by Hrag Vartanian
Most observers agree that it is the intellectual focus of the Boston community that gives it its uniqueness in the Diaspora. The region boasts five institutions that study and preserve the past and are committed to making it available for future generations. Each fosters a different aspect of the Armenian heritage but combine to create the Armenian community's cerebral flair.
SETTING THE STANDARD
NAASR's mission to educate
Described by former Armenian presidential advisor Gerard Libaridian as the "father of the Armenian Studies movement internationally," the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, commonly called NAASR, was the first to cultivate the fertile landscape that Armenian Studies enjoys in the U.S. today. Emerging from a singular idea to establish an Armenian Studies chair at Harvard, it has since evolved to encapsulate many ideals shared by its members.
The name that has become synonymous with NAASR and its four and a half decades of history is Manoug Young's. A native of Boston, Young grew up in the city's South End. After studying physics and mathematics at Northeastern University, he served during the Second World War in Europe as part of the U.S. Air Force. After the war, he had the opportunity to study at the London School of Economics.
Upon returning from overseas, he briefly taught at the University of Massachusetts Fort Devon, but was soon accepted at Clark University for graduate studies in International Relations. He researched 'The Kars and Ardahan Question' and became fully aware of the lack of resources available to students in Armenian Studies. He traveled across the country in search of elusive source material. As part of the requirements for his doctoral studies, he took an evening course at Harvard on Middle Eastern history. He noticed that the course's instructor, Dr. Richard N. Frye, lingered on Armenian topics and the graduate student approached him to learn about the professor's interests.
He discovered Frye's interest in Armenian subjects was extensive. Dr. Frye, it seems, hoped to establish a Harvard Chair in Armenian studies and was planning to write letters to prominent Armenians to gauge their interest. Since the required minimum donation to establish the position was $300,000, Young, who had never heard of any donation in the Armenian community exceeding $25,000, advised that the 'nickel and dime' route was more feasible.
Young sprung into action and interviewed Dr. Frye for a local Armenian paper while arranging for the professor to speak and introduce the concept to Boston Armenians. Young recalls that the Harvard professor aroused the audience when he declared, "The trouble with you Armenians is that you have a ghetto mentality."
The work to establish a Harvard Armenian Studies Chair began soon thereafter. Young, along with Thomas T. Amirian and Dr. Arra S. Avakian, invited individuals that unofficially represented diverse segments of the community to form a committee. According to Young, they devised a fundraising plan and set up an organizational structure which eventually became NAASR, "We didn't know how long it would take but we knew it would go to an endowment fund and the money wouldn't go down the drain."
In March 1955, they held their inaugural general meeting at Harvard. That night 60 people, including a number of Harvard professors, became founding members of the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).
During the next four years, NAASR garnered grassroots support and established over 25 chapters, including Detroit, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
In June 1959, NAASR held its Victory Banquet in Harvard's historic Memorial Hall with nearly 1,000 people in attendance and announced that they raised $388,000 for the Harvard Chair. Young remembers that the hall erupted in jubilation. Soon the University appointed a research fellow who was replaced in 1969 by Dr. Robert W. Thomson, the first occupant of Harvard's Mesrob Mashtots Chair. At the time, it was the only professorship to be endowed by a community organization at Harvard and possibly the first in the country.
NAASR's next campaign proved more challenging. Plans were drawn up to establish a similar chair on the West Coast. Los Angeles' 25,000 strong Armenian community and the University of California, Los Angeles' (UCLA) desire to create a Middle Eastern department with an integral Armenian component, encouraged NAASR to choose UCLA.
Fundraising the second time around took longer but by 1965 UCLA's Grigor Narekatsi Chair of Armenian Studies was inaugurated and the $200,000 endowment established the chair with Dr. Avedis K. Sanjian appointed as its first occupant in 1969.
"At the time I started my Master's research you couldn't buy half a dozen books in the English language on Armenian subjects that were worth anything. Now there are 1,500 active titles and over 2,000 books published on the topic. Many of them—about 100—are a direct or indirect influence by what we've done," Young says of the success of NAASR's Armenian Book Clearing House that began in 1960 in order to make publications accessible to a wider public.
Today only a few regional chapters remain, but NAASR's Belmont headquarters continues to organize lectures and conferences. Its resources include the Edward and Helen Mardigian Armenian Reference and Research Library, the Armenian Heritage Press and the Armenian Information, Education and Documentation Center for the dissemination of information to students, academics and the media.
Young, who has served as NAASR Chairman since its inception in 1955, points out that plans are underway to establish an Armenian Studies chair in the nation's capital. The ten Armenian Studies chairs that exist today are a testament to NAASR's original efforts to galvanize Armenians and ensure that Armenian history receives the attention it deserves.
