Azerbaijan – Packing List for Immigration

Pack… Memories of Your First Love

Second grade was the first time I fell head over heels in love. Or so I told my mother when she asked me if I had liked someone. “I don’t just like him, mom,” I’d said “I’m in love.” Mom took the situation with all the gravity it deserved (this had been my first love after all) and took me out for ice cream.

The subject of my ardent affection was Murad, a boy who sat behind me in first grade. He used to torment me mercilessly: I was a huge bow head, and he’d yank on my pigtails throughout the class, until I got fed up, turned around, smacked him over the head, and proceeded to get in trouble with our teacher. As soon as the bell rang I’d chase him down the corridors to seek revenge. Not for the pigtails: I could have lived with that, but I was an uber nerd even then, so getting me in trouble with the teacher was what I deemed revenge worthy.

My 1st grade class photo: I’m the one with a giant bow on my head standing next to the teacher, with “can we get this over with” expression on my face (that tells you everything you need to know about 7 year old me), Murad is the boy standing to my left.

Murad wasn’t all bad though; he would bring me Mamba fruit chews, share his lunch with me, and draw me when he got bored in class (I can’t imagine his drawings were very good, but I remember being rather pleased I was his muse). At the end of second grade we were in our class play together: Alice in Wonderland. I was Alice, of course, in my favorite checkered red dress, and Murad was the Cheshire Cat, and every time we had to rehearse our scene together, we’d both blush to the tips of our ears. But I figured this was method acting at its best: Alice had got to have been flustered by a big talking cat! (Though all this blushing during the play was what had given me away to my mom – I’ve been working on my poker face ever since.)

Pack… Your Ability to Survive a Genocide

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.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of Zabelle. But here is my christening at Etchmiadzin.

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.

Pack… Your Patience

I feel very cosmopolitan flying to see my aunt in Amsterdam, hopping on the phone with cousins in Moscow, and writing postcards for extended family in Nantes. But the part of the story that’s less suitable for glossy pages of travel magazines is how folks ended up so scattered all over the world and what they had to leave behind.

At the ripe old age of 4, my interests included bunny rabbits, chocolates (particularly from the russian candy factory called “Red October ” – I was a proper Soviet child), listening to my second cousin Levon play the accordion, and watching the children’s evening program on TV (here’s the YouTube link to the opening and closing themes for all my Soviet folks – try not to cry).

On this particular evening in the winter of 1988 we were visiting Levon’s family, and with him being older, he was put in charge of watching me. This made it easy for me to nag him into playing his accordion for me again and again. After dinner the adults had stayed behind in the kitchen, which meant that the living room TV and candy dish were now my domain (try and stop me, Levon). The sugary sweets would surely keep me up past my bedtime – but the adults seemed to be none the wiser.

Left to right: Grandma Emma, cousin Sveta, 4 year old me, and cousin Lena at the Children’s Railroad park in Yerevan in the summer of 1988.

In the kitchen they huddled around the radio. Every now and then I’d hear one of them exclaim in incredulity and what sounded like maybe anger or fear. But cartoons were on – what did I care about a bunch of adults and their boring radio? When suddenly the phone rang: long rings of a long distance phone calls – back then you could always tell.