A History of Armenian Womenâ (TM)s Writing: 1880-1921 introduces the reader to the wealth and diversity of womenâ (TM)s writing in Armenian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The volume focuses on six Armenian women writers-Srpouhi Dussap, Sibyl, Mariam Khatisian, Marie Beylerian, Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayian and these authorsâ (TM) novels, short stories, poems and essays. The study contends that Western and Eastern Armenian women writers, while not displaying a uniformity of opinion and vision, nevertheless found inspiration in the activism, writings and arguments of one another and form a literary genealogy of womenâ (TM)s writing in Armenian. The study has several objectives. For general readers and those interested primarily in the historical account it provides a chronological description of the formative period of modern Armenian womenâ (TM)s writing beginning in 1880 with the publication of a series of articles on womenâ (TM)s education and employment by Srpouhi Dussap and concludes with the physical dislocations and psychological traumas of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 and the fall of the first independent Republic of Armenia in 1921. On another level the book concentrates on disentangling the contemporaneous intellectual debates about Armenian womenâ (TM)s proper sphere. The author argues that the role of the Armenian woman was central to debates about national identity, education, the family and society by Armenian writers and women writers sought to participate in and guide this discourse through literary texts.

“This searing account of a little boy wrenched from family and innocence” during the Armenian genocide “is a literary gem” (Financial Times). When World War I began, Karnig Panian was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly a thousand Armenian and four hundred Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to survive at the orphanage without adult care. This memoir offers the extraordinary story of what he endured in those years—as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage. The Antoura orphanage was another project of the Armenian genocide: Its administrators, some benign and some cruel, sought to transform the children into Turks by changing their Armenian names, forcing them to speak Turkish, and erasing their history. Panian’s memoir is a full-throated story of loss, resistance, and survival, but told without bitterness or sentimentality. His story shows us how even young children recognize injustice and can organize against it, how they can form a sense of identity that they will fight to maintain. He paints a painfully rich and detailed picture of the lives and agency of Armenian orphans during the darkest days of World War I. Ultimately, Karnig Panian survived the Armenian genocide and the deprivations that followed. Goodbye, Antoura assures us of how humanity, once denied, can be again reclaimed.