Anahid Hagopian grew up in Aleppo, Syria, in the years leading up to the Second World War. Her childhood was spent amidst civil unrest, conflict, and uncertainty, faced with challenges around education, identity, women’s rights, and family secrets, including her mother’s precarious and sometimes dangerous social position as a wealthy courtesan in French-occupied Syria.
This is a story about the unbroken bond between mother and daughter, and the sacrifices made by one mother so that her daughter could achieve her education, which she always called her “golden bracelet of independence”.
This posthumous memoir is edited and annotated by Anahid’s daughter, Antonia Swann, who promised her mother on her deathbed that she would share her story with the world.
Anahid Hagopian grew up in Aleppo, Syria, in the years leading up to the Second World War. She never knew her exact age or birthplace.
Anahid grew up as a skinny, sickly orphan whose desperate single mother could not afford to keep her. She was put in an orphanage where she was treated badly by the nuns. In the meantime, her own mother, Hosanna, sang and acted her way to independence. One day, in a Napoleonic hat, Hosanna retrieved Anahid from the orphanage. Friday, my mother was cleaning toilets for the rich girls and on the following Monday, she was wearing white and playing tennis with those same girls. She went from a world of nuns, poverty, black and white, and silence, to a world of men, comfort, colour, and music.
Her time with her mother was some of the most memorable in her life; the two were very close with her mother, her only protector. Hosanna granted her daughter freedom when, at the end of WWII a British soldier, whom neither knew, asked Anahid to marry him. Letting her precious daughter go meant Anahid would finally have a chance of obtaining her “Golden Bracelet of Independence”.
Decades later, she found herself on the other side of the world, first in London, U.K., then in Toronto and Winnipeg, Canada. In Toronto, she wrote poetry, prose (for which she received awards), a syndicated column, screenplays, and book reviews. She also had her own television show and appeared on CBC’s Front Page Challenge.
She ended up attaining several graduate degrees and receiving a University of Winnipeg Gold Medal in French literature. For decades, she passionately taught French to public school children, of all ages, both in Ontario and Manitoba until her retirement, when she refocused on her main love: writing.
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