Rev

Rev. Mishael Simon Naby never traveled outside Iran until he immigrated with his family to Philadelphia, Pa. He arrived in the US on 5 May 1953 on the French passenger vessel, La Liberte, and never left the US. He missed his vineyards, orchard and life in Iran terribly and his adjustment to life as a pastor to the small Assyrian Presbyterian congregation in Philadelphia was neither complete nor happy. He lies buried in Mount Laurel Cemetery, in that same city, having passed away on February 13, 1980 from a heart attack while sleeping. He was a poet and writer above all, a man whose life and career were shattered by the genocide directed against Christians which spilled over from Turkish areas into northwest Iran.

Mishael, the last son of Shom’un, the son of Enviya, and Shakar, his second wife, came into the world sometime around 1898. They belonged to the poor end of a rich clan known as the Qirmizi, a Turkish word referring to ‘red.’ It was never clear whether this was a village in Mesopotamia from which they had fled in light of Kurdish expansion, or whether it referred to a trade, such as red color dyers. No other members of the clan survived in Iran or elsewhere as far as any of us know.

Mishael’s father fed and clothed his family by working as an itinerant musician. He played the zurna, not a very complex instrument, but a popular wind instrument often used, especially in the bridal procession. His first wife had born him some children (two girls?) who had left for the United States in the Assyrian immigration spurred by the fears of the massacres of 1895-96. They had gone to Chicago and little is known about them. His first wife had died. His second wife was also from Golpashan and her brother’s name was Avshalem.

Mishael lived much of his early life in Golpashan, where he began his schooling. Later he boarded at the American Boys’ College in Urmiyah (Qalla, later in the century the grounds of the Agricultural College of Urmiyah), and graduated in 1918, a fateful year for Assyrians. Classes that used to graduate upwards of fifteen or twenty boys annually had four students only in that class. Only one other boy in that class survived the tragedy of 1918 - Timotheos Suleiman (Urmiyah, Baghdad, Tehran, Yonkers), better known as Rabi Tima, Mishael’s lifelong friend.

In the panic of 1918, Mishael, a studious boy, was handed a rifle and told to try to defend the approach to Urmiyah from the north. That was the Assyrian army of Agha Potros of Baz (18??-1932), the last Assyrian military hero of World War I. Mishael was taken prisoner by the Turkish army and would have been shot along with other boys and men from Golpashan had he not escaped the ranks of the marching prisoners and headed for Tabriz with three companions. Hunger drove one of them to pick out undigested oats from horse dung and eat the kernels. He died of intestinal infections or perforated guts in Tabriz where the survivors arrived. Mishael’s young sister, at sixteen, was dragged into a Turkish rape camp. She was bought out of it through the intercession of American missionaries but had multiple sexually transmitted diseases.

Mishael spent the period from 1918 to 1921 in Hamadan where he was recruited to teach at the refugee school. He did the same upon return to Tabriz, and finally back to Urmiyah in 1923. His students, among them, Aprim Ishaq (later at the UN and Oxford) remembered him as a stern teacher given to prodding his students with a pencil on occasion. By this time he had become a vocal Marxist. In the early 1930s, he saw a vision of Christ, which beckoned him to follow. He did. He left teaching for the ministry.

He served at the Golpashan church and at the Urmiyah Presbyterian Church. When invited to serve the church in Philadelphia, his wife Lillie, whose two sisters had already emigrated, urged him to accept the invitation, despite the fact that the salary of $50 per week, even in 1953, turned out to be a pittance for a family of four.

The experiences of World War I, and the attempt on his life made in 1946 as the events of World War II wound down, because he was a Christian clergyman, helped persuade Mishael to sell all his vineyards, an inheritance from his deceased or immigrant relatives, at a time when Iran was in dire economic straits due to the western boycott at the time of Prime Minister Mossadeq. Money could not be sent abroad. The price of vineyards had fallen. He bought carpets and some assumed-to-be sellable items, bought his first and only airplane ticket (to Paris), his first and only train ticket (to Le Havre) and his first and last ticket on a passenger ship (to New York), and left Iran with $50 dollars cash for each of the four family members. Paris turned out to be dear – sausages and oranges made up the family diet for three days spent at a good Seine River hotel booked from Tehran. The lack of cash with which to tip the porter at the train station and lack of French drove him to try to explain in his WWI era Russian that he had no money left. He arrived in the heat of May in New York dressed in a Persian lamb-lined wool coat, and the black gabardine Sunday suit in which he was buried twenty-seven years later.

