NAZEN MERJIAN

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NAZEN MERJIAN
July 20, 1932 – February 14, 2022

Born in 1885, Nazen Merjian's maternal grandmother, Calliope Dolmajian, lived in a village near Bursa in what was then the Ottoman Empire. At the age of 20 she married and between 1906 and 1911 she gave birth to three children, one boy and two girls. Born in 1908, Perlanti was the elder of the girls and later became Nazen's mother. Calliope's husband was killed in 1915 during the attempted genocide of the Armenians by the government of the waning Ottoman Empire. Somehow Calliope carefully abandoned her children, and by 1921 made her way, without ever learning English, to Providence, Rhode Island, where she married and became Mary Goshgarian. Between 1923 and 1926 she somehow was able to reunite with her three children in Providence, Perlanti arriving in 1924 and taking the name Pearl Goshgarian. Mary Goshgarian's husband died in 1933, and she died January 28, 1971, in Providence.
Pearl Goshgarian married Hagop Merjian in 1930 and moved to New York City where he and his brothers ran an oriental rug business. In 1932 she gave birth to Nazen, and in 1933 to Nazen's brother Mardi. Hagop Merjian died in 1937, and the next twelve years Pearl was not only an immigrant in a strange land with a strange language but also a single mother, and due to a dispute about the cause of her husband's death, she had no financial support. She worked as a seamstress.
Nazen Merjian was a worthy successor to those two strong-willed women who faced formidable obstacles with minimal spousal support. She spoke only Armenian till the age of five when she became a student in the New York City Public School system and then needed to learn English quickly, on her own. Her mother working, she was a "latch key kid," and was often in charge of her brother, though being only a year older. Saturdays were spent at the movies, and Nazen loved westerns, especially if they starred John Wayne. She became so knowledgeable about cowboy culture that she could tell where a cowboy hailed from merely by looking at his spurs. She learned as many cowboy songs as possible, and since many of them were in Spanish or had Spanish words, Spanish became a passion and later her major at Queens College. With many like-minded girls and boys she founded the Eastern Westerners Club, serving as its President and Editor of its newsletter, and in that capacity once interviewing Gene Autry.
In 1948 the silver screen scintillated with Laurence Olivier in Hamlet; the theater sponsored an essay contest on that movie for its teenage clientele, and Nazen's essay won the prize. That was the genesis of her life-long interest in serious literature and her ever-developing ability to read it perceptively. Two days before she died she started reading Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois. She highly recommends it.
Her Spanish skills led to her receiving a fellowship from the Mexican Government to study at UNAM in Mexico City for a year. She faithfully started classes there, but she soon became disillusioned with the lack of seriousness of the teachers and of her fellow students. She therefore ended up spending most of that year on the beach in Acapulco, before it was ruined by the large hotels and hordes of tourists, where she lived and worked with a small group of artists and communists who made ends meet by providing the few tourists with a hammock and meals. For many summers after that, when she could take a vacation from work, she returned to Mexico, nurturing good friendships that lasted till the end.
Of course, during her "Duke" days she learned to ride, western style, and that may have been the genesis of her love of feeling her body in motion, her love of dance, of group exercise, which she maintained as long as her body could do it. She learned any kind of dance available to her, folk dances from many lands, belly dancing and tai chi, but what seemed to move her the most was bharatanatyam, a major classical style from south India. When she worked in San Diego, she started learning from Louise Scripps, who later sent her to the San Francisco area to learn from her teacher Bala Sarasvati.
To support herself Nazen earned the degree of Master of Library Science from Columbia University in the mid 1950s. She worked at the New York Public and over the years at many university libraries on the east coast, in the midwest and on the west coast.
From her teenage years on, she suffered major bouts of depression, so no matter where she lived, she was in the care of a psychiatrist, a couple of whom treated her well and with grace for a decade or two. Some of her longest friendships were with fellow patients she happened to meet during a hospital stay.
She retired from library work in the mid 1980s and then took up lobbying for animal rights and animal welfare organizations. Her favorite charity is Sea Shepherd.
If they were to be gathered together, her friends and relatives would assign to her many attributes: nurturer, great cook, cat lover, caring and fun friend, "Pigeon Lady of Providence," intellectually curious, sharp critic, confrontational, avid shopper, graceful dancer, humorous hostess, art lover, opera lover, book lover, lover of flowers, uniquely beautiful, distant daughter arms akimbo, nifty niece, quirky cousin, admonishing aunt, winsome wife, silly sister.
She died from complications due to dementia.

As published in Winnipeg Free Press on Mar 05, 2022