User:Yohannan123/Mishael S Naby

Mishael S(imon) Naby (September 9,1898 – February 13, 1980) Assyrian poet and pastor. Naby (the Persianized form of Enviya) lived in northwest Iran but emigrated to Philadelphia (USA) where he served a small Assyrian Presbyterian congregation. He is buried beside his wife Lillie Y Naby in the Assyrian section of historic Mount Laurel Cemetery in Philadelphia. Of his three books, two were published in Tehran (Iran) and the third in the United States. He also wrote a number of articles that appeared in Assyrian periodicals, mainly in the Assyrian neo-Aramaic language.

Personal Biography

Mishael was the younger son of Shimun, son of Enviya of the Qirmizi clan of Assyrians settled in the large satellite village of Golpashan, located about fifteen kilometers east of Urmiah (Rizaiyeh from 1928-1979), currently the provincial capital of West Azarbaijan. His mother, Sarah, had married the widower Shimun with whom she bore three children Enviya, Mishael and a daughter, Almas. While Enviya immigrated to Chicago before World War I, Mishael and Almas remained with the family. Both attended village schools run by Assyrians as part of the American missionary school system established since the 1840s. After primary school, Mishael enrolled at the Urmiah College for Boys, a boarding school.

This school system had produced leading members of local Christian society in the fields of medicine, education, and theology for almost ninety years. But by the time Mishael graduated in 1918, the student ranks had been depleted by Ottoman and Kurdish attacks on the Assyrian and Armenian population of the area. The normally twenty to thirty members of the graduating class were reduced to four young men. Of these two survived the genocide, Mishael and his lifelong friend, Timateous Soleiman (d 1992).

Shortly after graduation, Mishael was taken prisoner by the invading Ottoman army. The surviving Assyrian villagers and townspeople fled to Hamadan where the British military transported many to refugee camps in Iraq. After a month as a prisoner (near Khoy), Mishael and three other Assyrians escaped to Tabriz but one of the men died of perforated intestines when starvation drove him to eat oats he picked from horse dung along the road. Mishael spent the years up to 1923 in Hamadan where he was employed in the refugee school established by missionaries. He continued teaching after the refugees returned, first in Tabriz (1923-1927), then back in Urmiah.

During this period he became a communist sympathizer and his early poetry reflected particularly his growing atheistic tendency. One of the traumas of his early life was the murder of his father, an old man in 1914 who was marched with other Assyrian men to the Christian cemetery and bludgeoned to death. The other was the carrying away of his young sister Almas to a rape camp for Ottoman soldiers located outside Khoy.

Through American missionary intercession, he was able to rescue his sister and have her cured of the diseases she had contracted. Upon his departure from Iran in 1952 he had a stone monument constructed at the site of his father’s grave in Golpashan with verses in Persian and Assyrian neo-Aramaic. This was destroyed within a few years.

Mishael might have remained a mathematics teacher had he not inherited several revenue producing vineyards from extended family members who had either not survived the genocide or had emigrated from Iran. At the same time, he was recruited as a student by his mentor, a former teacher at Urmiah College, Rabi Pera Amrikhas (1872-1945), to study theology even after the short-lived seminary run under missionary auspices was forced closed in 1934 by the Iranian government. Thereafter he rejected atheistic communism, and turned from teaching to ministry. He supplemented the meager salary this provided with income from the raisin producing vineyards.

In 1941 he married a Fiske Seminary educated Assyrian teacher, Lillie (Dooman) Yohannan (1906-1991), and spent winters in the city of Urmiah and summers in the village of Golpashan. He and Lillie had two children – Eden Naby (Frye) and Dante Naby.

Literary Life

Mishael always wrote his poems and essays in his first language, the modern eastern Aramaic vernacular of the Assyrians that was developed as a written language during the mid-19th century by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. By the time that Mishael entered the educational system, classical Syriac was no longer taught in the modern schools. Much influenced by American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson whose works he read in English at school and after, nonetheless he could not write in English beyond correspondence.

In his twenties, he began to compose verse under the pen name “Yadgar” (Remembrance). Aside from occasional poems and songs, his major work consists of quatrains based on his experiences of World War I and its aftermath. He drafted and rewrote his biographical poetry which often returned to the refrain, “Ya yada kul, aha dakhiy?” (Oh Knower of all, why this?).

By the time these poems were published in 1970 at Ator Publishing in Tehran, he had already changed their tone from skeptical disillusionment with the protective power of faith in God to symbolic verses only alluding to the suffering he had endured as a Turkish prisoner of war. He found peace in “Grace” a female figure whom he associated with the Holy Spirit. The collection titled Qdila da-šmaya (Key to heaven) consists of a series of works composed between 1920 and 1960.

During the early 1960s, he decided that his poetry should appear in English translation and engaged his children in this task over a period of two years. The verse translation was published as Psalms and Song of a Persian (New York, 1964).

His last published volume appeared in the form of a dialogue in which theological questions were asked and answered. Composed in Persian, his third language after Assyrian and Turkish, Naqshahhā-yi khudāvand (God’s plans) was also published at Ator Publishing in Tehran (1351[1972]) through the efforts of his wife’s cousin, Charles Sayad.

One of Mishael’s earliest works, an essay co-authored with his Turkish Muslim cousin, Beglerbegi, and published in Urmiah during the 1940s, is now rarely found.

An endowment at Harvard University commemorates his life and that of his wife.

References:

Kliszus, Edward and Irene. The Assyrian Diaspora: A Research Project. 1999. http://www.aina.org/books/ad.pdf

Macuch, Rudolf. Geschichte der spät- und neusyrischen Literatur. Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1976, p. 372

“Some Attic Treasures,” The Assyrian Star (Fall, 2002), pp. 22-23.