"With an accompaniment of secret tears, forced from me by the exigency of hunger..." ~ Jane Eyre

There were custom made wooden shelves built in the basement of my father’s parents’ home. My grandfather, Krikor, layered basic planks of wood next to a refrigerator besides the one in the kitchen upstairs.

These shelves were over five feet long.

On the shelves sat mason jars filled with brined grape leaves for dolma, processed by my grandmother Anoush's hands – leaves straight from the grapevines in the backyard. Other mason jars were filled with bulgur, the cracked wheat used in tabouleh. Cans of chicken broth would practically fill an entire shelf. Boxes of pasta were stored intermittently between hundreds of cans and containers…hundreds. Corn, tuna, cranberry sauce, kidney beans, chick peas, peas, crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, soups, gravies, fruit cocktail, yams, peanut butter, breadcrumbs, olive oil, vinegar, pickles, rice.

As a child, I believed everyone’s grandmother’s basement was filled as though it were its own aisle in a supermarket. Six days a week she cooked for herself and my grandfather; she was petite and lean and he was tall and lean since neither were big eaters. Sundays we came – an addition of five more. Even then I never saw her actually enter the basement to gather ingredients for whatever dishes she was making, like pilaf and shish kebab and lahmanjoon.

It was as though the cans and jars and boxes of food were a permanent fixture there.

In her childhood, my grandmother was not to remain a permanent fixture in Chomaklu, Armenia. She would never grow up in her homeland. As a child, she and her family were deported and sent on a death march by the Young Turkish party after they had decimated the village and killed hundreds there, an addition to the million that were murdered during the Armenian Genocide.

Along this death march into Romania, my grandmother starved. Two of her siblings starved to death and their graves were preyed on by ravenous wolves during the nights after their burials. I remember the fight that ensued between my grandmother and great-aunt when my great-aunt told me of these events when I was a very young girl. My grandmother didn’t want me to know. But I needed to know.

And so do you.

A year after my grandmother died in 1998, I sat in a class with Dr. Druyan, who allowed me to alter her syllabus for Literature of the Holocaust and incorporate my own readings of the Armenian Genocide into the writings I did in the course. After reading Enemies, A Love Story, Dr. Druyan discussed Survivor’s Syndrome in her lecture. It was then that it dawned on me the full extent of my grandmother’s syndrome. There is more besides the stockpile of food in fear of starving, but the ocean of cans and boxes and jars and containers were the most prominent aspect of her symptoms.

I never left my grandmother’s home without eating. She was an amazing cook, and I hope that I do her proud with the dishes I make. My grandmother would make me and my sisters anything that we wanted…anything…and she would cook with a smile and watch us eat with pleasure. She spent her childhood starving and I spent my childhood being fed the best of food by her small hands, hands that even cooked despite Parkinson’s disease in her later years.

These days I relish in cooking for my nephew, whether it be pastina or scrambled eggs, for I know she is looking down and watching me make sure that her Armenian great-grandson, who will be taught about the Armenian Genocide one day, is well fed, both with the kind of food and the kind of love she gave us.

http://www.theforgotten.org/site/intro_eng.html