Mishael Naby wrote poetry, which his contemporaries admired especially for their biographical content. So many Assyrians had suffered so much in those years. They had lost their youth in refugee camps; they had lost their parents on the march or to hatchets and cudgels wielded by their Muslim neighbors. Mishael’s poems about these matters, and the repeated refrain of “Oh knower of all things, why this?” elicited sighs from his audience and served as a form of catharsis for the community. Eventually from the United States he arranged for the publication of his Assyrian poems in Tehran through the good offices of his wife’s cousin, Charles Sayad. They appeared under the title Qdila D-Shmayaya (Tehran, Iran: ? Ator, 1970). But he had purged them of doubts in the wisdom of the Almighty. The English translation, made by prodding his then sixteen year old daughter, Eden, into helping were also thus purged. These were published under the title "Songs and Psalms of a Persian" (New York, Carlton Press, 1964) by a vanity press. He also wrote a play Naqshahha-yi khudavand in Persian (Tehran: [s.n.], 1351/1972). But his first published work was done in Iran, in the late 1940s as a joint effort with his cousin Ala’addin Takesh Jahangiri Beglarbegi, his aunt’s grandson. That was the Muslim Turkish side of the family. This was the same paternal aunt who had tried to save young Mishael by lowering him into her well when young Assyrian men were being sought for extermination by the Ottoman army.

Throughout his life Mishael was a voracious reader. He used to borrow English language books from the American missionaries and copy out, with pen and ink, long passages in a small, even, slanted hand into notebooks which were so precious to him that he brought them with him to Philadelphia. He also brought his Scofield Bible concordance, an Assyrian language New Testament (Ghdatta), a full Old and New Testament Bible in English and a fat English dictionary. All these books were bound in black leather. He did not bring his beloved Persian language 78 rpm records, but he remembered the words to Shud Khazan and Boro Boro , two mournful, typically Persian love songs of the 1940s, which he sang with pleasure at family gatherings. His favorite Assyrian language song was Kiz maniy azin paruqiy ? (Where shall I go my Savior?), an evangelical song whose melody may not be part of the repertoire of western songs translated into Assyrian Protestant church hymnals. In Azari Turkish he loved to sing Qorkhma ol bir Danial (Fear not to be a Daniel), a church song set to a strident tune.

Despite the shortage of money in the US, in 1960 the Naby family purchased a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica which eventually led to the retiring of the 20 volume Book of Knowledge on which they had relied for songs, poetry, history and so much more. The EB, evermore serious and straight-laced than the Book of Knowledge, allowed Mishael hours and years of reading pleasure. But to make sure he knew he had read what he wanted, he would pencil next to the articles he liked a heavy check mark, perhaps to avoid being tempted to reread them. Thus he expanded his knowledge of history especially to enrich his sermons and his conversation. But for much of his later life, his circle of acquaintances was limited to less educated men. For this reason, he took great pleasure in spending some time with Dr. George Lamsa (1892-1975 http://www.equip.org/free/DL010.htm) and with Qasha Lazar Yavre, both fellow Assyrians.

Life’s disappointments left their mark but his faith in the hereafter and in the grace of the Holy Spirit brought solace to Mishael as did the presence of his children, born to him later in life than to many of his contemporaries because his life had been so scarred by the genocide. This was not a word he knew, nor did anyone in 1918 since it came into being in 1943. Nonetheless the attempt to wipe out physically, biologically, culturally, and geographically a whole ethnic group must have a name – and it is genocide.

Lillie Yohannan Naby was a much loved and talented woman born to an Assyrian family in the Digala, a satellite village of Urmiyah, in northwest Iran. Lillie’s maiden name comes from her father Avrahim Yohannan but the family circle included mainly her maternal extended family, the Doomans. Her father was a widower from the village of Ada who had been left with a young daughter when his first wife died. He had taken this girl with him on his second trip to the US and placed her in a school or orphanage run by Presbyterians in Tennessee. Since a picture of her grown daughter (taken in the early 1950s) shows her to have a remarkable resemblance to Lillie, his second daughter, it is likely that Lillie too had some of father’s looks. But in general appearance and perhaps in personality too, she resembled her mother Avigil Dooman, a pleasant and sociable woman who had graduated Fiske Seminary sometime around 1897.

