In memory of Arax Aroosian Balakian

Arax Balakian died peacefully at her home, surrounded by her family, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on July 13. She was born in Paterson, New Jersey, July 3, 1927, and graduated from East Orange High School. Having graduated at the age of 15, she spent a year working at the Irvington Varnish Company, which was then making parts for parachutes for the World War II effort, and this helped her pay for her first year of college.  She attended Bucknell University, class of 1948, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry. A campus leader and resident of the Senior Honors House, she was listed in “Who’s Who Among Students” 1947-48.  After graduation, she worked as a junior chemist in organic research in the laboratories of Ciba Pharmaceutical Company (now Novartis AG) in New Jersey. In 1950, she married Gerard Balakian, a physician and sports medicine pioneer, and they raised their four children Peter, Pamela, James and Janet, first in Teaneck and then Tenafly, New Jersey. Vivid portraits of Arax can be found in her son Peter’s memoir, “Black Dog of Fate.” Arax’s parents, Bedros Aroosian and Nafina Shekerlemdjian, were refugees and survivors of Ottoman Turkey’s genocide of the Armenians. After the bloodbath of the Abdul Hamid Massacres decimated the Armenian community of Diyarbakir in the 1890s, Bedros fled and arrived in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1902. Nafina, the daughter of prosperous silk merchants also of Diyarbakir, survived a death march to Syria in the summer of 1915 and experienced the mass killing of her entire family, except for her two young daughters, Zivart (Gladys ) and Arsalois (Alice). She arrived in New Jersey in 1920 and married Bedros that year, and Arax’s sister Lucille was born in 1922. Arax was close and devoted to all three of her sisters.  She was active in local community and school organizations and a charter member of St. Thomas Armenian Church in Tenafly, New Jersey, where she lived for 52 years. In the 1960s, she assisted her husband, Dr. Gerard Balakian, in the development of “Sport Ade,” the electrolyte replenishment drink that he invented in 1965 and that was groundbreaking in the sports drinks market in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After her husband’s death in 1981, Arax worked as a realtor with Weichert Realities and Friedberg Properties from 1987 to 2022.  Anyone who entered the Balakian home was greeted with Arax’s warm hospitality and superb cooking, which she continued into her early 90s. A staunch liberal, she was a supporter of economic and social justice, civil rights, LGBTQ and women’s rights, environmental policies, and global human rights. She could be seen wearing her Gloria Steinham T-shirt that read, “women get more radical with age.”  She and her sisters Gladys and Lucille worked assiduously with the Armenian Diocese for the earthquake relief in the years following the 1988 Armenian earthquake. In 2004, she was invited with her son Peter to plant a family memorial tree in the special copse at the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan. On a family pilgrimage to historic Armenia in eastern Turkey in 2015, when she was 87, she visited Diyarbakir, her parents’ home city and site of the mass killings of the Skekerlemedjian and Aroosian families, and called it the most profound trip of her life.  She is survived by her daughters, Pamela and Janet; son Peter and his former wife Helen Kebabian; grandchildren Sophia (Michael), James (Lucianna); and great-grandchildren Samara and Leo; and son James and his wife, Janet and their children, Alexandra, Katherine and Nicholas. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the local PBS or NPR station, World Central Kitchen, Children of Armenia Fund or St. Thomas Armenian Church in Tenafly. A memorial service will be held in late September. The post In memory of Arax Aroosian Balakian appeared first on The Armenian Weekly.