Why I Wrote ‘Letters to Barbra’

BY PAUL CHADERJIAN

Beirut, 1972. I was eight. The war had not started. The streets shimmered with French cars and laughter rose between buildings. Inside Cinema Rivoli on Hamra Street, a child sat in the dark and looked up at Barbra Streisand. She was everything I did not yet know how to be. Bold. Unapologetic. Radiant.

Her film “What’s Up, Doc?” played that afternoon. I did not understand every word, but I felt her power. She did not shrink to fit. She took up space, and we adjusted around her.

My neighbor Ani Palayan worked at a posh 5-start seaside hotel where diplomats stayed. She wore contact lenses and moved through the world like someone who understood its code. One day she handed me an address for Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. She said I should write to Barbra. So I did.

In 1975 I was ten. That is when the bombs began. The power failed. I lit candles and wrote more letters. I did not know if they would reach her. I only knew I needed to ask. How did you find your voice. How did you stay whole when the world cracked open.

Barbra became more than a star. She became a mirror. I wrote what I could not say aloud. Am I enough. Do I belong.

Years later, I gathered those letters into a book. I wrote more. Letters I never sent. A long conversation between the boy who whispered and the man who could not stop writing. I eventually mailed the book to her home in Malibu. I do not know if she read it. But she had already saved me long before the envelope arrived.

“Letters to Barbra” is not about fame. It is about survival. It is for anyone who waited to be seen. It is about the courage to write when the world forgets to ask if you are still here.

And yes, it is about how a Jewish woman from Brooklyn gave a boy from Beirut permission to speak without apology.

Paul Chaderjian is a journalist at KTTV FOX 11 in Los Angeles. He served as a reporter and senior producer at Al Jazeera for more than a decade. He is a former writer-producer for David Muir at ABC News in New York, working on World News Now, World News This Morning, and Good Morning America. He also reported for ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates in Fresno and Los Angeles. Since the early 1990s, Chaderjian has contributed to = Asbarez and Horizon TV. He has anchored and reported for CNN International, CivilNet, and Armenia TV.