A Life Shaped by Displacement The early years of Simon Samsonyan were defined by the sudden, violent shifts of history. Born in 1912, he was a child of the Armenian Genocide, orphaned as a toddler and forced into a life of movement. He survived the fires of Smyrna and the fall of Constantinople, moving through the chaos of the early twentieth century before finding a sense of place in Egypt. This early experience of loss and survival l…