Book Review: Ararat in America
Ararat in America: Armenian American Culture and Politics in the Twentieth Century
By Ben Alexander
Published by I. B.Tauris in 2023
264 pages
It’s surprising how little most Armenian Americans know about their recent past. I realized this shortfall when conducting research for my book nearly 20 years ago. The same unanswered questions popped up time and again. Why are there two Apostolic Armenian churches (plus two more when counting Armenian Protestants and Catholics)? Why did the community split into factions? When did the Genocide recognition movement take center stage? How did Armenians confront assimilation and integration in a nation where — unlike the segregated communities of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East — Armenians readily intermixed with local cultures? What I realized was that few people had the answers to these questions and even fewer had bothered to ask them.
It’s easy to see why. Stateless diasporas face daunting challenges in recording their histories. They lack government archives, official reports and publications and rarely possess the funds to sustain such efforts. Even if they managed to gather and store such information, who would produce and then teach this history? With no textbooks on Armenian American history to rely on, Armenian day schools in the United States largely stick to the foundational tenets of Armenian history stretching back to the reign of Tigranes the Great with little coverage of recent history other than the Genocide and present-day Armenia.
That’s what makes Ben Alexander’s Ararat in America: Armenian American Culture and Politics in the Twentieth Century such a welcome addition and a well-needed antidote to a major lacuna. Published by I.B. Tauris, it’s the latest volume of the series edited by University of Nebraska Professor Bedross Der Matossian covering modern and early modern Armenian history.
Following a chronological path that begins during WWI, Alexander, a professor at the New York City College of Technology, tracks Armenian American political (and to a lesser extent, cultural) history to the end of the 20th century.
One of the overriding themes in Alexander’s work is the dueling narratives of the events that took place immediately after World War I. The fledgling republic that emerged in what is now modern-day Armenia at the end of the war became a flashpoint for the American diaspora. Because much of the leadership of the first Armenian homeland after the fall of the Cilician kingdom were members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), that side of the community came to glorify the First Republic. For the ensuing decades, the ARF lamented the loss of this short-lived state while taking nearly every opportunity to condemn its Soviet overlords.
Their rivals within the American community, a loose coalition of Ramgavars and others unaffiliated with a political party, were largely indifferent to the republic. They were far more tolerant of Armenia’s existence as a Soviet province and were more inclined to remain connected to the church leadership in Etchmiadzin despite the restrictions placed upon the church in Moscow.
These contrasting narratives — what Alexander calls “two distinct zones of reality” — persisted for years before beginning to peter out in the 1960s when the memory of the Genocide and the continuing injustice surrounding the massacres began to take center stage in Armenian American political discourse.
Before that thaw, however, the Armenian American community entered decades of what amounted to fratricide highlighted by the murder of Archbishop Levon Tourian at a church in upper Manhattan on Christmas Eve in 1933. (The fact that many Armenians in the United States are unaware of Tourian’s murder — even though it was the most consequential event of the community’s history outside of the Genocide — is a testament to the need for this book.) The murder followed by the conviction of nine Tashnags — whom ARF sympathizers considered innocent scapegoats — further split the community in ways that remain largely under-appreciated today. “The aftershocks of the murder spread to personal and family relationships,” Alexander points out. “In some instances, siblings who had fled the genocide together stopped speaking to each other.”
The development of separate newspapers, social clubs, Sunday schools and youth groups caused these rifts to grow and helped forge and maintain “starkly different versions” of the memories surrounding the First Republic as well as the Tourian assassination. The most significant breach came within the church, arguably the most important institution in Armenian life. As each side took control of individual churches in the United States after 1933, that break was formalized in 1956 when a cleric closely aligned with the ARF became the new leader of the Cilician See in Lebanon. After that election, the American churches affiliated with the ARF considered the Cilician Catholicos their rightful leader, while the remaining non-Tashnag churches remained loyal to the Catholicos in Etchmiadzin.
Although the community avoided the murderous violence of the Tourian episode in the ensuing decades, the feuding factions remained highly antagonistic to one another. Over time, that antagonism spilled into the American political scene. The ARF’s critics accused it of harboring fascist tendencies during World War I; 10 years later, Tashnag leaders turned the tables, accusing their rivals of being communist sympathizers during the height of the Cold War. Leaders on both sides, Alexander writes, “condemned each other for outsiders to hear” — something they had avoided during World War I.
