in a caravan. Their government named them chader for their means of transportation and perhaps their time living in tents. Now I was the traveler being asked about my ethnicity in the land that had expelled my DNA so that it would survive.

Why did I not answer in the split second when I was asked? Was I weak, too worldly or too cautious as the journalist who writes about every single act of terror in the world? Was this a moment of truth or of safety? I looked in her eyes and said American- Armenian. And I knew immediately I had failed on at least one front. She had won. They had won. I had to hide behind my citizenship to answer a simple question without anxiety.

As I wandered the streets of a buzzing city, taking in the touristic sites, hearing about how my tribe had contributed to building this massive metropolis, I felt the sorrow of what could’ve been my other unlife. I felt an emptiness of not being at ease in the middle of millions that looked like me.

Days later, I found out the woman at the hotel who had asked me whether I was Armenian was Armenian herself. She revealed herself by saying Parev. She, too, had been careful not to reveal her identity to a stranger. Her honesty and my hesitation were all part of the aftermath of what could’ve been.

On my final day in the city, a British friend of a friend, a world traveler and history aficionado had an unexpected surprise for me. Over a latte outside the Grand Bazaar, he and his wife presented me with a memento. Wrapped in two sheets of paper was a small, tinned copper plate with engraved Armenian letters that said, Tiratsu Vartivari. The plate had belonged to a married priest, a kahana, named Vartivar, and it made its way from Anatolia to the west. It had been bought, perhaps stolen, sold, confiscated, perhaps lost and finally found in a pile of junk at a swap meet.

I don’t know who Vartivar was, where he had served and under what circumstances he had lost his plate. I was told this relic was used to serve honey in the olden days. I was told people engraved their names on their plates and dishes as a certification of ownership. Every year, the plates would be taken to be tinned to keep the toxic copper from being digested. Without microchips or barcodes, the only way for a silversmith to remember which plate belong to whom was to have the individual plates engraved with the owner’s name.

For a man who has never aspired to have a collection of anything, I was surprised to contemplate keeping what was being gifted to me. A copper, honey serving dish had no place in my suitcase full of a half-dozen Docker pants and shirts, disposable contact lenses, disposable razors and one hardbound copy of St. Grigor Narekatsi’s book of prayers.

But through serendipity or tragedy, this dish from the 18th century had found itself from Der Vartivar’s belongings to me. Even though there may be 9,999 other copies, made in a Chinese factory and shipped west for tourists seeking a connection to their past, I finally had a tangible, tactile relic from the history of my people. I hadn’t been able to feel at home in that big city home to 15 million people, but the city had brought me something I could hold when trying to connect to a past that has always been ethereal and still somewhat incomprehensible, intangible.

And three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for him who made him tell it, and one for you the reader.

Armenia Fund

2015-12-31T07:25:00.001-08:00

The Sun Shines Brighter in Historic Artsakh and Its Mountains Shelter Her Legendary People

Helping Vulnerable Children and their Families in Armenia’s Northeastern Border Region

Hayastan All-Armenian Fund Cleans Up Toxic Soil Around Historic Church in Lori Province

From Genocide to Earthquakes, the People of Gyumri Show Enormous Strength and Uncanny Resilience

Dreams Shattered by 1988 Spitak Earthquake Renewed and Realized

Championing New, Networking Ideologies & Traditional Needs Like Well Water Pumps for Irrigation

In the Shadow of Kings, a Royal Kindergarten is Helping Kids Reach their Full Potential

Newly-built Hacop & Hilda Baghdassarian Community Center Opens in Artsakh’s Krasni Village

An Ode to a Soldier, Father, Patriot Standing Strong in His Native Village Others Abandoned

Hayastan All-Armenian Fund Builds 115 Greenhouses in Tavush Region to Prevent Food Insecurity

South American Family Resuscitates Dilapidated Border Village in Northeastern Armenia’s Tavush Region

Holy Hymns from Centuries Ago Echo Through Present Day Villages and Himnadram Initiatives

New School Honors Enigmatic Genius from California Who Made the Ultimate Sacrifice for Artsakh

Stepanakert’s Hovhannes Tumanyan School Transformed into a State-of-the-Art Educational Institution

‘Compassion in Action’ Initiative Brings American Doctors and Nurses to the Homeland

FOX LA Celebrates Armenian History Month with TV Special on April 30

2015-12-12T11:11:00.000-08:00

by Paul Chaderjian

April 23, 2023

(LOS ANGELES) KTTV FOX 11 will broadcast a news special chronicling the Armenian-American experience as part of its month-long celebration of Armenian History. The special will air on Sunday, April 30, at 9:30 AM PDT, and it will be streamed and available worldwide through the station’s site FOXLA.com/live.

FOX LA morning news anchor Araksya Karapetyan became the first broadcast journalist in 2012 to break into the extremely competitive and second-largest U.S. media market, which serves more than 18 million viewers in several Southern California counties. In addition to covering breaking news and local, regional and national politics, Araksya helps millions of Angelenos with her serious yet charming personality start their day with the latest news, weather and traffic reports during the five-hour “Good Day LA” broadcasts.

While Araksya had occasionally reported about the Armenian-American community in Southern California, her focus on her people and her homeland intensified during the 44-day Karabakh War in 2020. After performing her daily assignments in the field and on the anchor desk, Araskya would continue working during her off-hours to interview newsmakers and find stories to keep viewers updated about the war on a daily basis. She not only summarized the headlines out of Armenia and Artsakh, but featured the local community’s involvement in humanitarian relief efforts and interviewed SoCal residents who journeyed to their ancestral homeland to help in hospital emergency rooms, in soup kitchens and on the frontlines.

Before Araksya’s regular reports and specials about Armenia, the only Los Angeles TV station that had devoted an entire newscast to Armenia and the Armenian experience was Channel 2. More than 30 years earlier, it sent journalist Bree Walker to report on the 1988 Spitak Earthquake, which Araksya experienced as a 6-year-old and remembers vividly. A few years later, her family would leave Gyumri as the Soviet Union collapsed and Armenia went to war with Azerbaijan over the autonomy of the Republic of Artsakh.

“As an American-Armenian, born in Gyumri and who grew up in Palos Verdes, I’m humbled to have the opportunity to serve the Armenian-American community, to represent my people on the airwaves of Southern California,” says Araskya. “Not only is it a blessing, but I’m inspired by the people from our community we profile on a regular basis, be they innovators bringing state-of-the-art medicine to heal the world or rock stars and influencers promoting justice from their platforms.”

Araskya has been a prominent figure in the Southern California Armenian community, regularly hosting special events including the Armenia Fund Thanksgiving Day Telethon and fundraisers for the Children of Armenia Fund. This week her work was recognized with a special honor from Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian. Araksya was the mistress of ceremonies at several Genocide commemoration events this past week and has also appeared in online community forums and panels to talk about her accomplishments and encourage young Armenians to pursue their dreams and never give up.

Before getting married and becoming a mother, Araksya began her first paying job in Idaho Falls, a TV market so small that she had to shoot and edit her own stories -- even set up her own lights and live shots. Her hard work in the sleet and snow of Idaho paid off when she was offered work in the 25th largest TV market in the U.S. - Portland, Oregon. When colleagues and supervisors would suggest she change her name, she would courageously decline the advice.

When the opportunity came for her to decide whether she would move to New York and work in international news or return home to be with her immediate and extended family, Araksya chose home. “Having my grandparents be able to turn on the TV set in the mornings and watch me is what inspired me to return home,” she says.

Araksya’s reports are online (https://www.foxla.com/tag/armenian-history-month) and shared regularly on all social media platforms. She has fans from Armenia, viewers from all parts of the U.S. and says she’s committed to telling her people’s most important stories as long as she can.

Connect:

https://www.foxla.com/person/k/araksya-karapetyan

https://www.instagram.com/araksyakarapetyan/

Three Apples: The Architect in a Box

2015-04-24T08:14:00.000-07:00

by Paul Chaderjian

Once there was and there was not…

There was nothing but sand here. Now, a picture-perfect 21st century metropolis stands tall with pride. Highrises of steel and glass, cemented with the sweat and blood of foreign workers, stab the clouds to reach the gods. They pierce and punch the Maker, challenging her dominion over mankind and its destiny.

Where there were dunes of sand long before humanoids traversed this shallow, now reclaimed seabed, there are now swaths of hyper-development and buildings on illegal steroids. All those commutes in solitary gas-guzzlers out west are how these towers were built, how these cities were birthed.

This isn’t Manhattan; it would never strive for that type of mediocrity or excellence. New York is too real, too historic, too known, too worn and too weak to compete with these new economic dynamics. Here is an Elysian vision, one perhaps only a Hollywood miniature set builder would dare create, a reality only a visionary like Steven Spielberg would bring to life and only in a dystopian film like Minority Report.

*

Somewhere east of the east, halfway up neon-clad, modern-day pyramids scraping the sky, sits idle a state-of-the-art gymnasium that seldom sees anyone sweat. And this is where you find him, fully clothed, reclined in the dry sauna with the heaters off, sleeping with the door of the small wooden box wide open.

You get on a high-tech treadmill and start your semi-virtual walk. You swipe your smart phone to listen to the latest smart NPR podcast and stare out at the architectural marvels of glass and steel, the New World.

Merely a minute or two into your semi-virtual walk, even before the long list of various sponsorships and NPR funders is pronounced, you jump off the treadmill and decide your role at this moment should be that of a biblical good Samaritan.

Sir, are you okay, you ask.

He is bald, perhaps a shaved head, wearing lycra workout clothing. His feet are bare, and his head is propped up on a rolled towel.

Sir, are you alright, you ask again, in fear the man may have passed out. He comes to and says he is just resting, that he has been training for a triathlon. He thanks you and leaves the sauna and the gym.

*

Days passed as the drivers from Kerala zip you in and out of congested roadways with drivers who speak no one common tongue of driving technique.

Houthis advance to take more real estate in Yemen, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant fighters battle Syrian rebels to enter the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, Iraqi government forces battle insurgents to take Tikrit, a white cop in the U.S. shoots an unarmed black man in the back and a Kamikaze copilot with a history of depression pulverizes his passengers and his plane in the French Alps.

A week passes as you pass through buildings whose architectural foot and fingerprints no other civilization has previously afforded to construct and no civilization before or hereafter would or could keep lit. Tens of thousands pass through this desert, to earn a living, wire money back to their villages and towns, to their needy home countries, laboring for months and striving for what others in the world often have without effort.

In these marvels of geometry, design and physics, where only a guard or housekeepers enter and exit, the owners leave the lights on for the world to see and as a beacon for them to come to the new center of the new world.

You decide you need to work out the weight and sheer madness of the world on weight machines. And there you find the sleeping man again, again in the sauna, door open, heaters off, and he is asleep.

Is he a guest at your hotel? Is he a security guard? Is he an employee sleeping on the job?

You’re curious, and you’re bored, so you strike up another conversation. You have to know the context of his situation.

*

Where’s your patch, you say, echoing the bullying tone used by expats from Britain, who still psychologically reside in their colonial, supremacist past. Your tone doesn’t sound right. You sound like the Brits barking at the Aussies, at the Indians, at the Nepalese. Barking, berating.

He looks at you like a deer in headlights, as if he’s about to be punched.

Los Angeles, he says, but Armenia originally, he mumbles, trying to separate himself from the U.S. of A, that scarlet A-word, the West.

