Born in Turkey in 1904, Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of Armenians in 1915 only to see his mother die of starvation, his sister abandoned to an orphanage (where she disappeared), and his remaining family scattered in their flight from the Turks. Arriving with another sister in Massachusetts, in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky - and obliterated his past.
