hanging on by a few threads, sitting in the bottom of a box of books from my father's house; anyone else would probably have thrown this tome out without a second thought, but given my fascination with old books and my business, OldCornerBooks.Com, my curiosity has gotten the best of me. The pages of this tome are yellowed with age, some quite brittle, some torn, but wait, at the top edge of the front free end paper is a name which I can barely make out, so faded with age it is. Let's see -- handwritten in pencil: Peter Bilezikian, 1929. Daddy would have been 17 then, 9 years in the United States, still attending Watertown High School. (He graduated in 1932). That page is yellowed with age but sturdy, so I turn to the next page.
At the top edge in blotchy ink in Armenian script is written, Ays Sourp Kirku Yepros Bilezikjiani gu badgani 1922 Mard 9. "This Holy Book Belongs to Yepros Bilezikjian". On the next page is printed the title of the book: Kitabu Moukaddes ya'ni Ahdu atik ve andu jedid. Oh, it's a Bible. A Bible written in Armeno-Turkish gifted to my blind grandmother on March 9, 1922; that's soon after she arrives in the United States, having survived the Armenian genocide (1915-1922) caring for four children and her sister Mary, her husband unable to help them because he was 'stuck' in the United States when the war broke out. But wait -- she wasn't blind then, not until 1929. So she must have held this Bible and read the very pages that I am touching.
[My father told me that she had had (and I can't remember the name of the disease -- did my father tell me it was erysiplis?) a very high fever that caused her face to swell up and although my grandfather had wanted to send her to the hospital, the Armenian doctor that had attended her, a friend of the family, insisted that he had dealt with these cases before, and that he knew how to handle the situation; that she would live through it, no worries. Well, he was right; she lived through it, but when the fever left her, it left her blind.]
I flip through the pages of the Bible, written in Turkish with Armenian letters (Armeno-Turkish), hoping to find a clue, about Grandma Epros, about my dad, but there is nothing. I continue to wonder . . . Had she gone blind because of the fever? Or had she gone blind because of what she had witnessed as a young child in Marash in 1895: 11 year old Epros, holding her sister tightly to her in the confines of a closet where her parents had hidden the children cautioning them to be silent, looking on as Turks (not their Turkish friends or neighbors) bludgeoned her parents to death.
Thanks to Tatoul and Varteni for the assist in translation!
ReplyDelete@Marash GirlThis blog is so wonderful!
ReplyDelete@Anonymous
ReplyDeleteThank you so much.
Wow, what an amazing Bible. The history that it contains, the fingers that caressed it. Thank you for sharing this wonderful item and the story.
ReplyDeleteGrandma Eprouse was an incredibly brave, strong woman . . . like her son, Peter (our Dad).
ReplyDeleteWhat I needed, arrived in the arms of my grandmother, who walked into the bedroom carrying a blanket and a book. She placed the book on my desk, turned to me, smiled, and threw the blanket in the air which, like a cloud of gray, settled on top of me. Then she knelt down and held me to herself. She kissed me on the cheek and on my eyes. How are you, degas (my sweet one)? I looked up at her and saw the storm cloud of hair that swirled around her head. Her eyes looked far off, as if they saw mountains we could not see. When she spoke, the sound of morning and the sound of evening was in her voice.
ReplyDeleteIn the summer, on a day of calm and quiet, when the windows were thrown open in her attic apartment, when the moisture in the air settled upon everything, and the breezes were trapped in the green shade of trees whose branches were pregnant with fruit, I could hear that voice lifted up to heaven. Her prayers would fall to the earth, like rain, all afternoon. From time to time, if I listened, I would hear a name I would recognize, because she always spoke the names in English. Whenever I heard my name, I stopped, immediately, because I could feel her embrace of me three stories of house away. It was the certainty of the voice, and the rain of virtue falling to the earth, and rising to heaven, that was the steeple of my summer days. When I played baseball a mile away on the highschool field, or capture the flag two streets up the hill, or bicycled explorations into streets and corners, and shared secrets in rooms with doors shut and whispers that papered the walls, I knew her voice was raised on my behalf, and I knew it was a canopy under which I lived.
@petersonA beautiful memory of our grandmother's love.
ReplyDelete"ays sourp kirke Yepros Bilezikjiani ge badgani 1922 mard 9".
ReplyDeleteThis holy book belongs to Yepros Bilezikjian 1922 March 9
Garo Derounian
@AnonymousThank you so much, Garo. I wonder if my grandmother wrote those words . . . I'm guessing that she did, then!
ReplyDelete@Anonymous[Thank you, Garo, for reading the handwriting in the photograph correctly.]
ReplyDeleteThis blog was very interesting for me because it was connected with family history. I like such stories very much.
ReplyDelete