A Name Emerges: Family, Memory, and the Secrets We Bury

Taleen Mardirossian’s The Mother Tongue of All Secrets (The Sunday Long Read, September 12, 2026) is well worth your while; I’ll post a few excerpts so you can see why I wanted to share it:

In the last months of her life, my grandmother started mentioning an unfamiliar name: Tony. At first, the name appeared in brief inquiries, like I wonder how Tony is or I wonder where Tony is. I didn’t think much of it. She was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, and names had been slipping off her tongue for quite some time. […]

My grandmother was a talkative woman in all four of the languages she spoke, but she had never told me anything about anyone named Tony. Who was he? And how could I unravel a secret hidden in a name that my grandmother denied recognizing but couldn’t stop saying? I didn’t know where to start. […]

My grandmother’s parents were Armenian Genocide survivors who were born in Kilis, a province in the Ottoman Empire in what is now Turkey, where many Armenians didn’t speak Armenian out of fear of discrimination and violence. When the massacres against Armenians began in the early 1900s, her parents were young children. Her mother, Arshaluys, never forgot the murder of her own mother or how close she’d come to starving to death herself. Arshaluys survived and found refuge across the border in Azaz, Syria. There she met my great-grandfather, Setrak, a fellow Armenian refugee from Kilis, whose entire family had also been among the million Armenians killed across the empire. Like her, he didn’t speak Armenian. He was a baker, which meant something to her: their children would never starve like she had.

As the only survivors in their families, my great-grandparents married and had six children. Although Turkish was their only language, they sent all six of their kids to Armenian school, ensuring that they’d speak, read, and write Armenian. The most important thing for them was that their stories of survival would survive in Armenian, and their mother tongue, which had been forcibly taken from them, would become theirs again. My grandmother, their fourth child, was born in 1938. They named her Zvart, which means happy in Armenian. My grandmother was always mad about being named “happy.” She wished her parents had named her something less prescriptive. Still, when I was born, she insisted my name be Zvart but settled on making it my middle name, passing on the burden of an impossible destiny.

Although my grandmother’s first language was Turkish, it was Armenian–her second language–that became her sacred language. During the genocide, when Armenians were forced into death marches through the Syrian desert, the women would use their fingers as pencils, sand in lieu of paper, to teach their starving children the Armenian alphabet. Unlike many of these women, Western Armenian had not been my grandmother’s mother tongue but like these women, this language would become a source of sustenance and resistance. She passed on not only the Armenian language but the duty to uphold it. She raised her children with Armenian as their mother tongue. It is one thing to preserve and pass on something you already have. It is another thing to bring something lost, something long gone, back to life. My grandmother’s responsibility was to resurrect a language that had been erased. My brothers and I were born in California but raised in a home where English was banned, a rule enforced not only by my parents but by my grandmother, who lived with us. “Speak Armenian!” she’d shout, always threatening to stuff our mouths with red pepper if we uttered another word in English.

The same grandmother who’d reprimand her grandchildren for not speaking Armenian would plant her lips on the tops of our heads while whispering habib albi, ruhi, omri. As a child, I thought these words were Armenian. Well, I assumed any word that wasn’t English had to be Armenian, since it seemed to be the only language allowed to live alongside us. I now know that the language of my grandmother’s affection–of calling us the love of her heart, her soul, her life–was in Arabic, the third language of my grandmother’s life. When my father and mother and aunts and uncles spoke English or French or Turkish, my grandmother would make them switch their tongues to Armenian. But when they spoke Arabic, she never told them not to. Of all the languages my grandmother spoke, Arabic was the one she favored. I always knew this to be true but never understood why. Was there a connection between Arabic and Tony? […]

Like many genocide-surviving Armenian families, my family’s dialect of Western Armenian is not purely Western Armenian. It is Armenian, Arabic, French, Turkish, and English. Sometimes, I catch myself saying three-word sentences while I speak “Armenian,” but each word is from a different language. For example–tazah fraise guzes? Tazah is the Turkish word for fresh, fraise is the French word for strawberry, and guzes means “do you want” in Armenian. A simple question, an offering of strawberries, tracks my family’s history of displacement. These “foreign” words come naturally to me. It never occurred to me that the words we speak so harmoniously are not meant to be spoken together or that these words might not long for or belong to one another. But my grandmother must have known this because she approached each of her languages with intention and sometimes even secrecy.

For the longest time, I thought my grandmother did not know English because that is what she told me. I did wonder why it was that she’d never miss an episode of All My Children and General Hospital if she couldn’t understand what they were saying. But then I’d watch Arabic films with her and sing Arabic songs without understanding them, so I guess I didn’t think it was all that strange. It wasn’t until my 20s that I realized English was my grandmother’s fourth language.

If you want to know more about the grandmother’s backstory, and who Tony was, click on through (and there are photographs to boot). You won’t regret it.