Documentarian Explores Kerr Family’s Legacy of Humanitarian Works in Promise Institute Program

Her presentation started by focusing on Steve Kerr’s parents, Malcolm and Ann, who were both professors. Hovannisian expressed her deep thanks to Ann (Zwicker) Kerr, who was in the audience, and has been a steadfast supporter of her project. The older Kerr is still the Fulbright Coordinator at UCLA’s International Institute, and she works with graduate students and exchange students to build cultural bridges between Americans and citizens of other countries.

In 1955, Ann Zwicker, an American student from Occidental College, went on a study-abroad program to Lebanon when she was a junior, attending the American University of Beirut (AUB). Before her classes even commenced, she was asked by the Mother Superior of an Armenian Catholic girls’ school to teach their students English. Little did she know she would soon marry into an American family with deep connections to the Armenian community.

At AUB, Ann met and fell in love with a young graduate student, Malcolm Kerr, who, she found out, was the son of the school’s dean of women students, Elsa Kerr, and venerable biochemistry professor, Stanley Kerr.

Malcolm had been born in Beirut where his parents had already been teaching at AUB, but had attended high school back in the US on the East Coast and college at Princeton. He had returned to AUB for his master’s program and after he and Ann married, they embarked on an academic career together that took them throughout the Middle East and the United States, ending up at UCLA before Malcolm Kerr was selected to be president of his alma mater, AUB, in 1982. In the middle of the Lebanese Civil War, Kerr was warned by colleagues not to go, but was resolute in his desire to work for a better world through education and uphold the standards of AUB, especially as a center for medical and science education. Just a year and a half later, in January 1984, he was gunned down.

Armenian Genocide Relief Work

Hovannisian pointed out that the Kerr family’s dedication to education and making the world a better place traces back to Malcolm’s parents, Stanley and Elsa Kerr. Before they were on the AUB faculty, they were both young Americans who volunteered to serve with the Near East Relief immediately following WWI. Elsa Reckman was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to German immigrant parents. Her tough childhood and losing her mother at a young age was cited as a reason for her empathy and desire to help others in need. While attending Beloit College in Wisconsin, she heard about the suffering of minorities in Ottoman Turkey during the war and became interested in the plight of the Armenians. She traveled to Istanbul (then under Allied occupation) with a group of young women and took classes in the Turkish language to prepare her for her work. An opportunity opened up to travel to Marash, known to her and her friends as a city in Eastern Turkey where Armenians had been massacred. Her friends tried to convince her it was too dangerous, but Elsa was driven by her conscience to go and “help the people she had come to help.”

In Marash, Elsa met Stanley Kerr. Kerr, who had a background in chemistry, had volunteered for the Army during the war and been stationed at the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland as a clinical biochemist. When the Near East Relief began looking for volunteers, Stanley “jumped,” but his superior officers did not want him to go. They relented, however, when they learned that the government had ordered all branches to allow anyone who was needed by the Near East Relief to be released.

Kerr went overseas in 1919 and was initially stationed in Aleppo, where there were thousands of Armenian Genocide refugees. In addition to helping to run an orphanage, he was assigned to drive around in an REO truck with a fellow aid worker to reclaim Armenian women and children from Bedouin Arab and Kurdish tribes who had captured or adopted them. He also became an unofficial photographer for the Near East Relief, taking pictures of hundreds of orphans in an attempt to reunite them with their families.

Eventually, Kerr was sent to Marash when it was occupied by the French and the Armenian deportees were encouraged to return. He was in charge of orphanages there as well. He witnessed the survivors of the Genocide attempting to rebuild their lives as well as the continued strife between Armenians and Turks in the region. When the French military pulled out of Marash in the middle of the night during a snowstorm in February 1920, three thousand Armenians attempted to follow them to the railroad station at Islahiye, but only about 2,000 survived the journey — another historical event that Kerr photographed and documented.

Despite the French retreat and the subsequent massacre of Armenians by the Turks that took place in the city, Kerr elected to stay in Marash as long as any surviving Armenians were still living there, in order to help look after their needs. At that time, Elsa was sent from Istanbul to Marash as part of the same relief effort, which is when she met Stanley Kerr. After they newly established Turkish government forced all the Armenians and the western aid workers to leave in 1922, Stanley and Elsa fled alongside many of their Armenian friends and students to Beirut, Lebanon, where they married that summer. They were subsequently put in charge of yet another orphanage, now destroyed, the site of which Hovannisian visited during her filming journey.

Both Stanley and Elsa Kerr commented many times on the Armenians’ valuing of education. They themselves dedicated their lives to the Armenians and all the peoples of Lebanon as they returned to Beirut after a brief return to the States where Stanley received his Ph.D. in biochemistry. In the 1960s, after a 40-year career during which their children were born and raised, they retired and returned to the US. It was there that Stanley Kerr compiled his memoirs into The Lions of Marash, published in 1972. He was assisting in the writing of this work by a young man he had met who was studying in Beirut at the Nishan Palanjian Jemaran in the 1950s, an Armenian-American with a deep interest in history – Richard Hovannisian.

Bringing the story full circle, Richard’s daughter Ani Hovannisian with the full participation of the Kerr family and descendants has embarked on the making of the documentary telling the full journey outlined here. Her discussion was followed by words of appreciation to the Kerr family and a short Q & A session. Ann Kerr along with her daughter Susie was presented with a framed original print of a Near East Relief poster from the WWI depicting a young Armenian orphan girl with the motto “Lest We Perish.”

To watch the program, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zDB3r5ZbAc.