The kids never knew growing up why we had a pool table in our basement -- the sounds of the billiard balls knocking against each other, the laughter and conversation of the pool players -- all lulling us to sleep in our bedroom situated directly above the gaiety. All of these memories surfaced when, yesterday, Marash Girl found a copy of What Next In Turkey: Glimpses of the American Board's Work in the Near East, a book written by Brewer Eddy and published in 1913, just before the Genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. What Next In Turkey: Glimpses of the American Board's Work in the Near East tells of the Christian missionary work of the American Board of Foreign Missions among the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia early in the 20th Century.
Brewer Eddy, the author of What Next In Turkey, was a household word at 474 Lowell Avenue. Peter always referred to Brewer Eddy's assistance in settling the Bilezikian family in Newton, Massachusetts, in helping Grandpa Moses set up his pool room on Washington Street in Newtonville. years before folks had automobiles, when pool was a game for the wealthy and most folks of means had a pool table on their third floor. (For proof, visit the pool table on the third floor of the Mark Twain House in Connecticut.) [It is interesting to note that Uncle Paul quickly became an expert at pool; he played for the house, as it were, until he learned that his cousin Krikor was gambling on him (and always winning) . . . at which point Paul never again played pool for the house in his father's pool hall.]
What Next In Turkey: Glimpses of the American Board's Work in the Near East is now listed for sale at OldCornerBooks.com.
Never before heard of Brewer Eddy. uncle krikor was a Bon vivant, sparkle in his eye, cigar in his mouth, needle and thread in his hands, and married to a woman with unsurpassed personality, a beauty who rivaled our mother's. He was the great grandson of Altun Baba (Gold Father), a name given him by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, inhe middle of the nineteenth century. The name fit him because he was a lender of money, gold, to the Sultan, occurring a generation before the first great Turkish attempt at genocide of the Armenian people (1895). Here we have a cast of characters defined by place and time and church affiliation. The owner, grandpa Moses, tough and quiet, brooking no baloney from anyone, former shepherd, master of pistol, rifle, and horse, known to have fought single handedly the wastrels who stole his herd of sheep, son of the first protestant preacher in Marash, who was disowned by Altun Baba for parting with the Armenian Apostolic Church, unforgivable because it was deemed inseparable from what it meant to be an Armenian, a cultural tide that separated us from the Moslem Turkic culture of our overlords. Moses was laconic, an apparition of an American folk hero captured in so many American westerns. He was an American before he ever set forth on the American continent. Krikor was savvy, savvy to the pulse of the new America, the America burgeoning forth from cities, the industrial might of the world, the new world. He attended a relaxed version of the Armenian Protestant church, while Moses attended the church of his brother, pastor Vartan, the one who had been thrown three times into Turkish prisons for preaching the gospel, the last sentencing was death. Vartan escaped the hangman, fulfilling the prophecy of the leader of their band of Christian brothers, Abraham. Krikor gave birth to a brilliant boy who grew up to be a contemporary 'Altun Baba'). The money Krikor made betting on Paul's prodigious skill, was probably the only net profit ever made in Moses' pool hall, because, after all, Moses was a westerner from the East who had arrived with six guns spent.
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