At its 10,000-square foot headquarters building, the largest fundraising effort in NAASR's history will also soon begin with a goal of $5 million to establish an Institute for Armenian Studies and Research.
In contrast to NAASR's well-publicized accomplishments, the least known cultural institution with an Armenian focus is the Armenian Cultural Foundation (ACF).
THE ARMENIAN CULTURAL FOUNDATION PRESERVES THE LITERARY HERITAGE
The Armenian Cultural Foundation (ACF) appears as an apparition situated amongst the manicured lawns of Arlington, Massachusetts. Founded in 1945 and dedicated to the prolific Armenian writer Elia Demirjibashian, the ACF is a treasure house of Armenian and non-Armenian sources archived in an elegant nineteenth century building framed by ionic columns.
A collection as eclectic as its founder, Vahan Topalian, it includes rare Armenian journals, letters by eighteenth century French luminaries Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Tiffany lamps and countless volumes of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat.
"We are very proud of our periodical collection, which is why we have compiled them into a catalogue for academics. We know that we have things that don't exist in the National Library of Armenia," says Ara Ghazarians, ACF's curator, originally from Iran and a recent Ph.D. in Sociology from Northeastern University.
Best-known as the author of Torn Between Two Lands, a unique study of early Armenian Americans, ACF President Robert Mirak inherited his position from his father, John Mirak. His father, a well-known community benefactor, was approached by Topalian to take over the financially troubled organization.
"Topalian was a free-thinking radical. One day he came into my father's office with a big pile of books and introduced himself. He said, 'We want you to become President.' My father replied that he didn't know about books. Topalian slammed his fist on the desk and insisted, 'You don't have to know anything about books to be President.' My father said he'd let him know," Mirak remembers about his father's earliest encounter with Topalian.
The next day, John Mirak received a phone call from ACF's lawyer informing him that he was elected President and he should appear in court the following day to represent the foundation. Robert Mirak says that while his father reluctantly became involved, his eventual enthusiasm for the foundation is reflected in The John Mirak Foundation's continuing support of the ACF.
While recognizing the treasures within the ACF's walls, Mirak believes the building is their greatest treasure, "Whenever we have a delegation from Armenia, they're very touched that a small group in the Diaspora that's supposedly 'lost' to the nation is really keeping up the efforts."
Recently, ACF has offered a home to the Armenian International Women's Association's (AIWA) Alice Kanlian Mirak Archive, who was both a member of AIWA and Robert Mirak's late wife, and has begun building a small collection of Armenian musicology.
Mirak hopes ACF will integrate into the region's rich intellectual life, "We want to acquaint people with the institution and then start tapping into some of the treasures in the non-Armenian collection—there's probably a story behind many of the rugs and furniture. We are trying to get everything we have on-line so that other people can learn what is here."
If preserving a rich literary and artistic past is the primary focus of the ACF, the Armenian Library and Museum of America (ALMA) has a wider mandate to collect, preserve, study and display the wealth of Armenian culture in its entirety. Unwittingly, ALMA has become the Armenian community's unofficial ambassador to the region's non-Armenians.
ALMA DISPLAYS THE RICHES AND DIVERSITY OF ARMENIANS
Like the unofficial city hall of Watertown, the Armenian Library and Museum of America (ALMA) stands at the heart of Watertown Square dominating most buildings in the busy junction. Founded in 1971 by local Armenian professionals, including Haig Der Manuelian, Arthur T. Grigorian, Paul Barsam, James Hekemian, Dr. Aram Chobanian, Diana Der Hovanessian and others, ALMA began as a library storehouse and today houses over 6,000 objects and 11,000 volumes.
Its riches include the breadth of Armenian history from a 1666 Armenian Bible printed in Amsterdam to the artifacts from an Armenian church in Indonesia.
"The Armenian presence is virtually everywhere historically. You can take anything and approach it from an Armenian point of view," says Gary Lind-Sinanian, ALMA's curator.
Lind-Sinanian, formerly a librarian at Brandeis University, is an unlikely curator of the largest Armenological collection in the Americas. Raised in an Irish-Scottish family in South Boston he explains, "I didn't realize there was an Armenian community growing up. My first exposure was in a college course. Professor Vahe Sarafian taught World History as Armenians perceived it. It was an ethnocentric perspective and I later told him that people on campus made jokes about him but he didn't care. He said the fact that three of his students, including me, became specialists in Armenian studies made it worthwhile."
Visitors are often awed by the impressive artistic objects but Lind-Sinanian sees ALMA's value in its interest in social history, "We had some academics from Harvard a few years ago to evaluate the collections and they reported that our uniqueness is the common pieces that have little monetary value such as immigrant passports and a broken violin somebody brought over in steerage a hundred years ago."
