Most of my Armenian generation got first-hand accounts of the Armenian Genocide of 
1915.  It wasn’t easy growing up in a family whose parents survived the genocide and 
who were struggling desperately to understand a new language while foraging for 
subsistence in a society that did not readily accept foreigners.  It didn’t give a youngster 
much latitude to learn or to socially understand the prevailing culture of ‘odar’ America.


My two older brothers and two older sisters didn’t speak a word of English when they 
started grammar school.  As for myself, I started becoming literate in English when my 
older brothers and sisters started becoming literate.   However, by the time my younger 
sister and brother were born, we had all become fairly fluent in English.


Those early years were very hard years for my parents, as it was for all parents of a 
genocide surviving family.  Minimum wage laws, unemployment compensation, social 
security, or health benefits hadn’t been invented yet.  As for trade unions, they had not as 
yet come into their own.  For the fortunate few of those who were employed and who 
wanted to remain employed, bearing racial slurs or insults from bribe-demanding 
foremen, managers, or slave wage employers was often part of the game.  All in all, 
carrying the stigma of ‘foreigner’ didn’t help to propel an individual to equal status with 
the native born, in those days.


As the years rolled by, my parents became more familiar with America’s ways but, 
understandably, they weren’t in a hurry to mix in with the mainstream.  All of our 
moments of joy and festivity therefore were entwined with other Armenian families such 
as ours.  We all went to the same Armenian church, the same hanteses, picnics, 
christenings, and weddings.  And if there wasn’t anything else, we visited a neighboring 
Armenian family or relative unannounced, and they in turn would do the same.  Here we 
were living in the land of freedom and opportunity, out of reach of the Turkish despots 
that had nearly butchered us into extinction, yet without fully realizing it, we were living 
in an ethnic island of our own making, apart from the rest.


As time passed, our people started to emerge from their islands and started to improve 
their lifestyles.  The Armenian immigrants were becoming owners of stores and 
businesses.  Some had found better employment because of their superior skills and some 
had also found alternate ways to supplement their minimal income.  By standard, they 
hadn’t as yet reached the level of their American counterparts, but they were getting there.  
However, even though they were enjoying more economic stability, they continued going 
to the same church, same hanteses, picnics, christenings, and weddings.  They were still 
living in their self-made ethnic islands but more out of choice now, rather than out of 
necessity.



Then it happened.  I was 9-1/2 years old at the time.  On December 24, 1933, the 
increasing rivalry between our opposing political factions finally exploded with the 
assassination of Archbishop Tourian.  It was as though a giant invisible knife had come 
down from the sky and cut our Armenian community completely in half.  Some of the 
people we knew weren’t coming to church anymore, nor to our hanteses and picnics.  
Families we knew stopped visiting us and we stopped visiting them.  I heard about 
husbands and wives separating, brothers not talking to brothers.  And as for fights, I’ll 
never forget the free-for-all that I saw in our Philadelphia Armenian Church.  The men 
were breaking solid oak folding chairs over each others heads.  At one point, we even had 
to stop going to church because some of our people had taken it over and were living 
there.  From what I recall, it took a court order to open it up again, but the people who  
took it over didn’t come there anymore.  They started their own church.


Sixty-four years have passed since that tragic period when our churches and communities 
became divided, and though we have been negotiating to reunite for the last thirty years 
or more, something always manages to get in the way.  Tragically, out of all the qualities 
we inherited from our forbearers, HATE seems to be the most prevalent.  It was the Turks 
who subjugated, persecuted, and massacred our people, but because of the 
HATE-mongers and divisionists among us, our guns are always pointed at each other 
rather than at our real enemies.


Most of our spiritual and political leaders tell us that in order to survive as Armenians, we 
must have unity.  But in order to achieve unity, they must also be prepared to make 
compromises which, up till now, they haven’t been prepared to do.  Looking back over 
the "our side vs. their side" game that they’ve been playing, it is not very likely that such 
compromises can ever be reached.  I therefore submit that before we can bring our 
churches and communities back together again, we must get all of the master-haters, be 
they spiritual or political, out of our church reunification process.


Joseph Vosbikian