Haigazian University Press and Hairenik Press Launch Armenian Memory Book Seri

BEIRUT — Haigazian University Press and Hairenik Press announced the publication of “My Native Village: Okhou” by Parounag Topalian, the inaugural volume in the new Armenian Memory Book Series, dedicated to bringing the rich tradition of Armenian memory books to new generations of readers.

Originally published in Armenian by Hairenik Press in Boston in 1943, “My Native Village: Okhou” (“Im Hayreni Kiughs: Okhou”) reconstructs the world of Okhou, an Armenian village in the Ottoman Empire, through the recollections of a survivor writing nearly three decades after the Armenian Genocide. The new English edition, translated by Simon Beugekian, is jointly published by Haigazian University Press and Hairenik Press.

Armenian memory books, or houshamadyans, constitute a distinctive literary and historical genre created primarily by survivors and descendants of the Armenian Genocide. Combining history, ethnography, geography, genealogy, folklore, photographs, maps, dialects, memoirs, traditions, accounts of daily life, and narratives of genocide and exile, these works sought to reconstruct communities that had been destroyed and populations dispersed. They function at once as historical archives, cultural artifacts, acts of resistance against erasure, and emotional roadmaps through which displaced Armenians preserved and reimagined home in exile.

The Armenian Memory Book Series will republish significant Armenian memory books, bring previously unpublished works into print, and make important texts available in English translation. Volumes will also incorporate critical commentary and new research situating individual memory books and the communities they document within the broader history and cultural heritage of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and its surrounding regions.

The series grew out of a proposal by George Aghjayan to translate the memory books of his ancestral hometown of Palu. Discussions among Aghjayan, Haigazian University President Rev. Dr. Paul Haidostian, and series co-editors Antranig Dakessian and Khatchig Mouradian developed that initial project into a broader initiative encompassing Armenian towns and villages across the former Ottoman Empire.

“The authors of these memory books undertook the formidable task of reconstructing the social, cultural, and physical worlds of communities destroyed by genocide and exile,” Dakessian and Mouradian write in their introduction to the series. “Their work preserved invaluable historical knowledge while creating enduring monuments of memory for descendants and future generations.”

The publication of “My Native Village: Okhou” marks the beginning of what the editors envision as a wide-ranging series that will make these extraordinary repositories of Armenian history and memory accessible to scholars, descendants of the communities they document, and general readers alike. More than eight decades after Topalian first published his account, “My Native Village: Okhou” now introduces an English-language readership to both one lost Armenian village and the remarkable tradition through which survivors sought to ensure that such places would not disappear from memory.

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