By Ken Byron
October 3, 2008
To many, New Britain is synonymous with Polish jokes and it’s easy to forget that there are more that just Polish people in New Britain and that the city has a long and rich history as a cultural melting pot. I was reminded of this when an advance copy of a book entitled “New Britain’s Armenian Community” came across my desk on Friday. Thls volume is published by Arcadia Publishing as part of its Images of America series.
I’ve worked in New Britain for years now and I’ve gotten used to seeing Armenian names from time to time. But to say I know little about their history is an understatement. According to this new volume, the first Armenians who came to New Britain were five men who arrived in 1892 to work in the city’s factories. By 1940, there were 2,700 Armenians in New Britain.
Armenians began arriving a great numbers in the 1920s. Unfortunately, they had a really good reason for coming. Most of them were fleeing what is called the Armenian Genocide of 1915, in which Turkey uprooted, deported and killed many Armenians. Many historians consider this to be the first modern, systematic genocide and the book’s author, Jennie Gerabedian, prominently mentions the suffering that many Armenian immigrants to New Britain endured. She also highlights the stories of many of them who came to New Britain and prospered.
The book is not a history in the regular sense of the word but instead tries to tell the story of New Britain’s Armenians through pictures. Arcadia has published a great many other local histories through its Images of America series and all of the ones I’ve seen are like this, page after page of pictures with sometimes very lengthy captions.