Zilelian from Zile
by Aida Zilelian
March 2, 2022
‘Es Mari Zilelyan em. From Turkiye, Amasya. Maybe you and me cosins. No good inglis. Sorry.’
I received this message last year on Facebook. The woman in the profile looked to be in her mid-seventies and lived in California. She sent me long messages, at first in Turkish, explaining that her family had lost many relatives during the Genocide and given that we shared the last name, perhaps we were related. She had searched for years and said she hadn’t found anyone until she came across my name. ‘I’m looking for my missing uncle. He disappeared during the Genocide’, she wrote in Armenian, when I told her I spoke fluently. ‘His name was Garabed.’
I called my Aunt Marie (she and the woman coincidentally share the same first name), the last living relative on my father’s side of the family. I asked her where my grandfather had been born. She told me it was a small city south of Amasya. Zile. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to ever ask. I finally knew the origin of my last name. It was where my grandfather Garabed’s family was burned to death during the Genocide, from where my grandfather had escaped at six years old.
My name is Aida Zilelian. My father Harutiun immigrated to Sunnyside, Queens in the early 60’s with his sister Marie, my grandmother Shaké and my grandfather Garabed. Orphaned during the Genocide, he had led a difficult life; he had been arrested as an adolescent for killing a Turk, he had lived under Romania’s communist regime selling goods on the black market and was imprisoned several times, and inevitably, moved to America in his fifties, dying as a foreigner, his native country a foreign place in his memory.
As a child, I grew up surrounded by my mother’s family, a boisterous and stubborn clan of Lebanese-Armenians, quick-witted and hilarious. The maternal side of my family is strewn throughout California and Rhode Island. My mother told us stories about her cousins in Beirut, their antics and close-knit existence where they lived among an enclave of Armenians before immigrating to America. Throughout the years, my mother’s family seemed to multiply. We’d hear a name for the first time – her cousin Boghos who lived in Paris, her cousin Peggy who had recently gotten divorced – whether first or second or twice removed (whatever that means, really) my mother’s bloodline was extensive. Who are these people? my sisters and I would ask. This is the first we’re hearing their names. My mother would wave us off, That’s nothing, she would say. That’s just from your grandmother’s side.
I think now about my father, being raised by his taciturn father and his compliant mother, whose relatives had also perished during the Genocide. He could not name an aunt or uncle, he heard no amusing anecdotes assuring him of his roots, his family’s legacy. Though he never spoke of his sense of alienation he revived the memory of my grandfather Garabed again and again, boasting of his bravery in Romania when he distributed illegal goods to his Armenian friends and neighbors at the risk of being caught. We learned of how he had survived after watching his family tied at the wrists, a mortifying link that bound them before they were set on fire, how he had run and hid from one village to the next before finding himself in France somehow.
If what Mari Zilelyan said was true, she would be my father’s first cousin. Her father would have been my great-uncle. Shortly after hearing from Mari, I received a message from her daughter and we began communicating with an ease that assumed a long-lost friendship, as if the years had carelessly slipped away. She suggested we take a DNA test. She, more than I, was confident that we were related. “Second cousins,” she said. “I can tell just from talking to you. We’re definitely related.”
I didn’t dare believe it. The disappointment would be too great. Had my father been alive, I would have been tempted to tell him about my correspondence. When the testing kit arrived I let it sit in my office for weeks before bothering to open the box. I probably would have thrown it away if I had not committed to taking it.
I told my Uncle Hagop about Mari, knowing he would be especially interested because he personally knew Armenians from his community who had reunited with their families decades after the Genocide. He sent me newspapers clippings. I read over each reluctantly, a small hope blooming. A brother and sister find one another fifty years after being separated, a refugee orphan who grows up in Egypt is found by her sister’s family, both siblings in their seventies. Did the fortune of finding one another eclipse the tragedy of all the lost years? It seemed a miracle, nonetheless.
“Did you get your results yet? I’m not seeing your name in my family tree,” Mari’s daughter wrote after receiving her results. “I have matches, but I already know those relatives.” I assured her that I hadn’t received anything yet. “I’m going to be shocked if we’re not related,” she said. By that point, she and I had continued our communication through texting and video chatting. I had met her teenage sons and spoken to them, learned about her amicable divorce. “My mom is going to want to speak to you and tell you all about your grandfather’s family. We all live miles away from each other over here. You can fly out with your family!” had been her last message.
That very day I received the email with my DNA results. I fumbled through the website, finally clicking on the ‘common ancestors’ icon, a short queue of names appearing (all from my mother’s side of the family). I scrolled too quickly, and then began at the top of the list, reading through each name slower than necessary. Slow enough to come to grips with the fact that Mari and I were not blood relatives. Although I had known it all along, I was still surprised. And I was angry that I had deluded myself. My only consolation was that I hadn’t shared my correspondence with Mari and her daughter with anyone other than my husband and my uncle, and that I didn’t have to deliver the disappointing news to anyone, really. It was just me. As if I mattered little.
I thought about the photographs Mari and her daughter would have shown me of relatives bearing resemblance to my father’s small family. The story of how they had survived, despite my grandfather’s grim recollection of them being murdered. Where they had settled, thrived. The family tree that would blossom, its limbs extending magically like an unfurling seed.
I looked at a photograph of my father and his sister, my grandparents. A black and white picture of them sitting on a large rock, smiling faintly, squinting in the sunlight. My father is barely twenty years old as he sits next to my grandfather Garabed, an aged version of what my father will grow to resemble in the passing years. My grandfather would live only a few short years after the photo is taken.
I would rather find a decorative bow and wrap what I have written here with clumsy sentiment or perhaps unveil some small triumph, a revelation. I have none. What I am left with is how singular I feel, like so many others, I imagine. I think of my grandfather and the small city of Zile, his large family extinguished and how he had managed to escape. He had lived, prospered and married, had children. And I am still here.
Aida Zilelian is a writer, educator, and literary organizer. She is the author of The Legacy of Lost Things (2015, Bleeding Heart Publications) which was the recipient of the 2014 Tololyan Literary Award. Aida has been featured on NPR, The Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Poets & Writers, and various reading series throughout Queens and Manhattan. Her short story collection These Hills Were Meant for You was shortlisted for the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Award. She recently completed her novel All the Ways We Lied and is currently seeking representation. Aida is currently based in New York City.