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Notes de lecture

Leon Z. Surmelian, I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen

London: Armenian Institute, 2019 [1st edition 1945], 271 p.
Anouche Der Sarkissian
p. 201-206
Référence(s) :

Leon Z. Surmelian, I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen, London: Armenian Institute, 2019 [1st edition 1945], 271 p.

Texte intégral

1One often hears that a book has a life of its own, whether it exceeds or fails to meet the author’s expectations, reaches unpredicted readerships, inspires other artists, or undergoes constant reinterpretation and reassessment. In the case of I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen, written by the poet, novelist, essayist, and professor Leon Z. Surmelian (1905-1995), the book’s trajectory is a story in its own right, one that is worth recounting before tackling its content.

  • 1 Zaven was Levon/Leon Surmelian’s birth name.

2Surmelian’s narrative centers on his childhood and how young Zaven,1 like so many other Armenian orphans of the Armenian genocide – who as William Saroyan put it in the introduction of the first edition “fooled the enemy and didn’t die” – wandered through Anatolia, Russia, and Armenia, before eventually going to the United States in 1922 to study agriculture at Kansas State Agricultural College. While California, where he settled in 1928 and spent the greater part of his life, is briefly mentioned in the eponymous Chapter 24, the book mainly focuses on the years 1913-1922.

  • 2 The New Mexico Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Best American Short Stories of 1944, A Decad (...)
  • 3 Nona Bakalian, “History Through Armenian Eyes”, New York Times, July 1, 1945.
  • 4 Kelsey Guilfoil, “Gold Mining Is Still Good in Nostalgia”, Chicago Daily Tribune, June 17, 1945.

3Portions of this novelistic autobiography had appeared in various periodicals and literary magazines2 before Surmelian gathered them in a book published by E.P. Dutton in 1945. It was critically acclaimed in the US and abroad, selling well beyond an Armenian readership, going through five reprintings in less than a year, and being translated into several languages. Critics of the time marveled at this story of boyhood “told simply, without bitterness or heroics, mingling lively incidents with earthy wisdom” despite portraying “one of the most frightful periods of Armenia’s history”.3 They commended “the child-like exultation of a St Exupery”, and celebrated the writer’s talent for “put[ting] on paper the sights and sounds, even the smells and tastes, which filled his boyish days”.4

  • 5 Rubina Peroomian, The Armenian Genocide in Literature. Perceptions of Those Who Lived through the Y (...)
  • 6 The growing body of published and self-published testimonials was produced or translated by the des (...)

4In retrospect, Surmelian’s achievement is quite remarkable, for the Armenian genocide and Armenian matters were not a topical issue in North America in the 1940s, unlike the sensation caused in the 1920s by the Near East Relief’s campaign in support of the “starving Armenians”, which struck a sympathetic chord among so many American households. At the time of the book’s release, Armenians were much less visible in the American landscape than they are now, demographically, organizationally, and in terms of presence within the public sphere and popular culture. When it came out, Surmelian’s narrative stood as a rare testimony written in English by a genocide survivor since Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian’s 1918 bestselling memoir that was turned into an equally successful film. Very few members of the “anapadi serund” (the desert generation)5 wrote about the atrocities they had experienced or witnessed. In this respect, Surmelian’s testimony was a seminal work that was ahead of its time, for it inaugurated the “testimonial literature” that began to emerge from the 1980s onward in Armenian diasporic communities, mainly in the US where it became a dominant genre of Armenian American writing.6

  • 7 I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen was Surmelian’s first book in English. From that point forward he co (...)

5In a curious twist of fate, the book that had been so unequivocally praised was never republished after going out of print in 1946. I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen mysteriously faded away and was gradually forgotten, although Surmelian remained a productive and well-respected author7 in the US and the Armenian transnation, as well as a vocal advocate of the Armenian cause.

  • 8 Michael Bobelian, Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-long Struggle for Justi (...)

6This disappearance from view is all the more puzzling as Surmelian bequeathed his legacy to the Armenian General Benevolent Union. It is also surprising that Surmelian’s poignant and beautifully-written autobiography did not resurface during the Armenian diaspora’s “resurrection”8 in the 1960s, when in the wake of a global revival of ethnic pride and a call for minority rights, Armenians started to organize marches and erect memorials; or in the 1980s-1990s, when efforts towards (re)cognition of the Armenian genocide contributed to the (re)publication and translation of witness accounts, primarily by Western diplomats and missionaries, although recent decades have seen the emergence of a substantial number of survivor memoirs.

