A few months back, longtime NBA assistant coach Rex Kalamian rummaged through a box of sentimental relics he stumbled across while cleaning. In the middle of a pandemic, especially after having spent months in the NBA bubble in Orlando, those family trinkets strummed a little bit harder on the heart strings.
In the box, Kalamian found one of his old writings — an essay from a ninth grade school assignment. Maybe eighth. He carefully unfolded the papers, now permanently creased and tinted beige after three-plus decades of being tucked away, and to life came the story of his grandmother Yevkine Yermanian.
She is the reason he was born in the United States, the grandson of a woman who witnessed atrocities in Armenia no citizen should have to endure. As he sat in his Los Angeles home, reading words he’d written after interviewing her back in the early ’80s, Kalamian was reminded yet again of her terrifying upbringing.
How she was from Amasya, an…
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