Despite the gravity of this enmity, Alexander deploys a neutral, non-judgmental tone. In doing so, he still notes the outsize role played by the community’s leaders in this harrowing epoch as well as the identity-driven differences they represented. “I see this feud as representing not only a turf war between leadership elites,” Alexander writes, “but also a debate between contrasting ideas about how to be an ethnic group in America.”
This animosity finally began to diminish in the mid-1960s as a new generation of Armenians, moved by the civil rights movement and increasing appreciation of the Holocaust, gravitated towards the enduring injustice of the Genocide. Unlike their forefathers, they had far less interest in clashing over decades-old conflicts. As this new generation took over leadership roles, they also lacked the emotional attachment to the First Republic and Tourian held by previous generations. By the 1970s, the parties of the Armenian American community, in line with their affiliates abroad, began to bridge ties and form joint organizations. In the United States, that led to the creation of the Armenian Assembly of America, an umbrella organization representing various factions.
By the end of the century, the parallel institutions — newspapers, churches, youth groups, advocacy organizations, etc. — remained as holdovers from a bygone era, but they carried little of the bitterness that previously defined the Armenian American community.
Alongside this intra-communal struggle, Alexander tackles the vexing challenge of balancing integration versus cultural preservation that all immigrant groups confront upon landing on America’s shores. While other ethnicities went through similar challenges, the added burden of fearing what Armenians called a “white massacre” amplified the community’s desire to maintain its culture. Another major difference for Armenians — unlike Italian, Polish and other ethnic groups in the United States — was the lack of a home country that could serve as a cultural beacon.
Alexander’s analysis points to the consistency of the Armenian reaction to assimilation across time. So many of the fears expounded by Armenian elders of America’s negative influence on their children and the threats posed by inter-marriage and loss of culture in the 1920s and ‘30s were often repeated by a new generation of immigrants originating from Lebanon, Syria and Iran in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Though Alexander uses this theme to segue into Armenian American art, he doesn’t spend much time exploring the works of writers like William Saroyan, Michael Arlen, David Kherdian, Nancy Kricorian, Carol Edgarian, Peter Balakian and others who explored the challenges of integration.
Some thorny questions go unanswered in Alexander’s book. Why did divisions within the Armenian community reach such red-hot intensity that they led to the murder of an archbishop in church during Christmas Eve mass — a dramatic set of events that could have been lifted from a Hollywood script — followed by decades of hostility? Nearly every nation or group has divisions. It’s asking a lot for Armenians to be an exception. But few spewed so much venom and vitriol, especially after suffering mass murder on a scale that should have brought Armenians together rather than turn them against one another so virulently. It’s also worth asking why Armenian Americans spent so much of their limited resources fighting one another and getting entangled in the Cold War rather than directing their ire towards Turkey.
While Alexander doesn’t try to answer these questions best suited for psychologists and sociologists, he does call out the diasporan leaders for amping up the community’s differences at a time when Armenians were still traumatized by the Genocide, the loss of the First Republic and expulsion from their ancestral lands. Despite “their lamentations about the lack of Armenian unity,” Alexander writes, referring to the editors of the partisan press, they “mastered the art of using the schism as a marketing tool” to their respective communities, “at times with relish.” In their attempt to preserve Armenian identity against assimilation, did they fuel — perhaps unintentionally — intra-communal animosity to keep their flock engaged in Armenian life? “The argument has been made here,” Alexander writes, “that partisan tensions played a part over the decades in sustaining the political parties,” and both factions “promoted their programs in such a way as to keep their constituents feeling involved in their homeland.”
All of these factors point to perhaps another reason why few have tackled this history before: despite the great accomplishments by multiple generations of Armenians in the United States, much of the community’s political history casts a negative light on its institutions and their leaders. Regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum, Ararat in America is an accessible title that provides a foundation to better understand the Armenian American community, and in doing so, perhaps chart a better path for future generations.
Michael Bobelian
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There is a problem with this statement:“But few spewed so much venom and vitriol, especially after suffering mass murder on a scale that should have brought Armenians together rather than turn them against one another so virulently.” Long before WWI, splinter Armenian militant groups were rather busy decimating each other. My grandpa was stationed in the area and he witnessed the brutal way they dealt with political opposition. Especially those Ottoman Armenian governors and officials who were reluctant to join an armed rebellion were assassinated quickly. Let us not pretend this legacy of assassinations and murder did not exist prior to the tragic events of WWI.