Avrahim Yohannan (this combination is very common among Assyrians), literate in Assyrian and English, was not known to have attended any schools beyond those in the village. Ada, being a large and prosperous place, had very good schools by the 1880s when he must have studied. Lack of work, the expensive price of agricultural land, and the lure of employment in America brought Avrahim out of Iran three times in his life. He would come to the US, mainly to Gary, Indiana, work for several years and return with enough money to last a while, then he would go back to earn more money. He would work as a bricklayer. On his second trip, he bought a house in Gary and was prepared to settle for good as a permanent immigrant. He wrote asking his new wife to come also with their new baby Lillie. This must have been about 1906 when Lillie was born. But Avigil would not leave her family, the routine of her life in a village surrounded by family and friends and the familiar, for life in a strange land to which only the needy went. She was a Dooman clan member, a large and prosperous family, with generations of educated men and women who had ties in the nearby Tsarist areas (Tiflis for example) but not in far off America. True, a cousin had already left to become a Protestant missionary in Japan (the father of Eugene Dooman, the US embassy counselor and COM in 1941), and her brother was a student at Columbia University, but Avigil had no ambitions for herself and imagined her daughter would become an educated housewife like herself.

By the age of ten however, Lillie Yohannan, with her mother, her six year old brother Benjamin, her uncle Koorush, and the family of her aunt Duvura, were fleeing their home in Digala before the combined forces of the Ottoman army, the marauding Kurds associated with it, and local Muslims (see "Shall this Nation Die" http://www.aina.org/books/stnd.htm). Her father was in the US anxious about his family as news of the terrible threats to Christians grew from 1914 onward, just a few years after Avrahim left for the US for his third and last trip.

The refugees headed south, in the heat of July and arrived outside Hamadan some weeks later. Lillie used to tell how the front of her dress had been burnt bare by the sun. The British were packing the Assyrians into trucks and shipping them to Mesopotamian refugee camps. Hamadan was already swollen with orphans and parts of families. No proper orphanages were operating and boys rounded up and placed in shelters without food were dying by the dozens of starvation and disease. The Dooman women, however, would not leave Iran. Thanks to the Masonic handshake between Koorush Dooman and a British officer at a blockade, the family was allowed entry into the town.

Soon thereafter, they returned to Azarbaijan, but remained in Tabriz while the Iranian government sorted itself out and sorted out what to do with the Assyrians. In Tabriz funds began to arrive from Avrahim via church relief organizations. But little Benjamin had fallen to disease in Hamadan. Lillie survived, entered Fiske Seminary in makeshift quarters in Tabriz, and graduated in 1925.

Back in Urmiyah, Lillie became a teacher at Fiske Seminary, and after her mother’s early death, perhaps due to a botched abortion, she was left to work and, at nineteen, take care of a household that included her father, uncle and two much younger sisters.

In 1934 when Riza Shah ordered the closing of American schools in Urmiyah, Lillie was already prepared to get a teaching position in the new government schools, run now in Persian instead of English and Assyrian. She had spent the previous year studying Persian at night. Until she emigrated in 1953, Lillie Naby taught at Shahdokht High School, the only girls’ school in Urmiyah and occasionally also at the men’s agricultural school. In both places she taught English while at the former she also taught home economics.

Life as a fresh immigrant to the US entailed a series of humiliations for this member of a family of social standing, professional position, and economic well being. She worked almost from the time she arrived in the US at menial factory jobs. But as she used to say, she felt secure from attack. She once scared off a gang of hoodlums in north Philadelphia who were preparing to mug her by standing her ground and hopping on the bus that arrived just in time. She also once warded off attack by a determined bull at a picnic in New Hampshire by yelling a firm “hoksha” when her host and her family had run away.

