April 24 In Remembrance

Though we'd already lived in Paris for 2 years by then and I'd taken 4 hours of French every day, my French floundered in a roomful of Parisians talking a mile a minute.

Our hosts, a French General and his wife, greeted us warmly and made sure we had a glass of champagne from the butler. We were then introduced to some of the twelve people in the tall-ceilinged, elegant apartment living room.

"Ah, oui...elle est Americaine?" I was suddenly the interesting one at the party. Thankfully, the interest in my being American quickly waned and I was introduced to General Menu, a man who spoke quite good English. Relief.....at least until he started gossiping that his wife and daughter don't get along and why. The why was so personal, I felt uncomfortable and sorry for the wife on more than one level. There's a saying that the Americans don't like you to get too physically close, but they'll tell you everything about themselves; the French will stand with you in your clothes on the subway or at a cocktail party as they talk, but will never tell you anything personal. Not this general, he couldn't wait to air his family's dirty laundry with this American. I was grateful to talk English with him, but I was pleased when the champagne and peanuts part of the evening was finished and we were called into dinner. (Why the word for little things you eat with a cocktail before dinner is French, I don't know. One rarely GETS a real "hors doeuvre" in Paris. The hootier party, the less the hors deouvres, too!) I used to joke that, as good as French food is (and it IS), inviting people for 8:30 dinner and plying them with champagne and peanuts for an hour before the main event makes you so hungry for food that any dinner would taste way better than it is!

In Paris, the host and hostess don't sit at positive ends of the table like we do here. The hostess might, but a guest sits opposite her, and General Menu was at the end of the table. I was seated next to him and I was thankful for his English. We chatted about his brother who has a restaurant in Colorado (Menu is a good name for a restaurateur, I figured!), more about his wife and her badly kept secrets, traveling in America, and then we ran out of things to say...

I'm one who mostly wants to talk religion or politics. It's a curse! I know, in America the rule is it's not polite to talk politics or religion at a dinner party. In France (and at our house, here or there), that's pretty much all they talk. SO, as the hostess was clicking on the button I figured out was at her foot and which seemed to announce to the kitchen staff that a new course should be served, I thought I'd take a chance and start a topic.

"What do you think of the French deciding to acknowledge in the Senate that the Turks did commit genocide of the Armenian people?" (this had happened about a week before this dinner) Suddenly, my congenial, English speaking dinner partner turned cold.

"I think that was a VERY big mistake. The Turks here live like Frenchmen, they speak French! We need them politically and this was a terrible thing. The Armenians have much too big a lobby in this country and this was a horrible mistake!" uh oh.

I smiled. I thought. I hesitated. Then I went for it.

"I am of Armenian descent." mhm.

The man didn't speak to me the rest of the evening. Whether it was embarrassment or anger I will never know, but he turned to the person on his left and Z resorted to speaking bad French to the person on her right. Au revoir, General Menu, it was nice talking with you.

Walking home that night, I told my husband that I got a great gift that night. I learned what bigotry feels like, what it feels like to be insulted because you're of a particular race or nationality. I smiled the short walk home. All of us can intellectualize what it feels like to be Jewish or Black and faced with bigotry, not many of us can really feel it firsthand. I looked at it as a gift and I was oddly thankful.

It was Martyr's Day yesterday, April 24, a yearly remembrance of the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. I am not one who feels America must officially recognize it (Bob Dole fought for it every year he was in the senate), it isn't going to bring back any of those Armenians who died horrifying, untimely, unnecessary deaths, and Turkey's denial is a big reason the EU won't accept them. Good. They'll keep denying, but we know the truth.

In French or English, the Armenian genocide was very ugly, and something nobody should ever forget.