Armenia, you repeat. You would’ve never pegged him for one from your tribe. He’s nordic, slender, not the stereotype, has blue eyes and no trace of a beard.

Really, you say. You tell him you are Armenian as well.

We left after the earthquake, he says.

What brings you to this part of the world, you ask.

He tells his story of teaming up with other visionaries in architecture to conspire against mother nature, to bring snow and a ski slope to shopping centers in the deserts of Arabia, to build navigable canals for gondolas inside great malls of commerce, to design fountains whose reach overshadows the architectural marvels of the old world, Freedom Tower, the West.

You’re an architect, you say.

He had drawn lines, matching adjacent surfaces and connecting parallel planes, and it had all been fueled by the trauma of 1988. He had been in one of those collapsible, poorly constructed Soviet apartment buildings in Gyumri.

The walls had toppled down on his mother and him.

She’d kept him home because he had a cold, and there he was, sitting at the kitchen table, drawing buildings, his mother cooking, and the earth roared and tried to swallow them. His mother and he had walked right out their front door and to a park nearby.

Tens of thousands didn’t get out, and their world had collapsed.

He later moved to Southern California, studied, began building, climbing up the ladder, married then divorced. He needed more money than ever before, so he signed up for greater career challenges and risks.

Now, his wife spent her time teaching Flamenco dance in the Valley, and his college-sons didn’t have time to entertain their dear ol’ dad on Skype or the phone. They just needed money.

His world has collapsed again.

*

The headlights must’ve come suddenly; the kitty didn’t know what hit her in a concrete canyon between 100-story residential towers near the biggest mall in the world.

Her eyelids swell instantly, and she can’t see. The pain in her body is so intense, her muscles begin to spasm.

She begins to regurgitate. Blood pours out of her mouth. Chunks of red meat — perhaps food she had eaten, perhaps parts of her intestines — color the crossing lane red.

She screams in pain, vocalizing her stunned and shocking situation. She screams at the injustice.

What was happening? Make the pain stop, she seems to be saying.

Her paws are buckled inwards, perhaps cramping, curled in against their usual curve. She stumbles sideways, backwards, makes a circle, doughy, lumpy, limping.

You run toward her, ask your friend Shafiq, what can we do?

The car that hit her has long gone, and there stand two helpless men and a cat, all in utter disorientation.

You run to the door of the highrise nearby, demand the security guards of iDiplomat bring you something to scoop up the kitty with. Bring water, you say. Call for help.

The guards bring an empty box (a coffin?), and you use it to scoop up the kitty, so she won’t remain in the middle of the street and be hit again.

*

You find him asleep in the sauna three days later at one in the morning.

You’ve finished a marathon shift and want to run a bit, but he’s there, the constant presence in the gym, asleep, making your life awkward. But this isn’t about you, you remind yourself.

You don’t have a place to stay, do you, you say.

You’re going with your gut feeling. This man is homeless.

He tries to deny it but realizes your question may be out of compassion and not malice.

Yes, he says, he had come for a lucrative contract. His bosses had not been forthcoming. He had started drinking again. He had been fired. Creative differences, he says.

He owed money now. He couldn’t get an exit visa. He couldn’t work for anyone else per his business visa. He had lost his car. He had lost his apartment. He had nowhere to go. He was a citizen of nowhere, a man in purgatory, an architect in a box, a sauna.

He had survived life in shipping containers in Gyumri. His family had called the metal boxes home for several years, and he was perhaps seeking the same safety he felt in them by hiding out in a wooden box, the sauna at the gym.

He says he strolls through the hotel lobby as if he were a guest, and no one would dare question the white man with blue eyes. The gym is never locked, he says, and when there are people using it, he walks aimlessly for hours through the malls, looking at a United Nations of races spending dollars like it was Monopoly money.

He can’t understand the human condition, he says. He finds life doesn’t fit any mathematical or geometric algorithms or patterns. The contradictions are too much: the abstractions, man’s material needs, the drive to build, the want to destroy, to confine, to enslave, to box people up, limit one another, to conquer, to spend, stand out, to make a name for oneself, be somebody...

Genocide, social media, wars, the Age of Narcissism, killer quakes, nuclear disasters, empires built, dismantled, oligarchs, Ebola, pollution, space alien abductions, global warming. He doesn’t get it, he says.

His grandfather had lost his entire family during the Meds Yeghern, our Genocide (the one not recognized here as the truth). He had been brought to Alexandropol, the “orphan city,” where he would be killed seven decades later, in an old age home, by an earthquake.

 And then we all end up in a box, he says pointing to the sauna. He knows the irony of him being the architect in this box, starting out in a boxed crib and eventually ending up in another box, a wooden coffin in the ground.

Is all this the only vision we can have for the human condition in the new future, he asks? Is this how we want mankind to flourish and evolve?

He remembers a verse from Ecclesiastes: have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after wind. Life, for him, was like chasing after the wind.

What was the whole point of this non-stop drive for men to be gods on earth, to taunt God with his sparkling edifices, reclaiming the sea, conquering the stars, and not caring for the well-being of the billions of others in their own humankind?

You don’t know, you say.

*

The days melt into the nights, and the 120 degrees outside melt everything from asphalt to minds. You get on the treadmill like a dumbbell of dead weight and start walking with nowhere to go.

You swipe your iPhone to listen to your podcast and stare out to a city under construction, in a world that’s only two sentences and three steps away from a modern Babylon, a dystopian paradise.

It’s been a week since you’ve been to the gym, because what’s the point. You step outside, and you sweat. You step inside and signs, vision, facts, agendas and media content overwhelm you. It’s all banal. But you’re curious about the sleeping man, and he’s not here tonight.

He’s not there the following week or the following month. You wonder, is he ok?

You Google search him. You’d been a good reporter weeks ago and asked leading questions. You had looked up his former employer’s site and even found his published architectural schematics. This time around, you find his name in the local crime blotter. It says a man with his surname, 52, was arrested for disturbing the peace and grand theft.

You’re drenched in a cold sweat. You’re the kitty in the street. We’re all kitties on the street. We’re all Hrant Dink. We’re all the architect. Struck, paralyzed. Incensed. Silenced. Wanting the Kardashian world, but shot in the back. We are powerless among the wheelers and dealers. We are starving at the buffets set for the visionaries, the rulers of men. We’re all boxed up, arrested, handcuffed, jailed.

You Google search for the verses the nordic architect had quoted from the Bible: Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.

And three apples fall from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for him who made him tell it, and one for you the reader.

Three Apples: dOIN’ tIME iN dAW’HA

2014-06-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

Once there was and there was not …

1. [[[ dIS aPPEAR fROM hERE ]]]

It’s Tuesday, and he’s on an Airbus, 32,972 feet above land, waiting for a computer network to ping him and beg him to return. Flight SU 106 is racing to Los Angeles from Moscow, where he has had a layover on his journey from Yerevan, Armenia — the faux Homeland — to his real home in the US.

Weeks earlier, he had told his new boss in Armenia he was thinking about a three-month break. A freelance assignment in the Arabian Gulf would stall the process of his full repatriation to the Homeland, which actually was not the place his forefathers had lived for centuries.

The sage advice he received was to just make a decision, stay or go, and just “move on.” It’s a win-win situation, his boss had said, but his heart was still torn.

He had flipped a 50 AMD coin to see if he would pack up only months after arriving. The conflict was that he had come to this place to try to fill the large hole in his conflicted heart. It was a black hole carved by events he hadn’t personally experienced a hundred years ago — a genocide against his people in what is now Turkish-occupied Western Armenia, his true Homeland.

“Did it matter much how the decision would be made?” he had thought, then left the 50/50 probability to the laws of physics, his guardian angels, the flicking force of his thumb and the velocity of a 3.5-gram steel-plated brass Armenian coin.

Over a pale ale at Paulaner beerhouse on Teryan, he had told a friend that he actually thought the hole in his heart had grown bigger in the few months he had just spent in Yerevan.

The fundamental visions he had daydreamed about using mass media to form a stronger connection between the imprisoned diasporan communities and the Homeland were radically different from the values of the radicalized, also imprisoned-natives who wanted to fire their wardens from office.

In his binary mind, there were two Armenias.

His Armenia was a state of captivity, a stunted existence of a sustained trauma from a genocide still denied, a genocide still defining his modern Armenian identity.

The second Armenia was populated by a people still imprisoned by a USSR and an Iron Curtain that had never really gone away.

“It was one of the greatest public relations coups in world history,” he had tried to explain to his graduate school classmates and professor. “The Soviet Union has rebranded itself, promoting its rank and file from deputies to the more stylish free-economy businessmen-politicians. The same dozen men who milked the country to sustain their regal lives before the collapse are still milking the country after the collapse.”

It had become quickly obvious how differently the two imprisoned communities tended to view their ethnic identity. Those with the holes in the hearts, far away from Freedom Square, idealized the place and attached to it, with blind love, the centuries-old dream of an independent Homeland under the shadow of Ararat. Except they had failed to understand that their dream should’ve really been of a view from the other side of the mountain.

On ground zero, the national identity of the natives was being crippled by design or by chance, preventing them from being free and choosing by consensus what they needed from a government that was supposed to be working for them and not the other way around. Those who weren’t hopeful about the future of their fledgling and young republic were selling the last of their belongings at the Vernissage to pay for any sort of a ticket out.

Rather than seeing eye-to-eye, the two prison populations often made it a practice to express their disrespect for one another. The holes in the hearts of diasporan prisoners kept widening, while the lust and envy for all things not within reach of the republic’s prison population became more obsessive.

Everyone in the two prison camps seemed more marginalized. Passion existed only when there was a winning football match and the tricolors were raised out of cars cruising Yerevan, or when it was April 24th once again and the nation united to make its annual pilgrimage to Tsitsernakaberd.

The rest of the time, strangers were walking past one another, inhaling each other, but living in different dimensions, unaware of the struggles within each of the prisoner communities or within the hearts and minds of each prisoner.

He couldn’t help but think that in this hyperconnected modern era, his people were more isolated than they’d ever been since the time Adam and Eve bit the forbidden fruit and felt the rejection of the Maker.

“Now we bite our modern Apples obsessively, every 30 seconds, just to quench the basic psychological and very human need for respect, validation, and dignity.”

He had explained to his nodding friends that because no one was giving or receiving respect, especially in smaller global communities like one’s homeland—where the expectation for validation was even greater—people were being driven unknowingly into narcissism.

“We have to resort to our faux digital footprints on social media to be famous, to get likes and be liked,” he had said before finishing his fourth pint.

“Being ordinary in the 20-teens [2013-19 in the common era] and not calling attention to ourselves is no longer a choice. Welcome to the information age.”

“You mean the age of the misinformed, LOL,” his friend had said. “All we are is selfish, inconsiderate, demanding excessive attention, feeling entitled, and pursuing power and prestige at any cost.”

“Let’s post a selfie,” he had said, and they had laughed.

2. [[[ dA sCRUB dOWN iN dISNEYLAND-YAN ]]]

On the faux-wood flooring of apartment 47 in his faux Homeland, the 50 AMD coin had landed heads up, so his fate had been decided.

He had hard-wrapped the latest episode of his reality show, Repat Life in the Homeland.

Many diasporan prisoners who were fighting a hard battle against genocide deniers were themselves in denial and often denying: they denied that their ethnic pride equated to racism and xenophobia in the open arms of the Americas, Europe or Australia.

