Curt Brown
“He succeeded
from the start in this venture and in a short time began selling
Oriental rugs. The growth of his business has been phenomenal, and he
has attained an important position … His rugs are known over the entire
Northwest.”
— St. Paul Rotarian, 1915
His boots ground down as
soldiers with pointed sticks jabbed at him for resting. He was forced to
march 40 miles a day. So Bedros Keljik, a 15-year-old Armenian
thirsting to emigrate to America, shredded his shirt and wrapped the
strips around his inflamed feet.
“A
terrible journey, and I shall never forget it,” Keljik told the New York
Times five years later, in 1894. “The sun beat down upon us, the ground
was scorching, but we had to march on. In two days our boots had been
worn off, and the hot ground being unbearable we had to tear off our
clothes and bandage our feet.”
A few days
later, Keljik and two older brothers were tossed in a prison on the
banks of the Euphrates River — “one great dark hole, no distinction
being made between murderers, thieves, or so-called political
prisoners.”
“He used
whatever he could — his accent, his wit — to find an edge, and he never
grew discouraged,” said Thomas Keljik, 69, who was 10 when his
grandfather died in 1959.
Tom and
his brother, Mark, have shared their grandfather’s inspiring immigrant
story in a new 40-page article in the University of Minnesota’s Modern
Greek Studies Yearbook.
“It blows my mind to learn
what he did as a 15-year-old kid who spoke no English when he first
arrived,” said Tom, a retired high school teacher living in St. Paul.
Nearly 120
years after Bedros launched his rug business, Mark still runs the
family’s carpet business — now an Uptown fixture at 4255 S. Bryant Av.
in Minneapolis.
Born in
1874 in the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), Bedros Keljik was the eighth of
11 children raised in the strict Armenian Apostolic Church, an ancient
Christian community dating to the end of the third century.
In the
late 1800s, Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II pushed a nationalist agenda,
pressuring Armenians and other Christian minorities to clear out of a
region bordered by the Caspian, Black and Mediterranean seas, where
they’d thrived for 3,000 years.
My
favorite anecdote in the Keljik brothers’ riveting story about their
grandfather involves a boyhood memory Bedros often shared with sons
Emerson and Woodrow.
His
grandfather, Sahag, gave Bedros a coin to spend on a trip to the market.
He considered the walnuts, raisins, apricot leather and other Turkish
delicacies before picking pistachios.
“I held
the nickel in my fist very tightly,” Bedros told his boys, but “when I
opened my hand to pay, the nickel had vanished. Do you know what this
means? Don’t hold onto anything too tightly.”
It would become a parable that defined him.
“There
were many times when it appeared that Bedros Arakel Keljik had lost
everything,” his grandsons wrote, detailing his first failed attempt to
emigrate, his unemployment and homelessness in Boston and his New York
business going belly-up during the Depression.
“We are
certain that he felt the pain, but he shrugged it off and went back to
work, full of optimism for the next challenge,” the Keljiks wrote. “He
did not hold on to his nickel — his past — too tightly.”
That first
try at emigrating included a 10-day, 450-mile trek on horseback to
catch a boat. Bedros and his brothers had money to bribe officials to
gain passports. But not enough.
“We were
arrested and thrown in prison,” he said in 1894. Handcuffed and handed
over to soldiers, they were escorted home to the village of Harput near
the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Turkey.
When his
bleeding feet healed — “still determined to come to America” — Bedros
headed for the mountains, bribed other officials, and sailed on a French
steamer to Egypt and then New York.
His
success as a rug dealer began with a display of his trademark gumption
after losing his $4.80-a-week factory job in Boston during the financial
panic of 1893. That’s when he noticed a Turkish prayer rug hanging
upside down in a Boston rug shop and went inside to tell the owner of
the mistake.
The
impressed store owner not only hired him but helped him gain admission
to the prestigious Boston Latin School. He dropped out but later
enrolled in a Chicago law school.
Bedros moved to Minnesota in late 1899, convinced that the burgeoning Twin Cities promised an untapped market for Oriental rugs.
Renting a
small shop in downtown St. Paul for $15 a month, he began cleaning and
repairing rugs. He got his big break when a prominent lawyer sold him a
dirty old rug for $5. A week later, the attorney walked by the shop and
saw a lustrous rug in the window.
“How do
you like your rug now?” Bedros asked. Stunned, the lawyer couldn’t
believe it was the same rug and invested a few thousand dollars to grow
Keljik’s business.
Bedros
married a woman named Zabel in 1911 and they had three children. By
1920, he opened a second shop — this time in Minneapolis. His rugs would
soon cover hardwood floors across the region.
Always
restless, Bedros moved to Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, where the
stock market crash in 1929 derailed his operations. He returned to
Minneapolis in the 1930s, working nearly every day until lung cancer
killed him just before his 85th birthday in 1959.
Famous legacy
Bedros
Keljik’s great-granddaughter, Yara Shahidi, is a popular teenage actor,
best known as Zoey — one of the kids on the popular ABC sitcom
“Black-ish.”
"Star Tribune," March 24, 2018
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