Lillie Naby took many initiatives: sometime in the late 1940s she bought a Kodak Brownie and recorded the life of her family and community in Urmiyah and surrounding villages. In 1981, after her family and her sisters had moved out of the area, she took on the task of breaking up her Philadelphia house of thirty years residence to move to Modesto, Ca. There she renewed special pre-World War I acquaintances, especially with Martha Yosep. Lillie performed in local Assyrian plays, gave lectures, conducted Bible classes and enjoyed eleven years of social activity free of economic hardship and the demands of labor. She passed away in 1992 in Massachusetts and was buried in Philadelphia with her husband.

Eden Naby

Eden is the name my father chose for me. Naby is the anglicized version of our Iranianized Assyrian name, nviya. In our Assyrian neo-Aramaic dialect, nviya means "prophet" just as nabi does in Arabic and Persian. The reforms of Reza Shah (d. 1942), the first in the Pahlavi line of Iran's 20th century rulers, included many measures that brought order to Iran's public administration. Among these was the issuing of identity papers which in turn required a last name, a less burdensome form of identity than a string of names of paternal ancestors. People chose as last names the towns or villages of birth, an ancestors name, a profession name, or a pen name. My father chose his pen name, "Yadgar", meaning "remembrance". When the idealism of youth had faded into more staid (and religious) middle age, he took the name of his grandfather as his last name, and that of his father as his middle name. I became Edeen Nviya on the feast of the Virgin Mary, in Golpashan, his birth village, Adan Nabi at age seven when I started school, and Eden Naby when my American visa was issued in 1953.

We spent every summer in the village, from about late June to mid-September.I used to envy those families who did not own vineyards and so spent a few weeks at Lake Urmiyah every summer. Misplaced envy, I learned when we finally spent a day there and came out of water so salty that it was almost impossible to sink, even though there is a story in the family that our dog, Hooshyar, dragged me out when I had floated too far. The village with its long rows of grapevines, sinjit trees, wild sumac ripening to a mouth-puckering tartness, and cows moeing on their way home at dusk was far pleasanter than the crowds of strangers at the Lake, sleeping in tents pitched on the narrow stoney beach.

My first memories and first pictures are from the village. We arrived at our house there by hired carriage, took out the bedding from the stored bundles, and went from dusty vineyards and even dustier roads to white sheets laid on cotton mats on the floor of the upstairs room. I cannot remember taking a bath in those village months although we must have. The elaborate bath facilities of our town house are clear in my mind but not that of the village. The bathing area could not have been by the dreadful outhouse we shared with our Muslim tenant/guards. We might have bathed in the backyard by the molasses processing house. The water from the central well, placed far too close to the bottom of our outdoor stairs for comfort, was icy cold. We must have warmed it somewhere for bathing. I cannot remember so I suspect it was peremptory matter of necessity rather than pleasure. I do remember getting into the cemented square enclosure to mash grapes with my feet. But I cannot remember washing my feet afterwards.

The grapes would not ripen until at least August but there was the orchard, the getting ready of the two special rooms for the processing of grapes into molasses, the smoothing of the varazans at the various vineyards, and in the midst of it all, having my birthday party. The local girls would be invited, most of them daughters of friends from Urmiyah who also spent the summers in the village. My mother would invent games, usually remembered from her American training at Fiske Seminary: apples hung on strings, jelly fed to each other by blind-folded partners, flour mounded candy, stringing a needle while sitting on a rolling jar and the outdoor games. My brother, whose birthday fell in the dead of winter, as he became older, was jealous of the fun we had at my summer parties while his were confined to one room in the town house.

School meant grey uniforms with white collars. These had to be tailored, since no ready to wear clothing existed. But there were plenty of cloth shops, seamstresses and tailors. For better clothes there had to be at least two fittings, but for school clothes, it was a simpler matter. For the last two Easters in Urmiyah, my mother dressed Dante and me in matching clothing navy gabardine motroski, (Russian naval uniform) the name by which sailor clothes were known. Mine had a pleated skirt and my brothers tailored short pants. The next year she knit us yellow wool tops to go with them. One of my mother's talents I did not inherit was knitting, something she did with great variety and taste to the end of her life.

All schools, by law, had to be conducted in Persian whereas teachers and students all had Azari Turkish as a common language. That was the language I knew and spoke with various maids, especially the last one, Maral, a half Russian, half Azari Turkish blond beauty. She barely knew how to read and write but filled my head on winter afternoons with story after story, many learned from her mother. I also heard my first anti-Semitic stories from her, though at the time they hardly meant anything to me at all. Later I learned their origin was Russian.