Guided by a policy to collect everything from Bibles to bumper stickers, some of the objects have been acquired in unusual ways, Lind-Sinanian explains, "Once, we were showing packs of cigarettes from Armenia that we collected over the years to an Armenian Government Minister. When he looked at the assortment he laughed and said, 'Let me add,' and took out his pack and stuck it in the drawer—which I catalogued later."
ALMA has recently reached out to non-Armenians nationally by mounting Genocide exhibits at numerous Holocaust Museums, "The Turks have done their best to destroy and scatter the culture. Every artifact and every piece of information we gather here is a validation that they've failed." It is a philosophy that Project SAVE's founder Ruth Thomasian shares.
AN ARCHIVE LIKE NO OTHER: Project Save
"I was working in New York on William Saroyan's play, The Armenians, which is set in a Fresno coffee house. All the men around the table are from different villages and towns and I had to dress them according to how they would've looked," Ruth Thomasian says of the beginning of the Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Inc. in 1975.
Confronted by the lack of material she became resourceful, "I wondered if Armenians had photographs of the old country and would they let me borrow them for research. That's the premise I started with. I soon realized Armenians had wonderful photographs and within three or four years I knew that I'd have to make a choice between costume design and collecting photographs and I've never regretted my decision.
"You see different cultures in the photos—the fez, the European dress—they all combine to say, 'This is Armenian,'" Thomasian says with the enthusiasm that continues to drive her.
When Thomasian adopted the archive project as her labor of love her German Connecticut Yankee mother supported her, while her Armenian American father dismissed the notion as something that could never earn her a living. She credits her mother's German genes for giving her the mindset to prove him wrong. She jokes, "I don't think I'd be doing this work if I was 100% Armenian, either I'd eventually be fed up with it or I'd think I knew it all."
For 25 years, Project SAVE has collected over 20,000 images. The archive's oldest image is a rare print of Etchmiadzin from c.1860—perhaps the oldest photograph of the cathedral.
"I feel that every community should have a Project SAVE. We know they don't and we're happy to collect all of them but our focus is the Armenian American community. We collect everything that has to do with Armenians. We don't have a beginning and ending date, right up to yesterday," Thomasian says indicating that the contemporary photos she began collecting decades ago have already become important historical documents.
Sustained predominantly by donations from Armenian Americans, Project SAVE has also received support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for over a decade. These funds have allowed its founder to draw a modest salary and hire a part-time archivist and an administrative assistant. Thomasian realizes that soon they will need to court million-dollar donors to house and preserve the collection, "It's not going to do any good for all of it to be packed up in someone's basement, that would be a tragedy. It's time for Project SAVE to have a life of its own and take on its own responsibilities."
"As Armenians, we're at the forefront of ethnic preservation in this country. I don't know of any other ethnic group that collects, documents and makes photos available to the public," Thomasian points out.
Another organization at the vanguard of ethnic history is also the newest kid on the block, the Armenian International Women's Association (AIWA).
AIWA FINDS A PLACE FOR ARMENIAN WOMEN
"One of the things that sets the Armenian community ahead of other ethnic communities in this country is that we now have women's organizations as elevated as AIWA. We are the beneficiaries of 100 years of Armenian women in this country who have contributed over and over again," says Armenian International Women's Association President Susan Moranian.
Best known for their international conferences, AIWA has published the proceedings of the first gatherings in London and Paris and most recently mounted its third conference last fall in Yerevan.
Only 10 years old, AIWA has already been successful in responding to the concerns of Armenian women worldwide. Represented at the United Nations as an official NGO (non-governmental organization) and a participant in the landmark 1995 conference on women in Beijing, China, AIWA has affiliates across the country and branches in Canada, Argentina, Europe and Lebanon.
Today, AIWA aligns itself with three women's health initiatives in Armenia and Karabakh, offers the Agnes K. Missirian Scholarship to female students of Armenian descent, contributes to the Cambridge Yerevan Sister City Association's Armenian School Aid Project, maintains the Women's Information Center and Archives at the ACF and has just released the Armenian translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves to educate women in Armenia about personal health.
Moranian explains, "We physically bring together Armenian women from all over the globe. While they may sound interesting on paper, they are incredibly energizing in person. To be in a room with 200 high powered, highly creative and interesting Armenian women who want to build bridges and find ways to go forward together is exhilarating."
"We're always looking at new horizons to reach," Moranian affirms about AIWA's future.
Over a century after its founding, Boston's Armenian community is responding to the realities of today and preparing for the challenges of tomorrow by establishing institutions that will serve and foster
