Book Launch with Boris Adjemian

The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention warmly welcomes Boris Adjemian to discuss his new book, The Library and the Survivor: An Armenian Intellectual in the Century of Genocides.

The book follows Aram Andonian, a refugee in Paris since 1919, who is both the designer and the linchpin of the Bibliothèque Nubar, the Armenian Library in Paris. A survivor of the 1915 massacres, he was also one of those who documented the genocide, collecting hundreds of testimonies from survivors on the ground at the time of deportation or later in exile.

At the critical moment of the destruction and dispersion of a people, the Library appears as a response to annihilation. Aram Andonian designed its plans, furnishings, and organization before himself settling there. He tirelessly solicited donations from Alexandria, Constantinople, Aleppo, Venice, Boston, and elsewhere. In 1941, this remarkable collection was the target of Nazi looting, which Andonian chronicled at the same time that he rescued the most valuable volumes from the greed of the occupying forces. After the war, in the Library, where he lived in seclusion, he continued his work as archivist and writer to the end, while the annihilation of the Jews of Europe, the Nuremberg Trials, and the concept of genocide forged by Raphael Lemkin shed new light on the mass crimes suffered by the Armenians thirty years earlier.

Boris Adjemian delivers here, in the form of an eminently embodied narrative, the dual biography of a man and a place. It is a major contribution to the history of Armenians in the twentieth century, bringing together the material history of knowledge, heritage practices, and genocide.

Boris Adjemian is a historian and researcher at the Centre de recherches historiques (CRH) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). Since 2013, he has been director of the AGBU Nubar Library and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Études arméniennes contemporaines. In addition to numerous articles, he has published La fanfare du négus. Les Arméniens en Éthiopie (XIXe-XXe siècles), Éditions de l'EHESS, 2013, and Les Petites Arménies de la vallée du Rhône. Histoire et mémoires des immigrations arméniennes en France, Lieux Dits, 2020. He is also a Lecturer at AUP this semester.