They denied their men could ever beat their women. They denied some of them were emotionally bankrupt, materialistic, and narcissistic.

They denied the validity of arguments or perspectives coming from outside their mini-tribes and from those outside the immediate circle of their own branch of the church or political community.

They denied anything they did not understand, like their children pursuing non-traditional careers or lifestyles.

They denied that among them could be addicts, abusers, depressives, and the anxious. They denied that members of their holy, chosen people could be fraudsters and turned a blind eye to the fraud that some accepted as a normal way to do business and have fancier cars.

They even denied they could easily rob one another and exploit the masses and the tricolor to gain power and prestige.

Not far behind, many natives of the new Homeland would get pissed every summer with the influx of tourists. They’d mouth off among themselves about the free-spirited and privileged gor-gors, who lived so well in the present and added an unnecessary gor to the end of their verbs to communicate how present they really were. The natives would complain about the gor-gors who sat at the outdoor cafes, populated the expensive restaurants and treated the city as their summertime Disneyland.

In turn, some gor-gors laughed at the activist-natives, who donned Guy Fawkes masks, took a hollowed-out pumpkin to the Presidential palace on Halloween and threw sparklers and firecrackers during street protests, thinking their impotent aspirations and actions could topple a faux-independent but very Soviet government with a stranglehold on their souls.

Both prison populations often denied the other’s existence, dissed, disrespected each other, and even denied fellow prisoners respect, grace, love, validation, and dignity.

Now he was moving away from those two prisons, away from his role as a Repat and on to his newest role as an American Expat in the newest city being built.

Doha, Ad Dawha’s skyline was rising fast and furiously on reclaimed land, where 10 years before had been the waters of the Arabian Gulf.

Tens of millions of cubic meters of sand were dredged from the sea to create a new promise-land near the desert.

“With no new worlds to explore, the new cool was creating your own land, where no one could’ve ever gone before,” he had written contemplating his obsession about his ancestral turf, his birthright on Earth, stolen from him by the Ottomans.

3. [[[ dOWN dA rABBIT hOLE ]]]

A few months after his life-altering flip of the coin, he would be grateful and happy he wasn’t around for the onslaught and multiple versions of ‘ordinary folk’ singing about how happy they were and recreating Pharrell Williams’ slick dance moves on the streets, in libraries, at parks and cemeteries in Yerevan.

His seventh-floor apartment with its half-obstructed view of the Mountain is cleaned out.

Everything that can’t fit in his one suitcase has gone down the chute. But he’s leaving his landlord the camel-motifed, quintuple-priced comforter a neighborhood home-goods shopkeeper sold him a few days after the cold weather had arrived.

She was laughing at the stupidity of yet more diasporan riffraff (with their dollar-sign-tattooed foreheads) coming for their annual Disneylandyan holiday-pilgrimage, short-or-long-term idealized repatriation to the place where everyone she knew wanted to escape and was escaping.

His Vivacell number, 098 511 844, has been turned off with no voice mailbox. He has committed Facebook suicide. And he hasn’t bothered to download the reel of made-for-instagram memories that could prove how happy people were in their lives, if said lives didn’t exit the boundaries of the confined prisons of social media posts.

Down the 4 Koghbatsi apartment building garbage chute, he’d also thrown the smashed-up external drive that contained half-written essays and MP3s of meticulously collected revolutionary songs and playlists of Nune and Arabo, which local elitist-activists-prisoners had laughed at and dismissed with the blanket, catch-all Rabiz label.

Perhaps the most damning material on the crushed drive—now stored somewhere on NSA supercomputers—was the volumes of journal entries about the lowest among his people, like those who couldn’t grasp the concept of courtesy.

So much for civility in an ancient civilization—“the first Christian nation in the world.” If diasporans squinted just a bit harder, they’d see the true colors of a view obstructed by their manic love affair with a homeland. They’d realize this was just another place on the face of a planet with many places. They’d see the cracks in the seemingly flawless panorama of Ararat-Opera-Republic-Freedom-Square-Northern-Avenue-Cascade.

To him it seemed there was a void in the city—a lack of compassion and spirituality. Some would rev their engines and gun for the elderly trying to cross the street. Others were unable to think of splitting their four-strong human-chain while walking arm-in-arm down city sidewalks.

He’d often step into the mud next to the sidewalk or stop dead in his tracks to see what the real Rabiz, seed-spitting men or the self-absorbed women would do or not do as they either noticed or didn’t notice an older gentleman trying to walk in the opposite direction on the typical 36-inch-wide (91.44-centimeter) sidewalk they were hogging.

The coin-flip also relieved him of always having to jockey for a spot at the SAS cashier when trying to pay for his stale bread or razors. Maybe the masses in his Homeland were no more or no less than the discourteous and rude masses in India, Arabia, or Appalachia.

The best part of closing up shop at Koghbatzi was going to be not having to listen to the obnoxiously loud, daily 1:00 a.m. Skype calls his next-door neighbor, the dentist, and his wife would make to their son attending medical school somewhere overseas.

He’d be in bed, trying to sleep, and through the poorly constructed wall that separated his bedroom from the dentist’s living room, he would be forced to listen to the couple screaming into their desktop or laptop’s microphone. Their son’s voice, more playful and energetic, would bounce back—from Israel, he was almost certain—broadcasting from a speaker turned up extremely loud.

And every night, like clockwork, the couple would ask their son what he had for dinner and how he did on his latest exams and labs. The dentist would recall something funny from that day, always starting with, do you remember so-and-so from such-and-such place?

When the daily cache of topics would deplete in approximately 15 minutes, the family’s Skype call would veer into the zone of discomfort for all those involved, including the accidental eavesdropper. The dentist would begin his nightly diatribe about conspiracy theories that ruled his life, his nation, and the world.

“Amen ban manipulatsia e,” was a typical red flag that would end one intangible theory before he would bring up another theory. “Everything is manipulation” was the family’s battle-cry as victims of a disrespectful world.

Their solace, thought the accidental eavesdropper, was their awareness that the masses were being played by their governments, which were always being empowered by corrupt media.

4. [[[ dA gLENDALE hILTON, rOOM 1523 ]]]

He didn’t want to unpack his banged-up suitcase when he arrived in the US to volunteer on Thanksgiving Day, since he was only going to be in Glendale for a week.

Out of the jumbled mess of clothing and toiletries in his bag, he fished out Tom Samuelian’s translation of Narek’s Book of Prayers moments after his mother told him her sister had died in Memphis.

Sirvart was the oldest of his Erzurumtsi grandmother Heranoush’s four daughters. Before starting her post-1915 life in Beirut, Heranoush, also known as Siranoush, had watched her tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, handsome, and charismatic brother get murdered.

Heranoush was Erzurum aristocracy. She was of the famous ilk of yesteryear. She was one of those who came from respected families in a land where all families were respected.

She hadn’t earned respect because of selfies on Facebook or glam shots in community newspapers.

Heranoush was respected because she had been a student of the Hripsimiantz Girl School at the Sanasarian College before the genocide. Her lecturers on Armenian history were the likes of Simon Vratsian. She had taken meticulous notes when Armen Karo Pastermadjian was at the lectern, and her diploma had been signed by the founding fathers of the ARF.

Then came the Catastrophe, and she ran for a chance at life, leaving behind her birthright, her family’s real estate and wealth, photographs, carefully collected and much-prized books and the hand-me-down family traditions of who sat where at dinner, who said grace, how a cube of sugar would be taken before a lady took a sip of tea, what coins and jewelry would decorate a headdress, and how her parents would have accompanied her brother if the day had ever come for him to ask Heranoush’s future sister-in-law’s parents for their permission to marry.

She would never recreate these traditions for her new family and her offspring like the family at 4 Koghbatzi and the after-midnight Skype calls they enjoyed. She would never pass to her grandchildren the tradition of how to sprinkle powdered sugar on the beeshee dough they would panfry as treats to mark special occasions and holidays.

The four daughters of a headstrong Erzurum girl had carried on only her bullheaded will to live, albeit traumatized and at times depressed. She was going to live, because they had wanted her to also die.

Heranoush had taught her four daughters that they should stay busy at all times. She had taught them the prayers she had learned and instilled in them the fear of God. After her eventual death from diabetes and old age, three of her four daughters had battled and/or succumbed to cancer or heart disease.

Heranoush had struggled to ensure her children were honorable, model Armenians, hard-working and impeccably dressed, and exercised their great love for their culture and literature. She had taught them to be respectful of all people, no matter their personality, physique, wealth, or lot in life.

She was the woman who had personified, for him, the abstract concept of genocide. She was the individual face that could explain the enormity of the catastrophe if her nightmare was felt and then multiplied by two million other unique stories of death, destruction, human trafficking, and traumatic heartbreaks that several lifetimes couldn’t cure.

Now Heranoush’s oldest daughter was dead, and he hadn’t been able to talk to her one last time, just as he wished he had talked to Allen and Sose one more time before their unexpected departure to the sweet hereafter.

The newlywed couple’s deaths had prompted his sudden move to Yerevan from his 38th-floor digs in paradise. He had been living the American Dream, on an island in the middle of the Pacific.

Now, all these deaths seemed connected, thanks to a human’s keen ability to post-rationalize anything.

Heranoush’s brother, her daughter, and her other daughter’s son’s friends were all dead. Perhaps it made sense that her other daughter’s son was destined to lead a lifetime of counting the dead and asking why they were dying.

5. [[[ dA sHOW mUST gO oN ]]]

“You’re a professional. You can hold it together,” said Mike, the executive producer of the annual Thanksgiving Day tradition that he had adopted as one of his own traditions and observed devoutly for nearly two decades.

He was crying.

The man to his right, Vache, was crying.

The teenage girl to his left, Natalie, was crying.

All on LIVE television, broadcasting from a Burbank studio.

His aunt was dead. His two friends were dead. His newest, recast dreams for the Homeland were dead.

Vache was the groom’s best friend and also happened to be the bride’s brother. And the groom’s only sister, Natalie, had joined the two men to talk about the Sose and Allen’s Legacy Foundation.

He had introduced a videotaped segment about the couple’s dedication to the Cause and their volunteer efforts to help the homeland through the Telethon over the past few years. The soundbites strung together offered a lesson for the living, who still had a chance to dream, create new dreams, and pursue new scenarios for their lives and for their Homeland.

While the video ran, a hush settled upon the studio.

He remembered a recent weekend and walking to every spot the couple frequented in Yerevan. Mike had asked him to snap pictures of the couple’s apartment, gym, favorite café, and the trees planted in their honor at Lovers’ Park.

At the telethon, he realized the assignment had been less about the photos he had snapped for broadcast than about Mike’s way to prepare him for this very specific, very public and painful moment on live television.

The phones had stopped ringing. Maybe everyone at home was also crying?

What was he going to say when the video ended? How was he going to control the pain, the tears, the rage? How was he going to run away this time when he was in the spotlight and on camera with no exits or outs?

6. [[[ mOVENPRICK dOHA, rOOM 1804 ]]]

Wednesday and Thursday are spent packing on one continent and unpacking on another, then arranging and rearranging his hotel closet on a parcel of land reclaimed from the sea.

Dockers: classic cut, wide cut, traditional cut. Aloha shirt. Aloha shirt. A Keep Calm and Carry On T-shirt his sister had brought him from London. Ugly ties tied by his father before his father’s death, never to be untied. A cardinal and gold film school cap. A copy of Will Grayson, Will Grayson, Andre Gide’s diaries, and Aharonian Marcom’s Draining the Sea.

