L'auteur | |
 | Dajad Terlemezian was born in Van, western Armenia, December 6, 1888, one of four children, two sons and two daughters, begotten to Mr. Mesrob Terlemezian, the scion of an old and distinguished family of merchants, and his wife Hulianna, a daughter of the Khanjian house. Early joining the patriotic movement, Dajad first "prepped" for organizational responsibilities by serving as an apprentice gunsmith. His alert, natural intelligence and willingness to follow orders soon took him from one important assignment to another. Having mastered the art of fashioning a rifle, he was made a courier and later a lookout and, as he takes up his own story, we find him producing the party literature in his native city. This field and executive training obviously made him the party's prime choice to take on the Davo operation, which, as we shall see, he handled so adroitly as to fulfill the confidence placed in him. As we are told, after his arrest he was taken to Erzerum where with the proclamation of the National Constitution he was freed. Dajad was able to find his way to America (fortunately, too, since the "honeymoon" of the curiously traumatic ''months of Constitutional brotherhood" soon waned, there were new Turkish massacres of the Armenians and, certainly, if Dajad had been discovered to be still in Turkey he would have summarily been arrested and experienced the firing squad or the hangman's noose—which he had escaped only through the kind coincidence of events.) In America, he first attended American International College, Spring-Held, Massachusetts, shortly transferred to the University of Wisconsin, at Madison, but left his collegiate career with the advent of World War One to enlist as a volunteer into the Armenian armed forces and as such to fight for the independence of Armenia, proclaimed May 28, 1918. After the great battle at Sardarapat, now a resident of his Armenian homeland, he married Miss Arpine Amirkhanian. Shortly after the joint invasion of Armenia by the armed forces of Kemalist Turkey and Soviet Russia and the sovietization of the government of Armenia, in January, 1921, as a well-known Dashnaktsakan leader sought by the Red authorities for execution, Dajad and his wife were able to escape to Constantinople whence they moved on to the United States, settling in Waldwick. The couple has had five children, sons Vanig, Aram and Dajad, Jr., and daughters Anahid and Astghig who have given birth to ten grandchildren, who in turn have already provided their proud grandfather with three great-grand children. Now (1975) at 85 years of age, Dajad Terlemezian is still astonishingly spry, still active, still alert and still the champion of those values to which he was earliest exposed in his native (and beloved) Van, long a hotbed of Armenian patriotism. Dajad Terlemezian's little biograph appeared originally in the Armenian language in the booklcngth publication Vasburakanuh yev ir darakir zavag-neruh (publication of the Pan-Vasburakan Compatriotic Union; Boston, 1942). That Armenian version is reprinted in this work. Its translation has been based on the original printing. The Translator Boston, Mass., 1975 |