7We should therefore be immensely grateful to the Armenian Institute in London for republishing I Ask you Ladies and Gentlemen, three quarters of a century after it went out of print. Thanks to this initiative, contemporary readers can (re)discover this pivotal work shedding light on the experience of the genocide and its aftermath from the vantage point of a child or, to be more precise, from the point of view of an adult narrator revisiting his childhood memories of the period.

8This new version includes the first edition’s preface by William Saroyan, a giant of Armenian American literature who, in his typically peremptory phrasing, lauded the book for its literary and dramatic quality, as well as its historical importance. The 2019 edition also offers a useful addendum with maps to help chart young Surmelian’s tortuous journey, a glossary of the foreign terms that pervade the narrative, family photos provided by the author’s niece, and pictures of Trebizond, the memory of which plays such a significant role in the book. Interestingly the author’s note that was added in 1946 to the very first pages of the book – in which Surmelian authoritatively expounds on “the Armenian question [which] remains unsolved” and “what […] Armenians want” – has not been included in the new edition. Instead, it has been replaced by a foreword by Richard Mourad Anooshian, who discusses how he stumbled upon an original copy of the novel and decided to republish it, as well as a preface by Dr. Susan Pattie, an anthropologist who has written extensively on the Armenian diaspora, who situates the historical context of the narrative and reminds readers of the story’s universality.

9In the opening pages, the book reads like a bildungsroman reminiscent of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The narrator offers a glimpse of his childhood by relating both major and mundane events with great attention to detail and a delightful mix of tenderness and mockery. The novel is thus an extraordinary source of information for historians and social scientists interested in investigating the customs and inter-ethnic dynamics of pre-war Trebizond through the lens of a well-off and well-educated Armenian family.

10Despite the light-hearted tone that permeates the first chapters focusing on pre-genocide life, an acute sense of nostalgia grips the narrative from the very beginning. The lively prose and dialogues capture the voices of lost loved ones and social practices (songs, games, jokes, popular beliefs and stories) from a world that no longer exists. By the same token, the child’s description of a seemingly carefree life is attuned to lurking dangers and injustices – such as the indelible memory of the mid-1890s pogroms, reminders of Ottoman society’s internal boundaries and the looming violence at play in the most casual interactions, foreshadowing the horrors to come.

11A sudden change in tone and story occurs at the end of Chapter 4: “and then suddenly there was a war in Europe. […] There was a total eclipse of the sun […]. There was a general mobilization […]. Trebizond was not the same city any more” (p. 60). This shift brought by the war is a turning point for Zaven’s family and Ottoman Armenians. Chapter 5, ironically entitled “My Turkish playmates”, can be read as a dramatic rehearsal for the displacement, dispossession, and massacre that will eventually affect the lives of so many Armenians. As the Surmelians flee war-stricken Trebizond to take refuge in a family property in rural Zefanos, they find out that their estate has been requisitioned by a Turkish official and his family. The passage stresses the imbalance of power and the duality of the situation: “what was good news for them, was bad news for us” (p. 66). The dichotomy is further enhanced by the narrator’s insistence on the gentlemanly manners and European looks of the Turkish occupiers, which stand in stark contrast to the symbolic violence of their forced presence. The paradoxical nature of the situation reaches a climax when a Turkish child betrays, in the middle of a game, the “imminent reality” (p. 68) that will befall Armenians: “‘Giaour dog, you can’t talk to me like that! […] You don’t have many more days to live anyway. We will cut your throats. We will massacre all of you. We will not leave a single Armenian alive.’ He moved his hand across his throat and showed me how they would butcher us” (p. 67).

12The age of innocence abruptly ends in Chapter 6. Armenians are disarmed, news spreads of the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and leaders in Constantinople, Armenian stores and houses are sealed, and deportations are ordered. From this point on, Zaven’s life is thrust into chaos. He is separated from his family and sent on a death march, where he witnesses unutterable horrors. He escapes death multiple times, and experiences deprivation, desolation, and vagrancy.

13What is striking in Surmelian’s account is the rendering of a child’s specific experience of the genocide, with its doubly vulnerable position. Throughout the narrative, the young protagonist meets other children, a reminder that most survivors were an “orphaned generation” who shared a common fate, but who had their own experiences of events. Some are Turkified, some are placed in orphanages, while others are left to their own devices. The various roles Zaven assumes exemplify the few options available to child survivors. He is sold at a slave market, then adopted by a cheta [sic] or çete (brigand) and later a Turkish merchant. He is a fugitive for a while, before finding relatives in Batumi. He attends one of the schools run by the Armenian Catholic Mekhitarist congregation that eventually relocates from Trebizond to Russia; he is then sent to an orphanage near Constantinople which is ultimately transferred to Armenia. After working as an “adjutant” to the Armenian Minister of War and an assistant at the Commissariat of the Interior of the Armenian SSR, he attends the Armenian Central College in Pera in Constantinople where he is offered a scholarship to study in the US.

