Zabelle Review

Zabelle
Nancy Kricorian
Hardcover (1998)

Haunted by unspeakable nightmares

By Stephen Kurkjian, Globe Staff, 07/06/98

More than 50 years after being forced to flee her homestead in eastern Turkey with her eight brothers and sisters, my grandmother would spend every morning sitting at the breakfast table of my parents' home in Watertown with her Armenian newspaper spread out in front of her and discuss with me the news of the day.

Often, the reporter in me would divert the conversation to her childhood and to those terrifying times of the massacres of Armenians - what had life been like before the Turkish crackdown began, how had she and her family survived when more than a million like them died, why had they wound up in Boston?

While she would occasionally give me glimpses of the tortuous path that had led her and her family to safety, inevitably she would stop, often waving me away by taking off her reading glasses and burying her face in her hands. I did not need to know about those things, she would tell me. What happened, happened in the old country. We are in America now.

Although fictionalized, ''Zabelle,'' the first novel by the poet Nancy Kricorian, is a story that my grandmother and hundreds, perhaps thousands, like her who were driven from their homes in the early 1900s could have told but never did. Their painful silence, now finally broken, is made understandable.

A child at the outbreak of World War I, Zabelle Chahasbanian is forced to join the death march with her mother, grandparents, and two brothers for hundreds of miles out of Turkey to Ras Al-Ain in the Syrian desert. Her father was taken from their home at the outbreak of the violence in April 1915 and was never heard from again.

The starvation, deprivation, and Turkish attacks during the trek are too much for her mother, grandparents, and baby brother, and with her brother she is left an orphan, with only her her best friend, Arsinee, to console her.

Marriage is arranged with an older man in America, and she emigrates to the Armenian enclave in Watertown, where she begins a quiet but emotionally restive life. Her enmity toward her mother-in-law, the emptiness she feels toward her husband, her displeasure at how her children turn out are the important issues of her life. What is not part of it is experiencing the fullness of American life.

Although she is a world away from the remote village where she was born, she remains captive to its old-world traditions - caring for her family, cleaning her house, tending to her garden, and generally suspicious of anyone who is not Armenian. The one time she ventures into the melting pot of Boston - a trip to see a movie with Arsinee - turns into a disaster after she is accosted by a man in the theater.

However, Kricorian leaves unexplained why the assimilation, which brought richness to succeeding generations of Armenians, did not work for Zabelle. It is an important question, because there were so many others like Zabelle, including my grandmother, who, despite being educated as a teacher in her village in eastern Turkey, likewise confined her world to her family, home, and church once she came to America.

Psychologists, of course, would search for answers in the way Zabelle dealt with the terror that had overwhelmed her in the world that she had fled - in silence.

There was no coming to terms with the anger and sadness that she - and the other survivors, both male and female - felt toward the Turks for their murderous acts as well as toward the international community for failing to redress the loss. The only time Zabelle revisits her past is in her sleep, when the nightmares set in.

Like Zabelle Chahasbanian, most of these women have died. Their heroic experiences, however, both in the old world and new, are vital to understanding how the Armenian diaspora, like other groups of immigrants, maintained their ethnic identity and were nourished by it.

This story ran on page C06 of the Boston Globe on 07/06/98.
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.

Two Writing Powers
JERRY CARROLL

Thursday, March 19, 1998

It was supposed to be a triumphal procession to the West Coast. Poet Nancy Kricorian would be promoting her fine first novel, ``Zabelle.'' Her husband, producer James Schamus, would be sweating out Monday's Academy Awards to see if his ``Ice Storm,'' a big winner at the Cannes Film Festival, got an Oscar. Instead, the film, directed by Ang Lee, wasn't even nominated, so they're giving the ceremony a pass.

``He got robbed,'' Kricorian said with a glance at hubby over lunch at the Ritz-Carlton. But she laughed, and Schamus seemed to take Hollywood's snub in stride. ``I start shooting a new film with Ang Lee on Wednesday, a Civil War epic.''

They're a power couple in New York writing circles. A respected poet, she scouts highbrow American novels for European publishers in her day job. He adapted Rick Moody's novel about family dysfunction for Lee, the third collaboration between the two. Kricorian spent six years writing hers about an Armenian woman who survived Turkish genocide. Her editor was Elizabeth Schmitz, whose first book was ``Cold Mountain,'' the huge best-seller by Charles Frazier. ``She only takes on one book a season.'' Kricorian's novel is lean and taut. Some of that is her poet's discipline, some is Schmitz. ``She's incredibly meticulous. She went over my manuscript three, four times, changing words even on the galleys, which you're not supposed to do.''

Between movie work, Schamus is finishing his doctorate on film history and theory at UC Berkeley. The subject is the Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer. ``I've got a fifth of a dissertation yet to write.'' He's got an in at Berkeley's English department: Its chairman is old pal Jeffrey Knapp.  ``He was my best friend when I was an undergraduate. We spent most of our time playing video games. Now I have to take him seriously.'' Kricorian said with a laugh: ``Not really.'' She's pretty and vivacious, he has a portly good nature.

The couple, in their late 30s, have two small children. Neither husband nor wife see ``Zabelle'' as a film. ``I felt relief that it was so good,'' he said, ``and I didn't have to figure out a diplomatic way of saying so if it wasn't. The other relief I felt was that she succeeded in writing a text that was completely resistant to the logic of late capitalist film production.''

C 1998 San Francisco Chronicle  Page E2

Source: Moorad Alexanian

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