His first day at the new freelance gig is on Saturday, and seeing the global headquarters of the world’s biggest international news operation is like a religious experience.

He prays to the news gods living in the Octopus software that keeps track of his words and starts to dissolve into real-time news. His sentences tell the stories of anti-government protesters in Europe and Asia, of modern-day genocides in South Sudan, Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria, crimes against humanity proceedings in The Hague, rebels stopping the flow of oil from Libya, and ISIL battling the Kurds for the northern territories of Syria.

The death toll in a country that was once Cleopatra’s wedding present from Anthony, Before the Common Era (BCE), had reached 125,835, water cannons and pepper spray were the tools of the trade for Turks in power in Istanbul, and another 31 had died in Afghanistan that day alone, while simultaneous car bombs in Iraq had leveled farmers’ markets and killed dozens and dozens and dozens.

No, make that 42 dead in Afghanistan. Wait, the latest line says it’s 57 dead in Iraq and also 57 in Afghanistan. Police have killed protesters in Bangkok. Snipers have taken out police and protesters at Kiev’s Maidan Square. Activists in Yerevan are protesting the handover of the republic’s gas infrastructure to Russia. Wait. The new death toll in Yemen is 24.

Murder in his family, the death of Heranoush’s brother, multiplied by two million had dumbfounded him. The ethnic cleansing campaigns in a place he had yet to visit had led him to be a chronicler of the world’s dead, if only for 11 hours at a time.

And every day at the computer he tried to imagine the thousands who had lost a loved one as part of the news of the day. Were the families and friends of each of those representing a whole digit in the death toll experiencing what he was going through with the deaths of his aunt and Allen and Sose?

And back home in the US, on the network newscasts from New York—videotape delayed by three hours for the West Coast and five hours for Hawaii—a “Fast & Furious” celebrity’s fast and furious death was considered the only noteworthy death to mark for American audiences.

“It’s like screw the rest of the world and its death tolls,” he told his Armenian counterpart on the Telethon. “In the US, we only respect the death of a celebrity, thank you. Who cares about the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Ukrainians, the Nigerians, the South Sudanese, the Armenians, the Turks, and all the common men of the Common Era?”

Marathon shifts consisted of writing, rewriting, choosing soundbites, voicing translations of history-making quotes in foreign tongues, script editing, interrogating reporters at various ground zeros sprinkled throughout the world, and requesting graphics of maps and two-line straps to be placed on the lower thirds of the 220 million TV screens.

The non-stop stream of emails with ever-flowing facts pinged his Dell computer as he would run between edit bays, where he would ask for a precisely timed montage of video from the field, and Creative Services, where he would ask designers for specific wall images to populate the monster wall behind the presenters (anchors).

He would look through the news wires for the latest facts, scour for the best frames of video fed from the scene, amend, update, edit scripts the news presenter would read, always making sure the number of the dead was accurate.

This chaos was his mental tonic to help ease the pain of being, to help distance himself from the American Dream, the Armenian Dream, the aspiration of both the diasporan prisoners and the captives in his faux Homeland, the identity crisis of the Armenian Diaspora and the inherited 100-year-old burden of surviving the genocide because #Turkey_FAILED_me.

“Buy you a pint?” asks the Irishman.

“Sure, but why the Hilton?” he counters.

“Only a few hotels are allowed to serve booze on the peninsula.”

“Hilton or the Four Seasons. You decide,” he says.

He finds himself with the United Nations of English-speaking expats on loan from their lives and respective countries. He figures his new coworkers also don’t want to find themselves in their 5-star rooms, alone, battling their own demons of self, identity, spirituality, narcissism, materialism, belonging and belongings.

-1. [[[ pREFACE ]]]

The singer’s driver had picked him up at the Armenia Hotel before it was called the Marriott. It was extremely cold that February in the late 1990s, and his nose wouldn’t stop running.

The singer’s gray Mercedes had gracefully maneuvered through the pot-holed streets on the outskirts of Yerevan, way past Jrvezh.

She was going to give him an interview, and his piece would be about an up-and-coming pop star overcoming the abuse and the odds. He was interested before meeting her, because he thought the story would be an uplifting read.

The following year and annually thereafter, he kept going back to the Homeland, just to see her. He would attend every one of her concerts and do more interviews.

The singer’s voice was the home he had never been able to find anywhere in the world. Her being was the love for a homeland, personified.

To him, she was the united, independent, and free Armenia. She was the soulful singer channeling Komitas and Sayat Nova and enjoying the affection of Armenians from around the world.

Her shows got more extravagant; one had 360 people on stage at the same time. The adjectives he used to describe her became more flowery, and her faux self-image became greater than her reality.

In between his annual pilgrimages to see the singer/the Homeland, he would catch her shows when she toured North America. He watched her record songs in Yerevan, Toronto, and Los Angeles. He even took her to see Sarah McLachlan in concert at the Staples Center so she could be inspired and pick up a trick or two.

They would correspond. She would ask for his input and feedback on new songs. In the pre-Facebook era, her respect was the most enjoyable he’d ever experienced.

But he knew there was no future when there was not much to talk about while they sat at VIP tables at Yerevani cafes.

Then came a specific moment when he finally realized they had nothing in common, could never fully understand one another, would never see the world from each other’s perspective or truly walk in one another’s shoes. That moment was when she had pulled off her uncomfortable high-heeled boots in the presidential booth of the Spendaryan Armenian National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet halfway through the “Anoush” opera.

In that opera he had waited for decades to see performed in Yerevan, Anoush’s brother kills her lover. She goes mad and throws herself off a cliff.

During the show’s most climactic moments, long after the singer had removed her high-heeled boots, the future chronicler of the dead decided he would have to start being outwardly agreeable but underhandedly unaccommodating, obstructive. He had to be a lot more passive-aggressive like many of the prisoners were, in order to survive.

The only way to deal with her—the singer/the Homeland—the only way to control the uncontrollable was by avoiding confrontation and allowing her—the singer/the Homeland—to call the shots that he wanted called.

“I’m going to marry A,” she would say years later. “Even though he is very young.”

“Why him?” he would ask rhetorically, feigning surprise.

And three apples fall from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for him who made him tell it, and one for you the reader.

Paul Chaderjian likes to draw doodles with Pilot Precise V5 pens on 3×5 unlined index cards. He is grateful for all messages he receives via atwater@live.com or Twitter @DOHApaul.

Three Apples: CAPITAL City

2013-11-02T05:47:00.000-07:00

BY PAUL CHADERJIAN

Once there was and there was not …

Fall 2013 will forever be imprinted in my mind with a melancholic pop song about our enigmatic obsession with the Homeland. In my mind’s eye these days, Arabo Ispiryan’s cinematic music video plays in repeat.

As the young protagonist picks up an older relative at Zvardnots airport, as they drive past our monuments and landmarks, Arabo professes his yearning for the Homeland. He serenades her about wanting her to beckon him, let him return home.

Why a love song about our abstract desire to be one with the Homeland would haunt me while I stand and live in her bosom has been puzzling me since I heard “Tun Im Hyreni” for the first time a few days ago.

Arabo Ispiryan - Tun Im Hayreni

Arabo sings of embracing a place that we collectively long for, a place that’s been bullied, pillaged, burned. He sings of sons enslaved by foreigners, of a nation whose springs have turned to fall. He sings of wanting to wash our ancient cross stones with his tears.

Year after year, something about this mystical place haunts us, lures us. What is the hold it has upon our hearts and minds? When we’re not here, we want to be here. When we are here, we want to run away but find comfort in a song about our longing and about returning home.

This place is just another place after all. Its capital, cities and towns, its hills and forests, its countryside are like other places in our vast world. But decades, centuries pass, and this place summons us back as it has millions of others from all corners of the world.

On the center-most stone tile of Republic Square’s central oval I stood alone last night watching the tricolor fly uninhibited in the wind over the government building. The applause for performers singing the praises of the capital city on its 2795th birthday brought me back to the moment, and I was suddenly surrounded by thousands.

The cool wind blew, and I watched the singers, dancers, the legendary Ararat 73 soccer team, Vegas showgirls and cheerleaders. The theatrics of the show were dazzling and the stage so bright that I was certain it could be seen from Earth’s orbit.

Thousands watched the extravaganza. Kids with balloons. Young people with the tricolor draped over their bodies. Every other face painted with the color of our flag. Girls solo dancing. Boys with arms up over their heads. Some shoulder-to-shoulder, moving in a circle dance. There were infants propped up on their father’s shoulders. Tourists and citizens were taking pictures with their phones. Cranes with TV cameras were beaming the show to homes across the republic and throughout the Diaspora.

People weren’t just standing and watching the stage though; they were crisscrossing the crowds, walking this direction and that, looking at each other, brushing past grandfathers, young mothers, teenagers and visitors.

It was disorder. Restlessness. Much like our nature as Armenians, never being able to sit in one place, never being at peace, never being satisfied. As one and as a whole, we were unruly, fidgety, aimless and chaotic.

Nearby, in front of the stage, the dignitaries, the nation’s leadership and VIPs were sitting in neat rows of blue chairs behind velvet ropes. Draped in their white shawls and with white scarves around over their black suits, they sat regally, watching, playing to the cameras that surveyed their faces.

Behind them, the crowd was an enigma. Yes, there was dancing. There were smiles. This was a street party. But there was so much free-floating anxiety, indescribable movement, incomprehensible chaos.

Where were these nameless faces going in this tightly-knit crowd, who were they searching for, what were they looking for, what did they need?

It was a party but it wasn’t. We were among thousands, but alone. We were smiling and laughing but worried. In the back of my mind was the amount being spent by donors to realize the big bash.

There were arguments I’d read on social media about how this was all a distraction for the masses living in poverty. But surely others needed this moment in time as much as I needed it.

These dualities and extremes of being an Armenian seem to be both the curse of this place and the blessings of our identity.

We wanted our Homeland. We wanted independence. We wanted nationhood. But collectively we’re depopulating this place that we passionately call our own. We starve each other in the name of capitalism and a free market economy and through monopolies. We continue to disenfranchise and marginalize segments of the citizenry and even alienate our Diaspora.

On the ground we’re a bundle of contradictions; we can’t even look at the mirror. Do we look and mimic Russia or Europe? Do we sign the Customs Union or European Association agreement? Do we embrace democracy or kleptocracy? Are we still in the USSR or independent?

I heard our patriotic songs last night and thought of the embarrassing exchange at the Council of Europe session in Strasbourg last week, when an obnoxious Armenian parliamentarian mocked our own President about his alleged gambling losses and shamed our entire nation in front of Europe and the world. Would you cheer her or jeer? Did she have that right? Did we give her that right?

Who are we? What are we?

Are we a medieval tribe or modern, egalitarian citizens of the world? Do we worship the mafiosos on our primetime soap operas or do we have scientists, writers and artists that we can hold up as role models for future generations?

Why can’t we decide? Why can’t we sit still? Why are we so torn? What are we torn about?

Alone I stood among thousands and wondered about their individual struggles. How many wanted to leave this place that others traveled miles to be a part of? Was the celebration masking internal sorrows? How many young men shared the storyline of the young Syrian I met two weeks ago? He was trying to figure out how to raise five grand to pay so-and-so under-the-table to secure a visa to Europe.

