My grandma Zabelle was my dad’s paternal aunt. But with his mother’s passing when he was only seven, Zabelle had as good as raised my dad as one of her own. And since I had no surviving grandparents, Zabelle was the one grandma that I knew.
In the late 1980’s she was already a tiny old lady. She wore long sleeve black blouses and a black scarf wrapped around her wispy white hair; even in the heat of August, even while cooking, with all four burners of her stove turned on in the kitchen. Zabelle was stern: I’d get a scolding for trying to sneak my fingers into the bowl of frosting she’d just whipped (I was a famous cake batter and frosting thief). But the woman was all love, her eyes crinkled with laughter all the while she was scolding me. She’d chase me with a wooden spoon under the kitchen table and tell me that if I sat there quietly, she’d let me lick the bowl once she was done frosting the cake.
Zabelle was a proud Vanetsi: her family had been displaced from Van in Western Armenia (now Turkey) in 1915, during the Armenian Genocide. But in Armenian culture Vanetsi people are known and often teased for their frugality (if not outright parsimony). And boy, was Zabelle a Vanetsi in that sense! A survivor of two world wars, 1 genocide, 4 different governments, and a number of more personal privations, she was nothing if not frugal. She was known to unravel old, worn out sweaters, and knit new ones out of the yarn. All the dish sponges in her kitchen had once been nylon pantyhose (don’t question it). And I still love Zabelle’s meat pies because she’d always mix rice in with the meat – years later it dawned on me that she used to do that to stretch whatever little meat she happened to have.
The woman was a wizard, an alchemist. She would make something out of nothing. And if she happened to have something, then she’d pull together a party for 40 of her closest relatives. That’s how big the family was back then…
Zabelle was the bulwark of the family. The strong one. The caretaker. She had always been, even at the age of 7 or 8, when her family, along with millions of Armenians, were marched by the Ottoman government from their homes in Western Armenia into the Deir el Zor desert in Syria, in the name of repopulation (read, deportation, mass murders, and genocide). But before having to walk through the desert barefoot with her baby brother tied to her back, Zabelle had watched her father Harutyun leave his home never to return again. The Turkish government had told all able-bodied Armenian men of Van to gather for army conscription. Harutyun, Zabelle’s father and my great grandfather, went in for this “conscription” and would not make it back to his family for another dozen or so years (the story of his survival, escape to America, and subsequent return to Soviet Armenia many years later is near-miraculous and deserving of its own separate post). My great-grandmother was left defenseless with three children under ten years of age, with my grandfather Tachat just a baby in arms.
Manook (the oldest boy), Zabelle, and Tachat marched through the desert with their mother. How they managed to survive I do not know, because this was a journey that proved to be fatal for nearly 1.5 million Armenians. But the little family made it to Eastern Armenia, to Etchmiadzin, the location of the mother church of the Armenian Apostolic church, where nearly 80,000 Turkish Armenian refugees had fled to (I still have family in Etchmiadzin to this day).
What Zabelle and her brothers lived though, what they saw during those days was not something my family talked about. She passed away when I was only six years old – my brightest Zabelle memories somehow have to do with the things she liked to cook for me, like tarragon syrup. In hindsight, I wish I had more years with her – there was so much of her to know! Like when my dad told me that Zabelle had “this huge grapevine tattoo that covered one of her breasts,” after I scandalized my family by coming home to Armenia covered in tattoos. I wish I knew how my tiny proper traditional Armenian grandma came to get a tattoo…
But I do know that no one made tarragon syrup like my grandma Zabelle… And if you’ve never had tarragon “soda,” I weep for you – that’s what my childhood will taste like forever.
P.S. Dear friends, my home Armenia finds itself under attack today. The situation isn’t merely a territorial dispute, it’s a matter of survival for the Armenians of Artsakh, much the same way it had been a matter of survival for the Armenians of Van a hundred years ago. And much like a hundred years ago, the Western world is standing by politely as people perish.
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