In my childhood and youth, whenever we (my father and mother, sister and brother) went to a show or a movie or a concert, we would peruse the program, looking at the list of participants -- either before the show opened, or (at a movie) at the end of the film -- looking for a name ending in 'ian', joyful if and when we found such a surname.
This habit continued. As a member of the Harvard Radcliffe Armenian Club, the skill I had developed was invaluable. It was the way we found our members, going over the list of Harvard undergraduate and graduate students for that year, looking for ian's or yan's, and upon finding them, sending out invitations (on postcards) to our first meeting for that year. One September, a tall, handsome man entered the Armenian Club meeting room at Phillips Brooks House, looking around, puzzled, holding up a postcard. He did not look Armenian, but then. . . As it turned out, his surname was Masakayan, a good Filipino name (who knew?). None the less, Jose became an enthusiastic regular at our meetings; we were delighted to have a Filipino member (along with the Irish-American and Chinese members) of the Harvard Radcliffe Armenian Club.
Later in life, when I was on the Board of the Armenian Dramatic Arts Alliance, I continued the hunt. Will I never get over this obsession?
one of the many dreamy possibilities i had as a boy was to become a captain of industry and name the company, IAN Industries! When asked by friends and those who were not, who were the Armenians, or what were the Armenians, or how did one know from the name whether the person was an armenian, or, I never heard of anybody famous who was Armenian, the spirit of the dead, the many dead and buried of my ancestors rose up within me as a spectre and I would explain how the 'ian' was the key to the recognition, and weren't there many who were famous whose name ended in IAN. For instance? well, there was Anastas Mikoyan, the only one of Stalin's inner circle to survive his paranoia, the clever fox, Uncle Paul said with a chuckle, and there was his brother, the aeronautical engineer, after which the Mig was named. Great, those two men were both leaders of the sworn enemy of my country, and i was exercising bragging rights. well what about humpartsumian, the famous theoretical physicist, more famous, and greater than Einstein, to those who had any familiarity with the sciences. Really? never heard of him. where did he come from? Armenia, well, er, Soviet Armenia. oh, another one from the sworn enemy of my country? and the two brothers did not even have a 'real' armenian ending, the 'ian' ending. they had a 'yan' ending. it is all the same, i said, having forgotten to mention that fact. wait a minute, i forgot Saroyan. oops, another deviant ending, i mean, variant of the 'ian'. the final blush occurred when i was @12 or 13 years old and was reading about the Nazi Blitzkrieg, for the first time, and discovered the architect of Blitzkrieg was none other than an Armenian? had to be. his name was Heinz Guderian. once again, proof, that famous armenians were almost always on the other side!. But, wait, the genealogy of Guderian was a Pomeranian ancestry. It had to be contrived, faked, to avoid changing the spelling of his name. Either that, or it was proof, that the IAN ending had gone to the dogs.
ReplyDelete18 years later, while on the trading desk, as a first week rookie, the boss, a man who hailed from the poverty of Nebraska, was looking at my name, 6 chairs away from me. we all stood or sat, depending on how charged the conversation was,asked me, while standing up and stumbling over the pronounciation of my name,'what kind of a name is that? Armenian, sir. Oh, yeah, that's right, now I remember, it ends in IAN, and that is how you know it is Armenian, right? Yes, sir. Hmmm... You ought to be pretty good at this business.