How many of the brunette women walking around in their blonde locks had husbands in Russia, earning a paycheck to keep the family back home eating? How many of these men would soon stop sending money so they could pay for their new Russian wives and their children?

Landmines clutter the borders, but we have massive projects like IT parks, hotels and the construction of a new 70-mile highway to connect the liberated lands of Artsakh through a second major highway.

Political prisoners sit behind bars while murderers go free. Citizens are guilty until they’re proven innocent. Activists get beaten by thugs. Yet, they’re all allotted the freedom to congregate and shout obscenities at a sitting President without fear.

The sudden burst of fireworks above shifted my attention to the sky. The dazzling light show made me smile again, and I realized no matter how harsh our realities were, we were all still fidgety kids at heart. We needed to take a moment, a respite, to celebrate that we have come through so much in our history as a people.

We survived the all-out attempt to exterminate us. We survived the Seljuks, the Mongols and whoever else has ruled, is ruling and will rule. We deserved these fireworks.

This may be just another place, but it is our place. It’s where we feel connected, even if we don’t know why. It’s where we feel at home.

Perhaps the spell of Erebuni-Yerevan is connected to the magnetic vortex of this place or that mountain on the horizon. Or perhaps this is all in our imagination.

Either way, Armenia is still connecting us to one another and to her mystical lands no matter how far we are and how loud we sing our nostalgic songs about returning home to our Hayrenik.

And three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for him who made him tell it, and one for you the reader.

Paul Chaderjian is a broadcast journalist at CivilNet in Yerevan. He has worked at ABC News in New York, at the ABC station in Hawaii and at the NBC, CBS and FOX affiliates in Fresno. He has also hosted the annual Armenia Fund Telethon. He may be reached by email: atwater@live.com

Three Apples: Pretty Good Day

2013-08-30T14:58:00.000-07:00

by Paul Chaderjian

A column for the Asbarez newspaper

Once there was and there was not …

Sometimes if you’re watching the clouds, the genius algorithms of our connectivity and oneness in the universe spell themselves out in plain sight.

Last Sunday, I was watching large jumbo jets landing and taking off from the Honolulu International Airport, passing through the few well-defined, fast-moving and magical clouds over Hickam Beach – a private military beach at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on Oahu.

My friends had taken me to the beach on my last day of a quick visit to Honolulu. The night before, I’d watched the stars of Hawaii Five-0 ram a black van into a bench on the driveway of the out-of-use emergency department at Leahi Hospital. The actors had then fallen into gurneys, sporting fake gunshot wounds to the arm and gut.

While Hollywood was making media content on Oahu, a group of friends was doing the same 8,000 miles away. I wouldn’t find out about their project until 12 hours later when my phone buzzed while I was watching the clouds, waves and jets.

What shifted my focus from the sky to my phone was an alert I’d subscribed to on YouTube to find out when CivilNet.am posted a new video. The new email said there was a three-hour video just posted.

I clicked on the email and the images and sound on my phone immediately transported me to the Tavush region of Armenia, where the Shamshadin Honey and Berry Festival had just taken place in the village of Bert.

Staring at the beautiful images coming from this magical place a four-hour drive north of Yerevan, watching Maria Titizian doing interviews with villagers and visitors while I was physically on an island in the middle of the ocean turned into a moment of awakening.

While feeling the Pacific sand under my feet, I knew that the Armenians of the Ararat plain had bridged a huge gap with eternity. We, as a people, had just crossed into the Twilight Zone, ventured into the forever and soon-to-come technological singularity.

For anyone, anywhere in this world, to be able to watch news events as they unfold in our ancestral homeland in real time, or tape delayed because of a time-zone difference, is beyond amazing.
As I watched the play-by-play, blow-by-blow 3-hour CivilNet coverage of a festival in a forest in Armenia, the world instantly became a much smaller place.

Maria Titizian interviews John Heffern

The survival of diasporas is no longer an issue now that we are forever connected virtually with the source of our ethnic identity.

Yes, we’ve had media before. We had cuneiform tablets sent overseas by our ancient sailing ships. We had parchment paper documents carried in scrolls to remote corners of our world.

We had books and newspapers printed in Venice, Madras, Persia, Western and present-day Armenia.
We have websites and apps like this newspaper’s, email-lists like Groong and word-of-mouth media.

But now, to access LIVE streams of video in Armenian and English as news events are happening in the homeland is beyond dreams of news junkies come true; it’s an instant ownership of the homeland in an Armenian co-existence, co-experience and co-presence beyond borders, geography, financial restraints of travel or excuses drummed up from apathy.

The living, breathing flesh of Armenia, its acne, scars and smiles are within reach of our smart phones; and we are no longer disconnected or distant.

Flashing through my mind were the high-speed drives down the 405 in 1989 and 1990 when Stepan Partamian, Kerop Manoukian and I would take turns delivering the one-hour Horizon ¾-inch videocassettes from Glendale to West Los Angeles.

Videotaped images of the latest developments in our newly formed third republic that Executive Producer Garbis Titizian had secured and arranged to be delivered by travelers from Yerevan to Los Angeles would go out on the air over channel 18 in Los Angeles.

Horizon news was the first that made it possible for diasporans to see, hear and understand the human stories of the complicated realities being experienced in the homeland after the earthquake, post-independence and during the Artsakh Liberation War.

How times have changed. It had taken 18 months for images from the Sumgait Massacre in February of 1988 to surface on Horizon in the fall of 1989. Now, we can watch Barevolution meetings, mayoral debates and a honey and berry festival in real time, anywhere in the world.

How wonderful and even more amazing it is that Horizon now airs half-hour CivilNet reports on Saturday nights at 7 p.m. and Mondays at noon for people who don’t and can’t access the internet.

These CivilNet broadcasts on Horizon are a metaphor for Armenians closing our infinity loop, especially for one of the founding members of Horizon, Salpi Ghazarian. The Civilitas Foundation Director created CivilNet, and now both her media entities complement and enable one another every time CivilNet reports air on Horizon on digital channel 31.6 all over Southern California.

Our media practices and hence existence have changed, and I know that soon our classrooms, gentrons (centers), gyms and homes will be using Apple TV and smart television sets to be tuning in and living life virtually and simultaneously with folks in the homeland.

Last month, activists in Yerevan – some extremely young – took to the streets to protest a bus fare hike. The number of people getting involved, exercising their freedoms of speech and assembly, was liberating for the Armenian soul. There was a sense of rebirth and a fresh burst of optimism on the bright-eyed and smiling faces of the teens, 20-somethings and others on the streets of the City.

Some compared the bus fare protests to the unity and synergy of the public meetings when Armenians stood up against the iron fist of the Soviets and demanded and won independence.

This month the activists are trying to stop the construction of a proposed highrise that is jeopardizing the structural integrity of surrounding homes. Police have been cracking down, sometimes manhandling the protestors inappropriately and unjustly.

And all this is being televised.

What some government officials fearfully dismiss as opposition media is changing the type of stories mainstream media is covering and how they’re covering it. This is truly revolutionary and historic for our fledgling democracy.

Even non-Armenians across the world are taking notice.

Thanks to new tools of technology, home video cameras, smart phones and laptops, those who are participating in the new surge of activism in Armenia are also broadcasting it so that Armenians and non-Armenians anywhere in the world can tune in and experience these historic days in the homeland.

Stay tuned. Better yet, get involved.

And three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for him who made him tell it, and one for you the reader.

Paul Chaderjian is a broadcast journalist with work experience at ABC News in New York, at the ABC station in Hawaii and at the NBC, CBS and FOX affiliates in Fresno. He also served as the Arts & Culture and West Coast Editor of the Armenian Reporter, anchored English-language news at Armenia TV and has hosted the annual Armenia Fund Telethon. He may be reached by email: atwater@live.com

The Legendary Charles Aznavour

2013-07-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

Three Apples: An Open Letter to Him

2013-05-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

BY PAUL CHADERJIAN

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. This wasn’t how it was scripted.

< #inhale >

I don’t know where you are and what you’re doing, but I imagine you two floating in slow motion in the middle of a vast, serene, white place full of clouds, hearing echoes of conversations from the wretched world far below.

Here, we are chattering simultaneously, posting, blogging, liking your photos, and it’s all reverberating through you and in you, even though it’s all meaningless, circular, and empty noise that mortals, like the ones you left behind, consider dialogue.

Our voices in this loud place run together, separate, sound foreign, fake, but they continue to sound. Perhaps there is music in your new place, in the background, a harp lessening your harsh transitions from the here and now to there, the eternal.

Here, we wish the clocks could turn back to a simpler time before Friday, to a time when you hadn’t died, hadn’t succumbed to fatal wounds, hadn’t been abruptly and violently taken from us, hadn’t gone missing.

Should we have tried to talk you out of the weekend trip to Georgia? Should we not have encouraged you to repatriate? Should I have told you to pursue medicine or real estate instead?

Now we’re talking, making noise, crying in front of our keyboards, hiding the emotional trauma, maybe drinking and eating.

There are drinks everywhere, food everywhere, but you know our thirst and hunger can never be quenched, our desires can never be fulfilled, and our curiosity never satisfied, while we are still here and not where you are.

In the air, in our heads and in our mouths, we smell and taste staleness, the smell of sweaters after the rain, the smell of a shirt worn too many times at the gym.

Something rotten happened to us, but you know all that, you feel it, you are part of the collective, the whole, the holy, you are permanently etched in our souls and have become our guiding spirits.

You know all this.

< #exhale >

You were supposed to be here, you know. We were supposed to see each other in Yerevan in two weeks, sip coffee at Art Bridge, walk down Northern Avenue, have yogurt-barley “sbus” soup somewhere.

You were supposed to live out our DNA-programmed, collective dream of repatriating for more than just a few short months. You were supposed to be there so we would comfort each other in that foreign place, which was getting cozier because of your radiance, your love, passion and can-do attitude, your optimism and hope.

Your story, in pictures, on film, was epic. Diasporans, in love, marrying in the Homeland, finding jobs and moving — a premise worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.

It was Monte Melkonian-epic. He had given up the comforts of the West to fight injustice wherever Armenians were before independence and post independence. You gave up the job at Operation HOPE, helping out an underserved subculture. You gave up your job in that fancy Los Angeles high rise, and you moved to help the American University of Armenia tell her stories.

You last told me Armenia wasn’t the same as I remembered it, when I asked you how you were getting along.

I asked if you were staying fit and continuing to exercise and eating well.

“I go to a luxurious Gold’s gym every other day. It makes any gym I went to in the states look third world. It’s absolutely huge and amazing.”

We would tell each other and our compatriots in the remote corners of the world that it would be okay, that we were proof it was all working out.

But you are gone, and we are hurt, human and too feeble-minded to understand.

We held memorials and vigils for you, just to let it sink in that it’s all real, that it’s not an internet hoax, a nightmare we would wake up from.

We looked at each other, at faces, thin and cherubic, lengthy, generic, pronounced and unpronounced, and we wondered what others were thinking.

We walked around, lit candles, took poses, tried to contain the anger at God, tried not to curse too loud, become too loud and obnoxious in our grief, or … to be too alive. While, in the back of our minds, we longed for one more embrace, a hug, a kiss on her cheek, a pat on your back, warm, live bodies near us, close to us, energizing our soul with your radiance, your love, your optimism and hope.

