Below is the introduction to a 20 page talk given at an AYF oral history training session in the late 1970’s. When the Armenian Youth Federation was considering starting an oral history effort, the AYF invited as guest speaker Marash Girl, then Chairperson of the Armenian Oral History Project sponsored and supported by the Armenian Library and Museum of America, Watertown, MA. The following text is the introduction to her presentation.
For years my father had been encouraging me to record, as did Saroyan, all the stories and tales that riddled our lives day in and day out -- brought into our home by many Armenian men (the women rarely told their stories in public) -- overheard by me in Turkish, or Armenian, or broken English, or all three, as I tried to fall asleep on a noisy Sunday evening -- stories of their own lives and others, or stories that had been handed down to them generation after generation. But I was not a story teller, or reteller, as my father was. I had the training, he had the natural talent. He was continuing the oral tradition, but wanted me to record on paper. I could not. For one, the tales of woe, I did not want to hear. And although my heart could understand the throb of the tales of a many-languaged people, my people, the Armenian people, I could not translate these in my language to the Americans, or American-Armenians of the 1960's and 1970's. Later my brother James must have been inundated with a similar urgency on the part of my father for my brother, liking writing more than I, set himself to the task of putting to paper such characters as Pambook Jack (who told us all that his stomach grew slarge because he had swallowed a watermelon seed long ago) and Khosrov the Barber who never stopped reading French novels, even while clipping hair. But these were stories my father told; my brother James had missed, because of the ravages of time and death, the stories told by the men themselves. And then the one man in my father's entourage of friends (and he had many) -- the one man who dared to tell his story, who had been to Der Zor and lived to tell the tale -- my brother would write his story; it was indeed worthy of preserving, so horrible yet true a tale it was. My brother must hear it for himself. So one evening, my father and mother, uncle and aunt, and my brother went to the C....ian household lugging a 50 pounds reel to reel tape recorder and an empty reel of tape. Mr C...ian, surrounded by this group, faced by a microphone, with his wife sitting by his side, began the long story of his life which culminated for the evening with a sobbing old man, surrounded by six others sobbing at the story of this very man, then a boy, watching his parents stripped naked and shot to death. Mr C.....ian never finished his story that night; Mr. C.....ian never finished his story for this audience for no one had the courage, or hardness of heart, or whatever it takes, to go back for the sake of a young man's writing a story to appear in whatever slick magazine or broadside that it might. Times changed, my brother went on to other things, the tape recorder was sold, and the tape? We're still looking for it. All of that was the beginning for me. And then I got older, married, had children. All of my grandparents were now dead. Many of the old men and women that were so much a part of my childhood and my growing years were dead. Their stories were gone. Their feelings, their ideas, their Armenianness, their living experience with history -- all gone. How were my children to even begin to sense what I had absorbed almost through osmosis all day long, and into the subconscious of my sleeping hours on those Saturday nights? Perhaps they never would. Oral histories, unfortunately, cannot bring back the dead or the past. But they can record, for my children, for myself, for your children, for the world, an experience, an individual Armenian experience, the Armenian experience, on tape. How the oral histories will be used, and by whom, when they will be used and how, can only be known in the future.
