My first reading attempts in my mother tongue outside school, were done during those long Summer days alongside my grandfather Boghos in Ras-ul-ain. The house of my grandparents, as I remember it, had a lot of magazines, newspapers and some paperbacks, all in Armenian. They probably came from Aleppo, because I have some visual memory of pictures of athletes, boy/girl scouts, crowds and parades during events in stadiums in Aleppo. I remember from the captions. Even though I had been a boy scout from an early age in Qamishly, I first saw the written form of the word Homenetmen(Armenian for the Diaspora athletics and scouts union) in those magazines, I think. They were mostly sports magazines.
My love for football swelled up with those publications. They were full of pictures and detailed captions depicting club matches in Europe. Names like Real Madrid and Dynamo, I first learned from there. Of course, like most children, I already loved and had played football on the streets of Qamishly long before seeing those printed pictures. It’s just that the magazines put a face on the players whose techniques we were imitating during our street matches, without knowing their existence. And their names!! Gente, Puskás , Yashin... Legends who became my personal heroes because of those pictures. I can not describe to you, for example, that image of Gente in mid-air doing what they called a double kick, a word that I learned from reading those captions.
I began this story with the intention of writing a second part about my grandfather Boghos. But midway, I feel that what I have written so far, has swayed me away from his story towards the topic of Reading. So, I prefer telling about my grandfather another time.
I want to confess that books and Reading in general were not of any extraordinary presence in my life as I was growing up, until I arrived in Canada at the age of 15 or so. Of course throughout my school years books were there and I read intensively because I was obliged to as a student. And I loved all the fiction and poetry I was asked to read. But, I wish my curiosity for books, and especially the Classics, had began at a very early age just like many of my favourite writers claim it to have been in their case. Why? Because books nurture your imagination and constantly remind you about how sacred life and the human soul are. The earlier you discover that, the faster you come to appreciate the importance of human integrity. But I was more of a visual kind of boy. Outside school, films and pictorial publications or magazines filled up my free time, rather than serious fiction and poetry.
I want to tell a short story related to all this. My mother loved reading and during those last few years in Beirut, before our move to Canada, she used to go through books very quickly. We were alone...my brothers had left for Canada and my father had returned to Qamishly to work because his business in Beirut had gone bankrupt. My mother was sad with longing for my brothers. Reading had become a kind of consolation for her. Also she had more time, now that the family was smaller and her house chores less. I used to get her books from the library in the Azadamard Armenian club in our neighbourhood. They were all hardcover novels, mostly by Armenian writers but also there were sometimes French or Russian novels translated into Armenian. It is thanks to her reading passion that I first heard names such as Tolstoy, Hugo, and Dostoyevski. She loved Raffi most of all and especially his ‘Tavit Beg’ and ‘Khentı’. At the same time, I used to take out books for myself. They were mostly abbreviated/summarized Armenian translations of foreign novels. They were very intersesting as a discovery at my age...King Lear, Journey to the Bottom Of the Sea, Gulliver’s Travels, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc, etc...
The young girl who used to take care of the library was very fond of me. I must have been her best ‘customer’ because of all the volumes I so often took out for my mother. She used to recommend many of the books for me to take home, every time I visited the library. I think I even had a crush on her at that age of 11 or 12 because of her attentiveness towards me. Also she was a beautiful young woman. One day, as I was going to leave the library, she came around the desk with a tender smile and caressing my head she said, ‘you are a very impressive boy. I admire your passion for books. I don’t know any other boy who goes through so many books so fast’. I felt as if a bucket of hot water was poured over me. I must have turned totally red, first blushing because of her warm caress and then because of feeling responsible for this wrong image she had of me. I had never told her that the books were for my mother. I was shocked with the guilt I felt. After a long silence, I blurted out, ‘most of the books are for my mother. She is lonely and reading makes her feel better’! Lost in all the shame I felt, all of a sudden she raised my chin with her hand and gently said, ‘still, you are an admireable boy because you care about your mother!’
That’s what I call kindness.
