Papers of Helene Pilibosian, 1906-2018

Editor, publisher, and poet Helene "Hosmig" Pilibosian was born in 1933 in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Khachadoor "Archie" Pilibosian and Yeghsabet "Elizabeth" (Haboian) Pilibosian. She had one older sister, Lucia. Both Khachadoor and Yeghsabet were survivors of the Armenian Genocide (1915-1923), during which many members of their families were killed. Khachadoor (1903/4-1989) was enslaved by the Kurds at a young age and forced to care for farm animals and young children. Eventually he escaped and with the help of acquaintances arrived at an orphanage in Aleppo, Syria. He was then able to establish contact with his father, who had immigrated to the United States some years before. His father provided him with money for the journey and Khachadoor arrived in the United States in 1920. He worked a variety of jobs in Massachusetts and Rhode Island (including as a gravedigger) before working for Star Market and then becoming a partner in Huron Spa, a grocery store in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Yeghsabet (1905-1997) was orphaned during the Genocide and sent to orphanages first in Kharpert, Armenia, and then Ghazir, Lebanon. She and other orphans worked at a rug weaving factory in Ghazir, where a rug made by the orphans was sent to the White House. In 1923, she began studying nursing at the American University of Beirut, and after graduation she relocated to Gardanne, France, where her sister lived. While in France, she began corresponding with Khachadoor, who was a close friend of her brother. In 1930, Khachadoor traveled to France and they were married, settling in Boston, Massachusetts, later on moving to Watertown, Massachusetts.

Pilibosian graduated from Watertown (Massachusetts) High School and Katharine Gibbs School. She attended Boston University briefly, before studying at Harvard University Extension where she received an Adjuncts in Arts (bachelor's equivalent) degree in 1960. During the mid-1950s, she suffered from depression and was briefly hospitalized at Boston State Hospital in Mattapan, Massachusetts, where she underwent electroshock therapy. According toMy Literary Profile: A Memoir, some of her behavior while a student at Harvard was deemed "questionable" in ways never fully made clear to her and the combination of her overall depression and the shock therapy treatment led to her not being able to remember a year of her life. In 1960, she married Hagop Sarkissian, who had immigrated to the United States from Lebanon in 1957. The couple traveled to Europe and then to the Middle East on their honeymoon, to visit Sarkissian's family. Sarkissian worked at the Harvard University Printing Office for the bulk of his career. The couple had two children, Robert Hovhannes and Sharon Anoush. In 1963, Pilibosian underwent gall bladder surgery at Mount Auburn Hospital and suffered a cardiac arrest on the operating table; she was resuscitated by emergency surgery including manipulation of her heart and was kept in a medically induced coma and on a respirator for four days.

From 1964 to 1966 she served as the first woman editor of the Armenian Mirror-Spectator, an Armenian Democratic Liberal Party paper originally based in Boston, then (since 1962) in Watertown; she later returned to the paper as an assistant editor (1975-1981). Pilibosian's editorials addressed a range of topics including "the teenage issue," Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and issues in the Middle East. She also frequently profiled notable Armenian Americans and other public figures, such as Indira Gandhi. On April 24, 1965, during her editorship, the newspaper published an issue dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

In 1983 she founded Ohan Press, a family-run press that published several books of her poetry, prose, and a memoir. Titles include Carvings from An Heirloom: Oral History Poems (1983), At Quarter Past Reality: New and Selected Poems (1998), History's Twists: The Armenians: Poems (2007), My Literary Profile: A Memoir (2010), A New Orchid Myth (2014), Candor Candy: Global Poems (2016), and Planet Tome Reborn (2016). (The last two works were published posthumously.) Her poems appeared in a number of literary journals including The Seattle Review, Louisiana Literature, and The Cape Rock. She and her father Khachadoor Pilibosian also collaborated on his memoir, which described the Armenian Genocide, his experiences when enslaved, and his life in the United States. The memoir, They Called Me Mustafa: Memoir of an Immigrant (1992, 1999), was selected by Alexander Street Press to be part of the North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories database. Pilibosian died in 2015 following exploratory brain surgery.