HAVA NAGILA

NAIRA KUZMICH

The concluding paragraphs of the story “HAVA NAGILA” in the book “WE ARE ALL ARMENIAN”. The author NAIRA KUZMICH was born in Armenia and raised in the Los Angeles enclave of Little Armenia. Her nonfiction has appeared in Ecotone, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quartely Review, Cincinnati Review, Massachusetts Review, Guernica, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Naira passed away from lung cancer in 2017 at the age of twenty-nine.

“But when I danced (note: Hava Nagila) in Berlin and I understood that when my parents pressed upon me my Armenianness, it was not the same as white strangers pressing upon me my foreignness. My Armenianness was a gift from my parents. It was not a weapon. It was a book I could turn to again and again and find myself there. A reminder: I was not a gap in the history pages. Not 1915. When my parents said, “You’re Armenian, not American,” they meant I knew where I came from, and I knew what that meant: I’d be confronted by my past everywhere. It meant I could not dance to another culture’s song, in another culture’s bar, and feel light in my skin. It meant I smelled the stink in the air, heard the laughter dark and mean. Long.

I thought about explaining this to my friends, thinking they’d get it because their own histories, but then I realized I couldn’t expect that of them. How to say to someone you love that they could never understand your pain because they haven’t been in your shoes? They have not danced the same dance as you.  Even when the music playing is the same, the body dancing is not.  The body moves to a different rhythm.

So I will say it to someone I don’t love. I will say it to the stranger reading: there are certain things you will never understand, but you must listen.”

Editor’s note: This essay was written in 2015, and the author passed away in 2017. In 2019, both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate passed resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide. In 2021, President Joe Biden also released a full statement of acknowledgment on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

WE ARE ALL ARMENIAN book presentation
A screen shot from NAASR organized Webinar.