Author John Christie was feeling unmoored after the end of a distinguished career in journalism. To regain his place in the world, he turned his investigative reporting skills on himself, beginning by going 100 years into the past and a murder in an ancient land.
There, he discovered the story of Gulenia Hovsepian, the woman who would come to be known simply as “Nana.”
In 1909, the nine-year-old girl was sent by her parents to their pasture to herd their cows. That’s when a boy from their village in Turkey ran up to her, yelling that armed men were coming for people like her family, Armenians. By the end of the day, her father had been murdered, and she and her mother, brothers and sisters went into hiding.
Gulenia survived the Armenian Genocide and made her way to America after World War I as a mail order bride. The rest of her life was hard – the Depression, the death of her husband leaving her to raise six young children, back-breaking work in a cotton mill, seeing her boys off to war.
In 1948, her oldest daughter gave birth to John Christie.
Nana was determined that her “Johnny,” the first grandchild in the family, would suffer neither deprivation nor tragedy. So, in their tenement on a dead-end street in Dover, N. H., he was treated like a precious commodity.
“Prince of Wentworth Street” is a revealing memoir of a boy determined to escape the cocoon his extended family created for him. And it’s a story of an aging man who finds his way back to peace with himself by returning to that blood-soaked hillside in Turkey where his family’s story began.
In this intensely personal memoir, Christie arrives at a moment of inexplicable dread late in life that forces him to peel back layers of identity -- designated good boy, journalist and businessman. His mission is to find his true self, and the journey leads back to the poor mill town where he grew up and to his grandmother, a survivor of the Armenian genocide who made a life in America. This is a book that will appeal to all readers interested in families and the ways which the children of immigrant families make themselves into Americans.
There, he discovered the story of Gulenia Hovsepian, the woman who would come to be known simply as “Nana.”
In 1909, the nine-year-old girl was sent by her parents to their pasture to herd their cows. That’s when a boy from their village in Turkey ran up to her, yelling that armed men were coming for people like her family, Armenians. By the end of the day, her father had been murdered, and she and her mother, brothers and sisters went into hiding.
Gulenia survived the Armenian Genocide and made her way to America after World War I as a mail order bride. The rest of her life was hard – the Depression, the death of her husband leaving her to raise six young children, back-breaking work in a cotton mill, seeing her boys off to war.
In 1948, her oldest daughter gave birth to John Christie.
Nana was determined that her “Johnny,” the first grandchild in the family, would suffer neither deprivation nor tragedy. So, in their tenement on a dead-end street in Dover, N. H., he was treated like a precious commodity.
“Prince of Wentworth Street” is a revealing memoir of a boy determined to escape the cocoon his extended family created for him. And it’s a story of an aging man who finds his way back to peace with himself by returning to that blood-soaked hillside in Turkey where his family’s story began.
In this intensely personal memoir, Christie arrives at a moment of inexplicable dread late in life that forces him to peel back layers of identity -- designated good boy, journalist and businessman. His mission is to find his true self, and the journey leads back to the poor mill town where he grew up and to his grandmother, a survivor of the Armenian genocide who made a life in America. This is a book that will appeal to all readers interested in families and the ways which the children of immigrant families make themselves into Americans.