Now you’re gone, returned to heaven like shooting stars, 21st century fedayees whose departure is your challenge for us to take action.

< #it’s okay to cry >

We are cordial, but we make it quick. “Thank you. SH*T. Goodbye. I’m sorry. GodD*MN this Fu^King world. It’s still a shock. Tragic… Fu^K.”

We get into our cars, sit there for a moment in the darkness, touch the steering wheel, put our hands on the passenger seat, wishing it had been us and not you. What was going through your mind in those last minutes? What promises did you leave unfulfilled? What destinies were unmade? How many children and children’s children vanished with you?

Why did you leave us?

Do we leave the vigil and go home, retire to our room? Do we make one more stop? Do we start the engine and drive until there’s no more road ahead – drive nonstop to a nondescript location to get away, find people who didn’t know you, our pain, the unfathomable? Is there anyone in those three thousand people who have seen us and known our faces who don’t know, who aren’t hurting as much, who are not confused, angry at God, speechless?

< #banality or destiny >

I’m sitting here tonight, wondering if these words are being spoken in vain, if these words are a drama I’m playing to myself for myself. I’m wondering if these words are just another way to convince myself that there is more past this tragic lifetime, if there are reasons, if there can be hope for joy.

Or are these words just nonsense, typed alone onto a screen, another form of teasing our minds, distracting from our most personal loss, or indulging in our narcissism. Perhaps words written are even more alienating than words not spoken, not read, not thought. Are we connecting here or disconnecting?

I can only remember your mission to connect us all in the information age. You were connecting us while you were alive, and now your deaths are, VIRAL, playing out on the same social media networks you used to share our stories, our cause and the rebirth of the Armenian Dream.

You were living the rebirth of our nation, the revolution, the renaissance you likened to the Zartonk of yesteryear, our intellectual rebirth during the Age of Enlightenment.

We had plotted and penned the iZartonk via Google docs a few years ago, and we were going to motivate, activate and connect every son and daughter of the Diaspora with the Homeland via the information superhighway.

You and I wrote: “Armenians in the Age of Enlightenment gave birth to young enlightened thinkers, selfless teachers, and the fearless Fedayees.” You were that young enlightened thinker, that selfless teacher and that fearless iFedayee.

In the pages of Haytoug, we promoted the idea a new generation of Armenians, armed with their laptops, cell and smart phones could be and are now a new breed of freedom fighters, waging an informational struggle for freedom from their people’s established norms — norms which are staid and are slowly suffocating, if not killing a new generation of young Armenians in the Homeland and our far-reaching diasporas.

< #revival >

But in our world here, who has time to connect for enlightenment? Who has the luxury to ponder about that new place where you and Sose are – that white, heavenly place with the harps? Most of us, especially the Millennials, are going about trying to accumulate more fame and wealth, and our reality is carved by a media that in itself is in the business to draw and retain your attention to make money.

Facts are skewed, reality blurred, but we accept it like sheep in a flock, following their leader, following the herder. We follow because we know nothing else to do, nothing more to want than the prizes of our collective mindset, the gold medal, the Oscar, the public office, the fame, the Pulitzer, the Nobel prize and sainthood.

In this wild and frantic race to attainment, we forget life is going by, love is being wasted and smiles are being used for material gain. Our creativity is used for commerce, relationships are used for advancement, and our joy is equated to success and position.

That wasn’t your way. You knew this was a time for a revival, using the new weapons of modern civilization –the communications tools that every citizen of the world either has access to or knows someone with access.

You knew that these tools – cameras, keyboards, editing software, iPad and iPods, FlipCams and iPhones – and creativity could lead to a deeper connection between individuals, communities, diasporas and the Homeland, a connection rooted in the convictions that our ancient nation would be whole again, and all this could happen through the iZartonk.

< #reality TV >

But in this world, the very same world where you must go the speed limit or get run over, we are left with a bundle of raw emotions and indiscernible thoughts.

People we know died from a Genocide, the Spitak earthquake, the Karapagh Independence War. People died from jet planes crashing into skyscrapers, shooters walking into schools and opening fire, from terrorists bombing a marathon.

Not from a car crash in Georgia. Not swerving out of the way of a speeding bus heading to Baku.

Fear of our mortality has set in, so will we continue celebrating money and celebrity. Because those are sexier, better, prettier, more fun and somehow blessed and at the top of the game.

Or will we look in the mirror and remember what you preached in your short three decades?

< #reflection >

It’s time to wash my face, and I look up and have to force myself to recognize the man I’m looking at. I stand there alone, my mind feeling alone and lonely amidst family and friends, searching for answers, in the shopping malls, the grocery stores, the bars, the internet and in churches, on the highway, at the gyms, at the bookstores.

Now, we’re all looking. Now, we’ve lost our equilibrium. We’ve lost our peace. We aren’t able to sleep. Our minds are racing, searching for the reason, the meaning, the right words, trying to play a role in a movie we had written about our lives, but the director has left the building, the studio has closed up shop, its stock worth junk.

We’re left with images of what could have been, you at your peak, your post-mortem roles of our heroes, fighting all odds and finding love, moving to the homeland, creating a niche.

Then STOP.

We are left with a bunch of words on paper, a screenplay that will never materialize, and a lot of regrets. We’re left searching, hoping, wanting, but knowing the role we have always wanted may never come, a role you, as renegades of pop culture, didn’t play.

< #how could it be >

We had plans in two weeks. Art Bridge. Sbus. CivilNet. We were going to plot the continuation of the manifesto we co-wrote. How would we tell Armenia’s stories to anyone who wanted to hear now that all three of us were in the Homeland.

Maral Habeshian introduced you to me when I moved to LA from Yerevan to fill the pages and airwaves of Armenian media — the glue we knew held and will hold our culture together in the information age.

She said you were eager, smart, talented, studying at UCLA and you were willing to help out. You already had a part time job at Asbarez but you wanted to do so much more. We plotted and talked about how you should cover an upcoming UCLA Armenian Studies conference on Musa Dagh.

We met for the first time at Conrad’s on Central. You had fries. Vincent Lima joined us, and we spoke at length about what media could and should do for our community. You shared my vision; I shared yours. We were instant friends.

When you introduced me to Sose, I could see why you were in love with her. She was everything you were and more. I copyedited the blog you launched for her, so she would review restaurants and write about food.

You asked me if taking her to Club 33 at Disneyland would be a big enough surprise for her birthday, and you saved for months to celebrate her and propose to her the way she deserved.

She was your muse and ours.

< #asbarez >

Ara Khachatourian, the man at the helm of this news-hungry beast of a Fresno-born Asbarez newspaper, the captain of our ship, put us to work together, and we wrote about the hidden Armenians, dance groups, the Telethon and Congresswoman Jackie Speier, and years passed.

Your instant messages prompted me to pen another column, and then another, and so we filled the pages of this paper, chronicled our history together, reported fact, contemplated identity, continued to stare at the Mountain that beckoned you and millions over the centuries.

You took on a pen name, Vartan Dudukjian, and came to my defense when readers argued with my thinking and essays on the pages of this paper. I liked Vartan. He was my defense, my back, my own Mark Geragos.

You and Liana Aghajanian joined me on the set of Horizon TV to talk about media. We took our show on the road and talked to teens about pursuing careers like ours, becoming citizen journalists, conscripted Lara Garibian into advocacy, and told our stories to one another and global audiences.

You quoted from Raffi’s novel, The Fool: “While the prudent stand and ponder, the fool has already crossed the river.” Those words were your auto-signature, but you lived by them while we pondered in our safe rat-race, in our mansions, wanting, desiring, racing in our fancy cars, or fancying other people’s oceans, beaches and rainbows from my 38th floor penthouse in Hawaii.

< #final #30 >

The last time I saw you was at the KCET studios in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving Day. You kept updating me on how many people were watching the Armenia Fund Telethon online. You told me about the viral messages via your social media campaign for the pan-Armenian Thanksgiving Day tradition that you’d become a part of and were promoting on multiple platforms and social media.

Your last words to me came via Facebook on April 22. It was 1:56 AM, and you said, “Are you coming to Armenia?”

I typed, “The plan is to be there by end of May. Waiting to work out details with Salpi.” I asked how life was.

You said, “Life is good. We’ve got a conference at AUA today. Organizing my first press conference.”

I said, “that’s great. You’ll do great as usual.”

Tonight, I’m adding these words to my last email to you: I’m coming, Allen. I’m coming. We’re coming. We’re all crossing the rivers and oceans and coming.

And three apples fell from heaven: one for Allen, one for Sose, and one for every mourner and iFedayee.

< #end end end >

Three Apples: Dancer and the Dance

2013-05-13T09:51:00.000-07:00

by Paul Chaderjian

May 13, 2013

On the edge of this multicultural metropolis, miles shy of the suburban promises of Americana in Orange County, thousands of cars have come to a halt on a massive multi-laned interstate in Buena Park. Cars, new and old, foreign and domestic, weave an incomprehensible tale of multicultural harmony in our globalized 21st century.

Inside the inner sanctum of isolated metal boxes on rubber wheels, radios blare the latest sensational headlines. A young Chechen is charged with heinous crimes that morning. The son of a dictator is threatening to make war in the Korean peninsula. Anonymous is shutting down the Internet in protest of unconstitutional reversals of privacy laws.

A Bruno Mars mix sounds from the woofers of a fancy black SUV driven by a young lawyer. A cancer surgeon listens to the Oprah network on Sirius XM broadcasting Dr. Phil’s talk on marginalization and belonging. Meanwhile a traffic reporter in a chopper above tells his TV audience about the Babylonian congestion tying up the southbound lanes.

One of the drivers making his way to an evening dance class keeps checking the digital clock in his Ford Windstar. The 20-year-old is on his weekly journey from North Hollywood to the Forty Martyrs Church complex in Santa Ana, where 40 dance students giddily anticipate their weekly rehearsal.

Donning fashionable, black sunglasses, a tight black t-shirt and black jeans, the young dancer and dance coach is weaving through the pastiche of tongues and histories, languages and ethnicities, tastes and journeys toward an untraditional career for the son of a traditionally conservative people.

Artur Aleksanyan is a professional dancer, a rising star in the Armenian world with recognition for his talents from the Israeli, Russian, ballet and modern dance communities.

He’s danced since he learned to walk, performing with Hamazkayin’s renowned Ani Dance Company and in dozens of mainstream American productions like “The Nutcracker,” “Snow White” and “Peter Pan” across the US and abroad over the past 15 years.

This is how the dancer is bringing his dance, his passion and skills to the kids and teens gathered as part of the Orange County Hamazkayin’s Yeraz dance group, which has inspired its small but tight-knit community for the past ten years.

Artur is teaching back-to-back classes with dancers between the ages of four and 19 as the group prepares for its June 2nd recital featuring various production numbers interwoven through a narrative.

“The story is of a boy who falls asleep after a long day at school and dreams of traveling to Armenia,” explains Artur. “He gets lost along the way and encounters several foreign cultures.”

The main character in the upcoming production heeds the advice of a few friendly gypsy boys, who point him in the right direction.

“The boy spends the remainder of his dream marveling in awe of the stories that the music and movement tell,” says Artur. “This is the first show that I am fully directing, and I am excited and anxious to see the final product.”

Rehearsal Hall

A month earlier, soccer moms have brought their most precious cargo to the Harut Barsamian Armenian Center in extremely large but safe SUVs. It’s midway through Lent, and volunteers are preparing vegan dishes for the “Meechink” meal two days later.

