What Our Words Mean: Towards the Vindication of Medz Yeghern

Vartan Matiossian

 



People do not bother to look for attitudes and terminology
which will assert their unique identities,
but rather opt for popular and widely current formulas.
–The Armenian Weekly, editorial (1981)¹

 

‘Shoah’ or ‘Holocaust’?

A crime against humanity may trigger a catastrophe for the victims, as exemplified by the obliteration of Jewish life throughout continental Europe during World War II. The close relationship between evil, calamity, and crime should be regarded as one of the logical reasons for the adoption of the word Shoah (Catastrophe) as the name of a catastrophic crime against humanity.

It is interesting to recall that when the term genocide had not yet been coined, the Armenian extermination that began in 1915 was called “administrative holocaust” by Winston Churchill (1929). According to journalist William Safire (1929-2009), it appears that Raphael Lemkin’s word “struck many as too clinical a description of what happened” in Nazi Germany, and therefore gradually yielded its place to holocaust to name the Jewish genocide.²

Towards Cilicia

Zabel Yessayan

Translated by Jennifer Manoukian

The 1909 massacres of Cilicia, focused in Adana, were the subject of abundant literature at the time. The "Grand Dame of Armenian literature," Zabel Yessayan (1878-1943), published in 1911 her testimonial masterpiece Աւերակներու մէջ (Amid the Ruins), written after her July-September 1909 sojourn as a member of the delegation sent by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople to help the victims and search for orphans. The following is the first chapter of the book.

Exile and Memory in Contemporary Western Armenian Literature

Jennifer Manoukian



A thick stack of black and white photographs flutters to the floor. A man stands over the jumbled pile and, looking past bent corners and nibbled edges, sees dozens of faces staring up at him. These faces are vaguely familiar—an old neighbor, a distant cousin, an aunt who used to spend summers with him. Some photos land face down and, from his height, the man can just make out the names and dates scribbled in purple ink across the backs.

He kneels down and, with the tips of his fingers, quickly rakes the photographs into a haphazard mound. He leans over it to inspect the faces more closely and immediately a voice begins whispering in his ear. Memories begin to flood the room. But these memories are not his own; they belong to the men and women in the photos. This voice anchors them to a story, breathes life into their stoic faces and makes their one-dimensional images come alive. But it also transfers the crushing weight of their memories onto this man’s shoulders.

In these memories lie the aching pain and unrelenting torment of deracination and exile. Although this suffering is not his own, he treats it as if it were an indelible part of his personal experience, silently assuming the burden of memory and selflessly disregarding its psychological toll.