In school too we learned stories, usually simplified versions of the Shahnameh legends (the Persian epic Book of Kings also adapted into Kurdish in recent years). In second grade I began to learn to embroider and cross-stitch, the enjoyment of which led to a lifetime of needl-related relaxation. We drew geometric patterns on square lined paper, used colored pencils (so much more elegant than crayons), and smoothed out chocolate foil of many patterns and colors to tuck into our school books. Some of the Muslim girls, from officialdom families, had very pretty ones which they traded. Our family only had chocolates for company which meant I snuck the discarded foil when I could, smoothed it out with a spoon, being careful not to tear it, and then placed the ten centimeter square into a page of my book. I would hold the candy dish out toward guests so as to have them choose the foil I most coveted. Most of our entertaining was done with delicious homemade pastries not stale store bought ones. Still the fancy chocolates were lovely and not to be duplicated at home.
Music came from a phonograph - horn and all - which had to be hand wound. The 78 rpm records could scratch easily and so we children could not go near the contraption at all. Then there was the radio, which was used only for news, BBC more often than not. During the Demokrat period, when our family was at political odds with many others, even some close friends, my father and one or two like-minded men would huddle around to hear the words of Winston Churchill quoted. That name is probably the first one I remember of a foreign politician.

Then there was the upright organ in the parlor which only my mother knew how to play. But the person I recall playing it the most was Columbus Dooman, the youngest son of my mother's maternal uncle. His looks scared me - and so I rarely went into the room when he was playing, although he was more accomplished an organist than my mother. We all sang - in many languages - with gusto. I learned many English songs from my mother without the slightest notion of what they meant. Because I would run unrelated syllables together while singing, it was only after the awkwardness of teenhood was passed that I began to question what words I was singing. There is one particular musical round I could not decipher. "The spring is come, I hear the birds that rush from bush to bush. Hark, hark, I hear them sing. The linnet and the little wren, the blackbird and the thrush". The names of the birds eluded my young understanding for over a decade. There were other musical rounds "Three blind mice", "Row, Row" and my favorite, "Come follow, follow, follow, follow, follow me". Whither shall I follow, follow, follow? Whither shall I follow, follow thee? To the green wood, to the green wood, to the green wood, green wood tree. I am still convinced that songs are the very best way to learn to pronounce any language well.

Teachers used to play cruel tricks on me because they knew my mother, or had been her students. I remember being in a panic when called before a group of women in the teachers lounge warming themselves by the stove. Whatever prank they had dreamt up had me in tears. My mother told me later they were joking. The sort of joke that results in a bunch of adults hooting at the sight of an eight year old fighting to hold back tears is the sign of a society barely civilized enough to deal fairly with unrelated persons.

Corporal punishment too was part of the curriculum. Perhaps because my mother was on the faculty, or because I was such a goody-two-shoes, I only remember being hit on the palm of my hand with a ruler once when the whole class was being punished for some infraction, perhaps not standing up when the teacher entered, or not doing so when she left, or when the principal was doing the same.

My early life included childhood diseases which at that time took lives. My brother got none of them but had a lot of accidents like falling into streams and cracking his skull for which I would immediately tell on him. I had whooping cough on top of typhus and was in a coma for days on end. My family nickname, Dindin, comes from this period of illnesses. Later I got stuck on the roof for fear of descending on the ladder and had to be handed down to a soldier in the adjoining yard which was that of a military compound. Fear of heights haunted my later travels in Iran when my husband insisted on climbing to any height to see ancient remains, usually Sasanian at such places as Kuy-e Istakhr.

Does a life get stuck in a moment? I think mine did for many years. As we emptied the house in Urmiyah, packed, said our many goodbyes, and walked out under the canopy of the freshly ripening apricots along the stone path leading to our compound gate, I was holding my father's hand. Dante's little eight year old hand was in my mother's. In addition to having my ears pierced to carry jewelry out of the country, I had also been bought my first wrist watch. I tripped on the edge of a paving stone, fell on my left arm, and broke the crystal on my watch. It stopped running.