At the age of 12, surrounded by her extensive Syrian-American family, Denice Karamardian attended the funeral of her beloved grandfather, Jido. Afterward, at a traditional family poker game, one aunt remarked, “Pa wasn’t Syrian, you know; he was Armenian.” The girl had never heard the word before, and the next day after school rushed to the library to look it up. That marked the beginning of Karamardian’s research into their little-discussed Armenian heritage.
Older family members knew, of course, but they had so thoroughly assimilated into Syrian-American communities that the long-ago past wasn’t a cultural legacy so much as the source of remembered and often contradictory comic anecdotes, like the day the new horses bolted, breaking a kid’s teeth. But for Karamardian, the mystery of her family’s origins (and her own sense of identity) was enough to send her on a mission, exploring family history off and on for the rest of her life.
“I had an epiphany in my late 50s,” she says, “that now was the time to prioritize the mission and plunged (rather bumbled) through the next 12 years, at times so overwhelmed I was paralyzed. When that happened, I went back to notes, read something else, dove down rabbit holes of research that often yielded miraculous tidbits and repeatedly ignited the flame in inspiration.”
After actively researching, interviewing, writing, and visiting sources throughout the U.S. and France, Karamardian has just self-published three volumes of her family story, “Odar,” through Paper Raven Books: “Jido,” “Silence,” and “Amirkans.” She considers them historical fiction: Though some facts were documented, she had to resolve conflicting or vague accounts, omit many characters and some problematic issues, and fictionalize scenes, especially from the old country. The chapters interweave stories from the 1890s to late 1960s, from different family members’ perspectives.
Karamardian will be reading from and talking about the novels this Saturday, Sept. 7, at 2 p.m.; the open event is downtown at the History Center in Tompkins County, followed by a book signing.
Karamardian credits the covid pandemic as the impetus for her finally buckling down to this lifelong project. She’d been drafting material sporadically for several years (summers in Ithaca, winters in Costa Rica). But in 2020, when she found herself stuck inside, she wrote daily from her sunroom, working online with an editing coach from California. Two editors and many revisions later, she had a lengthy work, which her publisher convinced her to split into three books.
“I resisted at first,” she says, “because I love sagas. But I realized that I seldom get through them. This complicated family story is more digestible, more absorbable in three sections –– and I believe more resonant.”
Born in Ithaca, Karamardian moved away for about three decades, earning a degree at the New England Conservatory of Music and establishing a singing and directing career, which led her to Boston, New York, and Denver. In 1999 she returned to Ithaca permanently –– both for its arts community and “to raise my son where I could find a village to help,” she says. Here she taught voice full time, opened the Coddington Guest House, and founded Crossing Borders LIVE, a live radio broadcast music series with an international emphasis, which ran 10 years to 2014.
Prior to these books, Karamardian had written music and theater reviews and journalistic stories, but nothing of this length. Driven by a desire to fully understand the Armenian part of her family, she read history and as many key works as she could find, like Peter Balakian’s memoir, “Black Dog of Fate.”
Karamardian wondered what she might have to contribute to the topic of immigration, since “immigration stories are familiar, often not unique. I grew up in Ithaca as a 3rd-gen kid like everybody else; Greeks, Italians, Irish, Syrians –– all my friends were 3rd generation. In the tiny Syrian community here, everybody had a grandmother who spoke another language. In the 1950s, these turn-of-the-century immigrants were still alive as the first generation.”
Because the lives of these elders and their cultures were less known, Karmardian says, she wanted to discover and share them –– “how many continents they moved through, how convoluted their stories were.” She believes few people today know much about Armenian history but also hopes her family’s story will be read universally.
The heart of the trilogy is Jido (“grandfather”), a Christian Armenian born in Syria as Hovsep Karamardian. As a young boy he was caught on the street without wearing the required fez and pursued by Turkish police. Their father shipped him and his brother away in the dead of that same night, a voyage that would take them to New York’s Ellis Island in 1904, where the now-named “Joe Peter” was accepted but his brother rejected. That led to their sojourn as peddlers in the Dominican Republic.
When the brothers later parted, Joe returned to New York City. Mispronouncing his destination of Utica, Joe found himself on a train to Ithaca, and so his upstate dynasty starts from here, with interludes in Detroit. Over his lifetime, Joe straddled multiple countries, towns, homes, and languages, always “odar” –– “other/stranger/foreigner” –– until settling in this area, where he and his wife Helen raised eight children and Joe became a citizen. (From Joe’s work at the salt mine to his eventual South Danby Road farm, these novels are full of intriguing local references.)
This family history, often joyous and even triumphant, is inevitably threaded with tragedy –– memories of distance and displacement, persecution and murder. Quite unforgettable is the story of Joe’s young sisters, Mary and Martha, who were kidnapped and used as Turkish household and sex slaves. Once rescued, they finally reached the U.S., married and had children; one a silent survivor, the other broken. Ultimately, Karamardian’s family stories of resilience remind us of the endless flux of events and moments and influences that shape us all.