BILL TAMMEUS Languages provide religious connection

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The United States is an astonishing tossed salad of cultures, ethnicities and religions, most of which have roots elsewhere in the world.
We know that, but it's easy to ignore because many of us live and socialize with people not much different from ourselves. It's self-limiting, but we do it anyway.
I was reminded anew about America's many sources of people and religions recently when I met Boris and Irene Stephen. They are the parents of my friend Kristin Amend, a member of my church. Boris, of Assyrian heritage, grew up speaking Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. Well, Boris at least spoke the 20th-century version of it that was spoken where he was born in what is now northern Iran. Irene also is of Assyrian descent but was born in the United States and never has known more than a few Aramaic words.
Aramaic has received lots of attention recently because of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ." The actors in it speak mostly Aramaic (how well is a matter of debate). Aramaic has been around about 3,000 years -- and, like Hebrew, is a Semitic language -- but only a few hundred thousand people in the world still speak it.
"Until I was 6 years old," Boris said, "I couldn't speak a word of English. Well, one word, 'no.' I started kindergarten and didn't know English. In the first week I was sitting in the corner as a 'dunce."'
Language assimilation
Much the same thing happened to my mother. She was born in the United States but first learned Swedish, the language her immigrant parents spoke. Since immigration laws were relaxed considerably in 1965, new waves of people have come to America and are working through much the same process of language assimilation.
Boris and Irene have not seen Gibson's movie, though they said relatives who have seen it "caught a few words" of the Aramaic. They may or may not see the film because, as Boris said, they are Christian and "we know the story."
It's estimated that nearly half a million people who identify themselves as Assyrians live in the United States now -- perhaps a fifth of them in the Chicago area, where both Boris and Irene spent most of their youth.
Assyria became a major Middle Eastern power after creating an independent state in the 14th century BCE (the term scholars now use to mean Before the Common Era), or BC. The Assyrians had several ups and downs. The final version of their empire was destroyed shortly before 600 BCE.
But many people today, like Boris and Irene, still consider themselves Assyrian. Boris Stephen's parents lived near Lake Oroumieh, or Urmia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. It's in the far north of Iran, close to Iraq to its southwest, Turkey to its west and Armenia and Azerbaijan to its north. When World War I started in 1914, the Russians were on the allied side, opposite the Turks of the Ottoman Empire.
"The Russian soldiers had come down and occupied that area (where his parents lived) to ward off the Turks," Boris said. "So when the Russian Revolution started in 1917, the Russians pulled out" and went home.
At that point, the Turks came in and began killing local residents, who were mostly Christian, he said. So "our people fled." His parents went first to Russia. Another part of his family went to Iraq, then Afghanistan and then to India, China and Japan before arriving in San Francisco.
Oppression
America is full of families with stories of flight, religious persecution and forced or unforced choices -- Jews running from Hitler's killers, Muslims seeking new opportunities in freedom, Christians fleeing oppression. And that doesn't even count all the Sikhs, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and followers of other faiths here.
You don't have to go far to discover these fascinating stories. I'd heard my friend Kristin speak of her Assyrian heritage, but I hadn't appreciated much about that until her parents, who live now in Florida, visited her recently.
The thread from Kristin and her parents leads all the way back to the language in which Jesus told parables, preached sermons and offered words of encouragement and instruction to his followers. I know Jews who still speak or read Hebrew, Moses' language, and I know Muslims who converse in Arabic, the language of the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran.
These linguistic connections give us a religious way of understanding the complex truth of the American motto, E Pluribus Unum -- from many, one.
X Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star.