Daughter of Tenedos
Cindy Adroushan was a neighbor of mine in Slough City when I was a boy.
She wasn’t born in Slough City. The Adroushans adopted her when I was too young to remember. They were an Armenian-American couple with one son who were hoping to adopt an Armenian orphan from Turkey.
The Armenians of Turkey had been the victims of genocide at the hands of the Turkish government, and the very identity of Armenian Americans had been altered in the crucible of that genocide, such that that dark event became a permanent part of their consciousness. So it was that Armenian Americans sought to help the Armenians of Turkey in any way that they could.
But Cindy wasn’t Armenian. When the Adroushans heard about her, Cindy was a toddler, living in an orphanage in Istanbul. They were told that she was born on the nearby Island called Tenedos. They were told that she and her brother were the last Greeks born on that storied Greek isle. Now all the Greeks were gone, and it would be a Turkish isle from now on.
No one knew what had become of Cindy’s twin brother, except that he had been adopted. Their mother had not survived childbirth, as was once so often the case. The Adroushans could only presume that the father did not possess the means to care for his own children.
Greek turned out to be close enough for the Adroushans. Cindy’s story would not be easy to forget. It reminded Mr. and Mrs. Adroushan that the Greeks had also been the victims of genocide in Turkey. They knew the sufferings of their own people more intimately, but they knew they shared their misery with the Greeks. It occurred to Mr. and Mrs. Adroushan that this little child, though not Armenian in blood, knew firsthand the nightmare that they had only known through their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Would they dare reject a child for her failure to be born an Armenian?


