Moughalian’s Feast of Ashes Threads a Family’s Story into History

The new workshop on the road to the Dome of the Rock would become a New Kütahya, where the ancient Ottoman ceramics tradition still thrives, displaying beautifully colored glazed tiles and pottery painted in every possible hue of the color palette. Along with a few other famed potters, Ohannnessian took in surviving Armenian orphans and founded an entirely new school: in Jerusalem today the name Armenian is synonymous with an entire artistic tradition.

His granddaughter, Sato Moughalian, the author of Feast of Ashes, grew up in the leafy New Jersey suburb of Highland Park surrounded by other immigrant families, many of them Jewish. Her parents had barely escaped Nasser’s nationalization of Egypt in the 1950’s and they now led productive lives, her mother an English teacher, her father an engineer. A lone beautiful vase made by her grandfather David decorated a mantelpiece their suburban living room.

As a child Moughalian learned about World War Two and the Holocaust, but knew little of her own history. She studied hard, attended Barnard and became a renowned flautist and founded the Perspectives Ensemble, that contextualizes the work of musicians and visual artists. When her mother died, she left a memory book of sorts behind for Sato and her cousins. Sato took down the beautiful blue glazed vase from its perch once more, and thus began a multi-year quest to learn about her family’s history and in particular that of David Ohannessian, master ceramicist:

“But my grandparents had survived. And my parents had survived. They had made a giant leap of faith and traveled to yet another foreign country in the hopes that they could root themselves in a different kind of society—one that was free of constant threats, upheavals and loss. I came to see my grandparents’ fundamental task had been to keep their family alive. Not only had they done that, heroically, but they were also able, somehow, to take a centuries-old art form and give it a new life in Jerusalem…They went on to create a family of seven children, each of whom would add his or her gifts to the world.” (p7)

The journey took Moughalian around the world to Turkey, England, France, Israel, Palestine, Armenia and even back home to Brooklyn. Family history but also a desire for setting the record straight drove her forward as she explained to me: “Although Ohannessian’s story had been told, cursorily, in various art histories, those texts generally contained significant errors about him and portrayed him as a voiceless, powerless artisan, dependent on the benevolence of British Mandate patrons. This was a grossly incomplete description. I wanted to draw a clearer line from the first half of his career in Kütahya to the second in Jerusalem.”