On a card table in the entrance to the hall, Lebanese-Armenian grandmothers on a break from kitchen duty distress exercising their math skills with a game of cards. While they keep track of their cards, they also keep an eye on the young souls milling around and socializing ahead of their class.

Artur is coaching 13-year-old Sofia Sakzlyan as she gracefully moves her hands and fingers over her head to a melody titled “Deer of Karabakh.” She’s beckoning the past from a faraway place and recreating the golden age of her ancestors’ culture in a new land, a new stretch of diaspora.

Community organizer and head of the Hamazkayin Siamanto chapter, Shoushig Arslanian, says when the first instructor of the dance group moved to Boston, she “knocked on Ani Dance group’s door, and they were nice enough to send us one of their lead dancers.”

That’s how Artur began his relationship with the Orange County community last September, accepting the challenge of weekly 2-hour roundtrip drives every Monday night and a marathon four-hour coaching gig, broken down into 60-minute sessions, individualized by gender and age groups.

“The best part of the experience is seeing the progress,” says Artur. “I do it because it’s a new challenge. I try to not only teach dance but to also teach our culture to our students through the one thing I’m able to communicate best with – dance.”

Passing The Torch

Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance plays loud from speakers connected to Artur’s iPhone. Young boys move to the rapid succession of notes, mimicking a choreography passed down from generation to generation in rooms like this all over the Armenian Diaspora.

8-year-old Armen Andekian moves rapidly across the floor with a sword in his hand. Artur instructs Armen and the other boys to watch one another and keep the proper distance as they move across Ghazarian Hall.

“Seeing the development of mental and physical strength, seeing the smiles after class” are what Artur says motivate him. “I love to see them push through struggle. “

Artur says while he pushes his students to reach their best potential, he also realizes “not everyone’s born a dancer.” He says he doesn’t expect his students to pursue careers in dance but gains great satisfaction watching them improve artistically, physically and collectively over the previous week’s class.

Choreographing A Future

“I can’t say I was the one to discover a desire to dance,” explains Artur. “That’s a credit I must give to my folks. They signed me up for my first dance class at the age of 3. I guess it was a good parenting move I will forever be grateful for.”

It’s well past nine on another Monday night, and Artur is back in his Windstar on an hour-long drive back to the San Fernando Valley. It’s been an exhausting but gratifying night. He has belted out instructions, made the kids sweat, laugh and celebrate their ancestor’s arts.

He is teaching the kids lessons he’s learned and the disciplines he has acquired along the way, inspiring younger dancers the way the Ani Dance Company has inspired him since 2008.

“I love being part of a group where passion and devotion are eminent,” he says. “My directors, Yeghia Hasholian and Suzy Barseghian-Tarpinian, have been dedicated to keeping a fire lit for the Armenian culture through dance for close to 40 years.”

Artur says for dancers, it’s incredibly gratifying to have the opportunity to be on stage with a company like Ani.

“We don’t just dance,” he says, “we tell stories. We wear the costumes, we step to the rhythm, and we embrace the culture. Representing not just our culture, but our heritage.”

On a freeway that can lead one to any direction that can be punched up on a navigator, to any neighborhood, subculture or no culture at all, Artur has got his route planned.

“I’d like to better myself and improve my craft with further study,” he says. “Possibly on the East Coast or overseas. Europe? Perhaps even in my homeland?”

Whichever direction his career takes him, Artur says he intends “to make the absolute best of it.”

And three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for him who made him tell it, and one for you the reader.

Paul Chaderjian is a television news producer at the ABC station serving the Hawaiian Islands. He began his career at Horizon Armenian Television and has worked at ABC News in New York as a writer-producer for “World News Now” and as a reporter in Fresno. He served as the Arts & Culture and West Coast Editor of the Armenian Reporter, anchored English-language news at Armenia TV and has hosted the annual Armenia Fund Telethon. He may be reached via filmfan323@gmail.com

Three Apples: Decoding the Rise of the Buffalo

2013-02-03T04:51:00.001-08:00

By Paul Chaderjian
a column for the
Asbarez newspaper

Feb 3, 2013

Once there was and there was not …

In a haunting phonograph recording from 100 years ago in Paris, the scratchy and hollow, melancholic and faraway voice of genius priest Komitas comes to life via 0’s and 1’s, bits and bytes, on an iPhone 4S in Hawaii.

Prologue

Monochromatic images follow on the screen of the mind: a round cylindrical or maybe a flat 7-inch disc, spinning unevenly at 70 rotations a minute. There goes a motherless child sent to the seminary. Here comes the celibate monk, a driven genius crisscrossing the lands of the Armens to create an encyclopedia and playlist of songs spanning thousands of years.

The famous ‘notaji vartabed’ gives his people their modern musical identity and perhaps more. He finds notoriety in Europe. There he is in Berlin, Paris, then back to Constantinople, where he is jailed on April 24, 1915.

He sees the Great Catastrophe, Genocide, experiences the indescribable trauma we have yet to understand a hundred years later. And he breaks his vows to humanity, temporarily deciding not to speak, not to sing, nor write… until he can resurface digitally in 0’s and 1’s.

Act One

Before Komitas’ vow of silence, before the so-called mental breakdowns, and long before his long depressive states in asylums, came days when his voice was so potent and clear that it impregnated the future.

“Lorva Kutan Yerk” he sings. It’s a plow song he heard and transcribed from the region of Lori, a song ancient Armenian farmers sang as far back as our pre-Christian Era.

Call it a ‘horovel’ sung by generations who tilled the soil, labored until they broke their backs, but always humbly honored the life force that gave them a chance to grow their food, nourish their young and quench their souls through prayers, music and art.

Komitas’ voice captured on a gramophone begins a song titled “Brrreh Gomesh” (PreGomesh on iTunes).

His legendary voice sings a complex melody, a sequence of fast changing pitches of sound, the equivalent of trills on the piano, notes unexpectedly jumping far and near in what is authentic Armenian music.

32 seconds into this column’s musical score, the song started by our 19th century genius priest, a 21st century pop icon turns it on its ear to plow a new musical path, one inspired by a plow song.

The beat and bass of club music begin. Cue the Dubstep, the light show and dancing. Atoms from centuries apart create a fusion to empower generations to come.

Brrreh Gomesh, sings the pop star Sirusho, and thus she and her lyricist Avet Barseghyan flash us back 2000 years, melding the ancient into the here and now and towards Singularity – the forever.

Komitas is in Da House, and he is singing again. His people’s music has been thrust into eternity.

Act Two

Brrreh Gomesh, Arise Buffalo, arise beast, she sings, making the ancient Brrreh sound herders called out to lord over their animals.

It’s the ‘giddy up’ of yesteryear when surviving meant a tougher fight, when it took the physical power, silent strength and marathon-worthy endurance of a buffalo for men (the ArMENians) to survive Mother Nature and their animal and human predators, be they familial or foreign.

Arise, and let the world know
that your path is just
Arise, and let your fair fight
receive its honor in heaven.

It’s the voice of pop icon Sirusho, the very same beautiful and energetic young woman who rocked the airwaves across Europe and Eurasia on the Eurovision stage in 2008.

She is the glamorous daughter-in-law of the former First Family of Armenia, the powerful voice who represented her nation in the Eurovision contest.

Her song then ‘Kele Kele’ (Come On, Come On) was the rallying cry from the teenaged independent Republic of Armenia to the established nations of the world.

As horovels helped the masses get through the labor-intensive pre-Christian Armenian Kingdom that spanned all of the region we know today as the Middle East, and as revolutionary songs motivated victims to take up arms against the pan-Turkic agenda, music became more than lullabies to get through the long days of tilling the soil or Schlager to entertain a captive audience.

These songs, what Komitas put to paper, what Sayat Nova put to memory, the hymns heard in churches and the images seen in music videos turned into messages and lessons from the past that are beyond the grasp of our narrative-making, storytelling conscious mind.

These songs are our Carl Jung’s theoretical connections to god and the collective unconscious, a place where universally understood symbols connect us to one another and the creator without language and regardless of culture, nationality, time in history, education or experience.

Epilogue

Could Sirusho’s gomesh, the buffalo, be the collective symbol, a code for the essence of the hardworking Armenians who have not faded from history no matter what circumstances they’ve found themselves in?

Is Sirusho’s call for the rise of the symbolic buffalo a message to the progeny of the herders, be they in the Homeland or on a remote Pacific island?

Are we the buffalo of the world, those beastly animals without predators, without fear, subjected only to the annoying Brrreh’s of insignificant rules and rulers, irrelevant bosses and customers, and governments and for profit corporations that try to lord over us, break our spirits and backs?

he is disobedient and courageous
in the eyes live his silent struggle
life is a duel with earth only
overcome by the unbending soul

Yes. A pop song via iTunes and YouTube can be how Komitas, Sayat Nova and Parajanov are reminding our subconscious about how to be true to our true essence, how to be righteous, do good and fight a fair fight in the eyes of heaven.

Sirusho is telling us to listen to the voice of the genius, Komitas, who cultivated these ancient codes of a people to pass on to future generations. His notations on paper were more than cadences and “khaz” but keys to survival in a chaotic future of uncertainty. His were the lessons from the first humans to walk the Earth to modern Armenians, who have survived no matter who was or is lording over us or who has tried to destroy us.

there’s only one law in nature
a strong will finds the way
and continues to multiply.
there’s only one requirement of nature
that the mind never rest
and never give up

Madonna & Fayruz

Brrreh Gomesh’s use of Komitas is reminiscent of Madonna’s code-breaking in “the Beast Within,” which sampled the Arabic hymn, “El Yom Oulika,” sung by the Lebanese icon Fayruz. Sirusho’s and Madonna’s uses of the ancient are calls to action for modern man.

Just as rap artists in the 80s rallied for an uprising, sampling well-known melodies before their marginalized, underground genre became the mainstream, Sirusho is also asking you to fight the power and set aside corporate-set values and what your conscious mind believes is man’s reality.

Brrreh, she rallies, grasp the unseen, dispel the myths, listen to the dreams from your sleep. The conscious mind, the modern world, sees white and black; the subconscious sees rainbows and unity.

Prologue

The dynamic, kick-up-the-dirt dancing of the Brrreh Gomesh music video features a stunning and fantastically clad, gorgeous Sirusho. She is our new Siren, born to destruct the inhumane and redirect, herd the buffalo.

Her song is about all things Armenian, all things human: perseverance, cultural preservation, doing right versus wrong, family values, hard work, optimism, worship and the love for making and sharing the arts, books, knowledge and the wisdom of the ages.

These elements are innate human dynamics, learned as man progressed from god’s first creation on the Armenian Plateau through ages when villagers made wine and carpets, made microchips and the computer programs that unfortunately run the modern era’s giant information technologies of consumerism.

Like prayers and constitutions and corporate mission statements, the symbols unleashed in song, videos and print can refocus us on who we are, who we’ve been, whose we are and how we should be.

Pain is sure to pass as waters
from a mountainside are always cold,
The face of fate is in your blood
and the path you follow violates nothing

The non-narrative dialogue and meaning of the buffalo and the call to those hearing it to once again giddy up and do something about their circumstances are what Sirusho Kocharian and Avet Barseghyan are telling their pop-loving global audiences.

