The latest podcast is with Judith Saryan, who edited a new English edition of Zabel Yessayan’s account of a trip to Adana in the aftermath of pogroms targeting Armenians there in 1909.
Download the podcast or listen below:
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Read my Hurriyet Daily News review of “In the Ruins: The 1909 Massacres of Armenians in Adana” (AIWA).
Here’s an interview from last year with translator Jennifer Manoukian, discussing Yessayan’s remarkable life and work.
Here’s another piece I wrote last year for Al Monitor from a crumbling station on the Armenian side of the closed Turkey-Armenia border. The immediate political dynamics have changed since then but it may still be an interesting read. View photos I took of the station here.
Finally, let me flag up my newly opened Patreon account – Through it you can support the Turkey Book Talk podcast by making a monetary donation, large or small, on a per episode basis. Check it out. Many thanks to my first supporter Sera Aleksandra Marshall.
Discussing the life of Zabel Yessayan with translator Jennifer Manoukian
February 14, 2015
My review this week was of “The Gardens of Silihdar,” Armenian feminist Zabel Yessayan’s (1878-1943) memoir of growing up in Ottoman Istanbul. Yessayan fled the city in 1915 after being included as the only woman on the Young Turk regime’s list of Armenian intellectuals targeted for detention and deportation. The book was first published in Soviet Armenia in the 1930s, shortly before Yessayan was arrested in Stalin’s purges and exiled to Siberia.
I caught up with translator Jennifer Manoukian to discuss Yessayan’s remarkable life and work. You can read the interview at the Hürriyet Daily News here.
Read my review of “The Gardens of Silihdar” here.
For those interested, both “The Gardens of Silihdar” and Yessayan’s novel “My Soul in Exile” were recently published in English translations by the small press of the Armenian International Women’s Association.
Turkey Book Talk 