14The different lives he lived show the precarious situation of child survivors, who were tossed from one hand to another, and had to adapt to shifting borders. The series of identities Zaven assumed can also be read as a sign of his resilience and resourcefulness. While luck is essential to the protagonist’s survival, guile and his command of languages are also key components. Far from the usual portrayal of victimhood, the narrative foregrounds agency and connects Zaven with epic heroes such as Odysseus or Hercules. He refuses to convert to Islam and flees his adoptive Turkish father; pretends to be Greek, Russian, and Italian; rebels against the Mekhitarists in order to become his “self-god” (p. 158); leaves Armenia because he feels disappointed, deceived, and “confined” (p. 196); and decides at Getronagan, the well-known high school in Constantinople, to “pass [himself] off as a poet” (p. 208) to be chosen for study abroad.

15Reading this book raises a number of unsettling questions, due to this constant blurring of the lines: between recollection and reconstruction; personal trajectory and national narrative; the burden of tragic events and the power of self-reliance; life’s randomness and a writer’s control over his created world; testimony and literature; horrors and poetic beauty. Surmelian, it seems, was not only conscious of these unresolved tensions, but indeed emphasized them, as illustrated by the book’s title, which is also the title of Chapter 24 written on the eve of WWII. There is something quite dramatic in this inaugural appeal as if the narrator-writer was once again playing different parts. He is simultaneously a child questioning adults about the world’s madness, a performer on stage, a plaintiff in court calling on the jury, a surviving victim summoning his lost community. The narrator-writer thus acts as a mediator between the dead, the present and future generations. As a witness, he informs of the grim reality he faced; as an artist he uses his creativity to touch his audience; and as a survivor, he evokes the members of a disappeared world, bringing them back to life forever.

16Today, as political turmoil sends countless underage migrants out on the road across the globe, the stirring story of a child haunted by the unburied dead and searching for refuge is both topical and timeless. In light of the scholarship that is increasingly attentive to the experiences of minorities within minority groups, along with the growing concern among academics for giving voice to the voiceless, this rendition of an Armenian child’s survival is a valuable source for exploring the specificities of children and childhood from a historical and comparative perspective. More broadly, whether versed in history, the social sciences or literature, readers will no doubt appreciate Surmelian’s unique testimony, which speaks to the heart, illuminates aspects of a vanished world, and challenges the traditional boundaries between academic disciplines.

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Note de fin

1 Zaven was Levon/Leon Surmelian’s birth name.

2 The New Mexico Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Best American Short Stories of 1944, A Decade of Short Stories, Hairenik Weekly, Kansas Magazine, The Tanager, The Armenian Mirror Spectator, Common Ground.

3 Nona Bakalian, “History Through Armenian Eyes”, New York Times, July 1, 1945.

4 Kelsey Guilfoil, “Gold Mining Is Still Good in Nostalgia”, Chicago Daily Tribune, June 17, 1945.

5 Rubina Peroomian, The Armenian Genocide in Literature. Perceptions of Those Who Lived through the Years of Calamity, Yerevan: Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, 2012, p. 84.

6 The growing body of published and self-published testimonials was produced or translated by the descendants of survivors or by community organizations. Despite an unprecedented increase in the past forty years, such literature – written in or translated into English, and encompassing fiction and non-fiction memoirs of survivors as well as (auto-)biographical accounts of first, second, and third generation Armenian immigrants to the USA – has seldom if ever been studied. For a selective overview, see Lorne Shirinian, Survivor Memoirs of the Armenian Genocide, Reading: Taderon Press, 1999 and Alan Whitehorn, “Remembering the Armenian Genocide Through Survivor Memoirs and Historical Novels”, The Armenian Weekly, April 19, 2017.

7 I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen was Surmelian’s first book in English. From that point forward he continued to publish exclusively in English. Among his most noteworthy writings are 98.2, a novel published in 1950 about a young man who suffers from tuberculosis; Daredevils of Sassoun: The Armenian National Epic (1964); Apples of Immortality: Folktales of Armenia (1968); Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness (1968), which remains a reference for creative writing students to this day.

8 Michael Bobelian, Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-long Struggle for Justice, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009, pp. 121-140.

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Anouche Der Sarkissian, « Leon Z. Surmelian, I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 14 | 2022, 201-206.

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Anouche Der Sarkissian, « Leon Z. Surmelian, I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 14 | 2022, mis en ligne le 16 janvier 2023, consulté le 18 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/3022 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.3022

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Anouche Der Sarkissian

Paris Nanterre and Sorbonne Nouvelle

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