What else is Brrreh Gomesh than a reconfirmation about our potency and the message that no economic crisis, closed borders, unruly neighbors can dissolve our spirit. No ruler can ever lord above fair and just people, be the rulers Soviet, post-Soviet, businessmen-parliamentarians in power for power, Azeri, Ottoman or Martian.

Arise, and let the world know
that your path is just
Arise, and let your fair fight
receive its honor in heaven.

And three apples fell from heaven: one for Sirusho, one for Avet, and one for Komitas.

Paul Chaderjian is a television news producer at the ABC station serving the Hawaiian Islands. He began his career at Horizon Armenian Television and has worked at ABC News in New York as a writer-producer for “World News Now” and as a reporter in Fresno. He served as the Arts & Culture and West Coast Editor of the Armenian Reporter, anchored English-language news at Armenia TV and has hosted the annual Armenia Fund Telethon. He may be reached via @pchadNEWS

Three Apples: There's a Land that I Heard of Once in a Lullaby

2013-01-11T22:40:00.001-08:00

a column by Paul Chaderjian

for the Asbarez newspaper

Once there were and there were not …

IZ is blaring in your earbuds as you battle your default human nature of being unsatisfied, lazy, suffering, lethargic and ennuied.

You are pushing half your body weight away from your chest, against gravity and destiny, and sweating in a gym on the fourth floor of a building at the intersection of King and Ward in Honolulu.

You open your eyes and standing in front of you is a Kazakh lawyer. His lips are moving; he’s talking to you.

You smile and remove your left earbud to hear him, because your right brain is intuitive and processes the whole and not the parts.

His name is Tim. You met him more than a year ago at the gym. He and his wife have a strict routine they follow every other day.

Today, he jumps through a series of thoughts and questions.

“Your anchor Pamela Young. She’s the most talented woman on the air here. I saw her live reports from the Vatican. Good coverage of the Mother Marianne Cope beatification ceremonies.”

When you first met Tim, he asked where you were from. “You’re not local,” he said.

You’ve always had issues with the word local. What is local in the 21st century? So, you told him about the place of your birth, the place of your origins, the civil war and the American schools where you were taught to be global and cosmopolitan.

“I know Armenians,” he had said. Then he had explained his accent and where he was from with some hesitation. He had said people knew his country only as the butt of jokes, thanks to Sacha Baron Cohen.

You had almost said people around the world knew your Homeland because of a reality show star. But you had refrained.

“Armenians are smart. You’ve got Jewish blood in you,” he begins and then asks whom you think the President will name as the head of the DOD? Then he asks which think tanks you follow and most agree with.

#FOURTH MACHINE, THIRD SET

The Beautified Project’s rendition of “Kilikia” is blaring when you feel a light slap on your shoulder. You’re doing curls and turn to see who it is.

Josh is a Filipino-Mexican public school counselor. Smart. Dedicated to his students. He’s the only child of a military couple from Nebraska, who stayed on the islands after they left the service.

“I told my cousin I met a Kardashian,” he says.

You ask him to explain.

“You,” he says. “You’re the Kardashian.”

Brad says hello. He’s the retired Air Force pilot, a major, from South Carolina, who now spends a few hours a day selling time shares in Ko Olina.

You introduce the men to one another and make your way to the treadmills and Joanne, who lives three floors below you in your building down the street and thinks you’re her landlord’s nephew. She is carefully walking uphill and watching the Hill on C-SPAN.

You smile and think of all the people whom you’ve met at the gym, in your apartment building and at work:

Joe, the Hawaiian doctor whose Hawaiian parents are both doctors. He has just returned from USC to join the family practice. Haruko, the precious great grandmother next door whose name means spring, and the pilot down the hall who flies to Hong Kong with his fiancee, the stewardess, every week.

Then there’s Takashi, the chain smoking neighbor next door whose wife walks him to the garden so he won’t smoke inside their home. He’s multilingual with a keen sense of politics and political players on the islands, and he is a consul at the Japanese consulate and writes reports to the Foreign Ministry about everything that is happening here.

There’s Matt, the art historian and tour guide at Shangri La, Bob, the former bodyguard of the Hollywood stars, and let’s not forget the Beirutsi Armenians huddling together every Tuesday in the back of a Waikiki jewelry shop for backgammon tournaments.

#MENTAL WORKOUT IS PAU (finished)

On the elevator, you’re greeted by the bright smile of an academic named Marco. He’s a multiple degreed mench with a historied personal story dating back to Sicily, the Bronx, San Francisco and now the islands. He helps run a private university and is tasked with its institutional effectiveness.

When you were working in Armenia a few years ago, a friend of a friend called you ‘riffraff.’ She did what native Armenians did to the repatriates in the 40s – reverse racism, the expression of self-hatred towards others, encultured xenophobia.

She, a diasporan, equated people who weren’t fortunate enough to land in one place and have a steady job in their chosen profession to debris that the waves thrashed around and delivered to a beach.

Debris has been washing up on the islands from the 2011 Japanese triple disaster, when a tsunami and earthquake created a nuclear nightmare, and the ocean’s gyrations have brought boats, buoys and a television set to Hawaii.

Your Genocide was your multi-generational tsunami, and here you are – wherever you are reading this column.

What can you be but grateful, learning after a lifetime to trust the waves, the oceans, the universe - God as She sweeps you where you need to be. You feel blessed and are grateful to have been allowed to enjoy the label, rather title of riffraff – debris of the world, trash.

You’re royal riffraff, the connector of people, the glue of society, the spiritual soul making the universe a friendlier place.

You, we, I am proud and blessed to be riffraff.

Had you not trusted Her, would you have ever met and learned from the 101 incredible souls on Oahu like the Kazhakh, the Filipino, Japanese, Hawaiian, jeweler, restaurateur, painter, writer, retired Jordanian doctor, the sniper, engineer, banker, the Air Force major, the grandmother of ten, and globe-trotting journalists... all in one place, somewhere over the rainbow.

And three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for him who made him tell it, and one for you the reader.

Paul Chaderjian is a television news producer at the ABC station serving the Hawaiian Islands. He has worked at ABC News in New York as a writer-producer for “World News Now” and as a reporter in Fresno. He served as the Arts & Culture and West Coast Editor of the Armenian Reporter, anchored English-language news at Armenia TV and has hosted the annual Armenia Fund Telethon. He may be reached via paulchad.com

IZ the Songbook Collection By Kamakawiwo'ole, Israel (COP) (Google Affiliate Ad)DAT IZ VOODOO BY ORANGE SKY (CD) (Google Affiliate Ad)

DAT IZ VOODOO BY ORANGE SKY (CD) (Google Affiliate Ad)

Three Apples: #GenocideFilm: Hashtagged Prophecies for a New Year

2013-01-04T21:15:00.004-08:00

By Paul Chaderjian
January 4, 2013

a column for the asbarez newspaper

Once there were and there were not …

#We become the story we tell ourselves

On Friday, April 24, 2015, I walked among hundreds of thousands snaking through the reflective pathway to the needle monument and concrete slabs nesting our eternal flame.

We held hands, moved in unison, tweeted pictures and carried flowers underneath a sheltering sky of gloom.

One hundred pathological years of lies had passed since one of the greatest human catastrophes, when the physical manifestations of our iconic culturemakers and culturekeepers had been gathered and sent to heaven.

But their souls were freed. And they became the caretakers of those who survived, empowering them to defeat the deletion… and undelete our ancient culture.

We would not be aborted.

We escaped to the remote corners of the world. We were dumped on beaches and built shantytowns from scraps to shelter our haggard bodies and souls.

Some of us changed our names in xenophobic places. Others unpretended believing in our God, hiding on our ancient, ancestral lands as Turks.

Ethiopia. Kolkata. Colombia. Kaka’ako. Estonia. These became our homes. Economic despair. Marginalization. Melancholia. Unbelonging. These became our norms.

Many died from heartbreak after surviving the desert. Millions of tears were shed, enough to fill the Pacific and Atlantic. But that was part of our destined journey.

The scorching heat that melts any individual’s past, identity and history in so-called melting pots of yesteryear reached a boiling point, but we arrived at our tipping point.

Our sons and daughters took up guns, pens, brushes, toothpicks. They wrote newspapers, sounded musical instruments, preached from pulpits and traveled cyberspace to fulfill a predestined undream – a lifetime mission to preserve a race of a then-placeless, unimportant people.

One hundred years later, we walked to Dzidzernagapert – one and a half million of us – listening to the creations of Khatchatourian and Hovhannes and the Vocalise of Zakarian, Yesayan and Bayrakdarian.

From above, the swooshes – in sync – of blades from hovering machines of flight, hired by an alphabet soup of global news organizations. The images and words streaming in multiple languages, reporting to the world that the progeny of the monster genociders of yesteryear had apologized, righting-rewriting wrongs, making reparations.

Our third Republic’s borders were open, peace agreements signed, economic and political treaties blessed, and a thousand years of cultural, financial and spiritual rebirth for the Armenian people of the world had begun.

After laying down the orchid and plumeria lei I had brought from the Oahuan rock in the middle of the Pacific, I looked up to thank the Creator for this moment and day. She opened the clouds, a rainbow fell upon Yerevan, and She asked me to come Home.

#Her millenary daydream pushed against our collective consciousness

I walked slowly to the Gentron – our center – from where the lifeforce of Hayastan pulses to all the thriving Diasporas which have harbored-in this rebirth in the new Age of the Armens.

Smiling and nodding at strangers, I bid a silent Namaste to every soul on this solemn day, feeling gratitude and happiness that we collectively survived our unyears – the days when politics failed us, when megalomaniacs stole from our citizens what was rightfully theirs, what was meant for their individual well-being and when we were doomed by materialism and vanity.

Outside the Golden Apricot Cinema, formerly known as the Gino Moscow, I paused, inhaling the moment, the red carpet, paparazzi, fans, the celebrities walking in – Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Shekhar Kapur, Sona Tatoyan, Vahe Yacoubian, Nora Yacoubian, Jose Rivera, Edgard Tenembaum, Cigdem Mater, Alex Kalognomos, Maria Titizian, Salpi Ghazarian, and Vartan Oskanian.

Marcom had pushed against our collective consciousness, Tatoyan had turned the “poison into medicine,” and the auteurs of our epic story had transformed the generational trauma springing from one hundred years ago into singularity with new lifetimes of pride and success.

On the silver screen, Kharpert had come to life in the masterfully well-made motion picture, “Three Apples Fell from Heaven.” Our Genocide was now in High Definition. Its ghosts and angels for the world to see for millennia. Its lessons touching viewers at a cellular level.

Our Genocide Film had made our story viral, launching dialogues inside homes, in cities and nations, at the White House, the Kremlin, the United Nations and European Union. It had been destined to be our tipping point, our historic turn.

Art had paved our way, and our voices were finally heard.

And three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for him who made him tell it, and one for you the reader.

Paul Chaderjian is a television news producer at the ABC station serving the Hawaiian Islands. He has worked at ABC News in New York as a writer-producer for “World News Now” and as a reporter in Fresno. He served as the Arts & Culture and West Coast Editor of the Armenian Reporter, anchored English-language news at Armenia TV and has hosted the annual Armenia Fund Telethon. He may be reached by email: atwater@live.com

Castro Triplets Born at Valley Children's Hospital

2012-12-24T05:29:00.001-08:00

Echmiadzin Sends Students to the U.S.

2012-10-19T05:25:00.001-07:00

VIDEO LINK BELOW