Armenia, the diaspora and the myth of return, as seen through ‘The Sopranos’

2026-01-26 - 17:45

*MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR ‘THE SOPRANOS’ for those who somehow still haven’t watched it. I was one of you until recently. There are certain things I like to keep in reserve. I have been this way for as long as I can remember. As a child, I used to save my favorite bite of food for last, convinced that finishing it too early would ruin the whole meal. My favorite treats were gummy ‘fruit’ snacks (remember those?), and I would always leave the orange ones for last, nudging them into the corner of the bag so I knew exactly how I wanted to finish. I still do this, just in different ways. I put off endings. I avoid watching the finales of television series I love, not out of forgetfulness or boredom, but because I like knowing they’re still there. As long as I haven’t seen the ending, the world it belongs to hasn’t fully closed. It stays open, available, unfinished. Out of curiosity more than concern, I Googled it, then asked an AI to see if there was a name for this instinct, clinical or otherwise. The answers came back with phrases like ‘anticipatory savoring,’ ‘deferred closure’ and even something called the ‘Zeigarnik effect.’ None of them felt quite right. Leaving it unnamed feels appropriate; naming it would already be a kind of ending (which I’m trying to avoid, remember?). In any case, over time, that habit shifted from saving finales to saving entire series. My wife and I carried ‘The Sopranos’ in our back pockets like that for a whole decade. We knew it was there, and we knew, from friends whose taste we trust and who are not prone to exaggeration, that it was among the greatest television series ever made. But we waited until a few weeks ago. A close friend would often return to a particular episode whenever we spoke about Armenia. What intrigued him was not the plot itself, but its familiarity. He was struck by how a group of Italian American men went to Italy for the first time and by how little that encounter resembled what they imagined it would be. He spoke about how the characters felt the distance between heritage and reality. Almost instinctively, he connected this to his own experiences of Armenia: not the towns or villages our parents and grandparents came from, but Armenia as a state, with its own rhythms, pressures and priorities. I didn’t know when I would finally watch the episode, or why it would matter as much as he insisted it would. And then, one evening, it arrived. Season two, episode four: ‘Commendatori.’ At first glance, ‘Commendatori’ resembles a familiar television device: the travel episode, in which a change of scenery promises novelty while reassuring viewers that nothing essential will change (‘The Simpsons,’ season six, episode 14, ‘Bart vs. Australia’ is a personal favorite). Many shows use such episodes as spectacle or fantasy, offering a brief escape from the logic of their own worlds. ‘The Sopranos’ does the opposite. In it, Italy is not the reward but a test. Each of the three men who make the trip responds to that test differently. One arrives and retreats almost immediately into drugs, reducing Italy to little more than a backdrop for his vices. Another, intoxicated by the promise of history, beauty and transcendence, barely looks at Italy at all; to him, it registers as a market and a business negotiation. But the third character, Paulie, arrives carrying something heavier and more fragile than either of them: inherited expectation. Paulie does not come to Italy in search of himself; there is no uncertainty in the way he understands who he is or where he belongs. His Italianness, affirmed and deeply internalized, was shaped over decades in New Jersey. Small fragments of the language (often bastardized), culinary traditions (often assumed), Catholic rituals (often displayed rather than practiced) and half-remembered stories (often embellished) are performed with confidence and authority. Italy, in his imagination — and in the imagination of his peers — is not a question mark or a destination of discovery, but a place that exists to confirm what he already knows to be true. ‘Commendatori’ quietly dismantles that expectation without ever staging a dramatic confrontation. Paulie’s Italian does not land, and his attempts at familiarity are met with indifference, confusion and mockery that he cannot understand. At a formal dinner, surrounded by traditional dishes and hospitality, he recoils at the food and asks, without irony, for spaghetti with tomato sauce. His hosts exchange glances and mutter insults in Italian. Paulie smiles, unaware. He wanders through Naples expecting recognition, only to encounter blankness instead. Italy does not reject Paulie dramatically; it simply does not notice him. The most minor, ordinary inconveniences undercut his expectations. At a café, when Paulie greets a stranger with an enthusiastic “Commendatori!” (“Commander!”, a greeting of respect) and raises his glass to silence. There is no response, no recognition. In another scene, a broken, poorly kept bathroom, something that should barely register, becomes a source of irritation and offense for Paulie, and inherited mythologies quickly collapse. One scene shows this especially well. Paulie learns that the sex worker he is with comes from the same town as his family. For him, this feels momentous, like a symbolic homecoming within the homecoming. He lights up, expecting recognition, even reverence, but she shrugs. To her, it is simply a town — just another place. The gap between them is not emotional or moral, but structural. What carries deep meaning for the diasporan often feels ordinary to those who ‘never left.’ Watching this episode from Yerevan, I felt a familiar unease settle in. Not because my own experience mirrors Paulie’s in any literal sense, but because this disappointment is deeply recognizable. Diaspora life, especially when it is dense and institutionally strong, trains us in a particular way of relating to identity. We grow up in spaces designed for belonging: community centers, churches, schools, youth groups and family gatherings are environments where greeting everyone feels natural, where we find our shared heritage, and where we understand ‘being Armenian.’ Identity in these spaces is intimate, communal and reciprocal. The problem arises when that logic is unconsciously transferred onto a state, which operates differently from a community and is often very different from the places we come from, culturally, linguistically and in its traditions. I have seen this repeatedly in Armenia, and I have recognized it in myself. Diasporans arrive and instinctively behave as if the country operates like an expanded community space. We greet strangers with familiarity, expect warmth and recognition and assume access. We speak confidently and critically about what should be fixed, often without fully absorbing the asymmetries of power, risk and consequence that shape daily life for those who live here. Armenia becomes a projection screen for diasporan expectations rather than a lived reality, which is often strained and uneven. In our ‘pursuit of homeland,’ we often forget how thoroughly shaped we are by the places we come from. We arrive in Armenia carrying habits, assumptions and reflexes formed in Toronto or Boston, Los Angeles or Beirut, convinced they are neutral or universal. Only once we are here do they become visible. The ways we speak, the pace we expect or the kind of relationships we assume are inheritances of our own environments. We sometimes call those places ‘adoptive,’ ‘temporary,’ even ‘foreign lands,’ as if the language itself could bend the truth or cloak it in something more comforting, something that sounds better to our ears. But often, they are the only homes we have ever actually known. What unsettles us is not the discovery that Armenia is different, but the realization of how Canadian, American, Lebanese, French (insert your own here) we are. At one point in the episode, Paulie stops being merely funny and becomes instructive. His mistake is not arrogance so much as category confusion. He treats Italy as though it exists to affirm his inherited identity, rather than to carry on its own complicated, indifferent life. Many diasporans do something similar, often with sincerity and conviction, and often without noticing how jarring that posture can be to those who live inside Armenia rather than orbit it. A country is not a family gathering; it does not exist to validate anyone’s sense of self. It has its own cadence, its own failures, its own internal arguments and its own distribution of vulnerability. Familiarity can be mistaken for belonging, but they are not the same. One of the more interesting truths ‘Commendatori’ exposes is that Paulie’s relationship to Italy is not actually rooted in return, but in symbolism. In practice, New Jersey is his homeland: It is where his life unfolded, where his language makes sense, where his habits are legible and where his sense of belonging is never in question. Italy, by contrast, plays a different role. It is an imagined origin, a cultural anchor, a place that gives weight and legitimacy to an identity formed elsewhere. Paulie likely has the financial means and freedom to visit Italy when he wants, to experience it briefly, selectively, and on his own terms and then to leave. What unsettles him is not rejection, but the realization that Italy does not recognize him as its own in the way he has long imagined. Something similar happens in the Armenian context. For many of us, places like Toronto or Boston are not temporary homes, but homelands in every practical sense: places where lives and families are built, communities are sustained and futures imagined. Armenia, meanwhile, occupies a dual position. It is undeniably a homeland, sometimes described as the first or ultimate one. Yet it is also a state with its own internal logic, pressures and inequalities that do not always align neatly with diasporan expectations. Paulie’s confusion in Italy stems from the clash between an imagined homeland and a lived one. Many diasporans encounter a similar reckoning, not because their attachment to Armenia is insincere, but because attachment alone does not determine how a country receives you or what it asks of you in return. There is a temptation, when inherited expectations collide with reality, to retreat into resentment or denial: to decide that the homeland has failed you, or to harden your identity into something defensive and self-sufficient. Paulie does neither, exactly. Instead, he narrates his experience triumphantly upon return, insisting that everyone should make the pilgrimage, even as the evidence suggests the trip gave him very little of what he expected. There is denial here, certainly, but there is also something more: an attempt to integrate disappointment without surrendering belonging. The final car ride of the episode is quiet, but very telling. One character gazes out at the familiar industrial landscape of New Jersey, unsettled, perhaps realizing that he missed something he did not know how to access. Another seems empty, having squandered the trip entirely. Paulie, however, smiles. It is not a triumphant smile; it is much smaller than that. Home reasserts itself, not through longing, but through familiarity. Living in Armenia has taught me a few things. Language, for one, stops being mostly symbolic and becomes functional. Belonging, too, shifts from something inherited to something negotiated daily. Parts of you can be compromised in that process. In my case, the Western Armenian language and Canadian cultural values are at risk (even as I do my best to hold on to them). Armenia, in turn, reveals itself not as a metaphor or a museum, but as a country under pressure, where life quickly and repeatedly tests the limits of nostalgia. What ‘Commendatori’ ultimately understands is that disillusionment is not failure, but a lesson. Paulie goes to Italy expecting enchantment and encounters regularness, inconvenience and indifference. In doing so, he experiences something many diasporans eventually confront: the homeland is not waiting to complete you; it is busy being itself. Paulie never articulates what Italy teaches him. He just sits silently, smiling, as New Jersey passes by outside the car window. In that silence is something rare and useful: the beginning of humility. It’s unromantic, unresolved and incomplete, and perhaps that is what return actually looks like.