GLENDALE’S ABRIL BOOKSTORE AN OUTPOST OF ARMENIAN CULTURE
By James Ricci, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times, CA
Aug. 10, 2006
Abril Books in Glendale is a touchstone for immigrants and their
Americanized offspring.
Thirty years ago, with his native Lebanon going up in the flames of
civil war, Harout Yeretzian, a Lebanese Armenian, came to Hollywood
and joined his brother in founding a magazine devoted to the Armenian
language and culture.
One thing led to another. The magazine spawned a print shop, which
spawned a bookstore, which spawned a small publishing house.
Three decades later, the brother is gone. So are the magazine and
the print shop. Yeretzian’s dedication to his people’s literature,
art and music, however, remains, domiciled now in a cottage-like
brick building near Glendale City Hall.
Abril Books, which claims to be the largest of the half-dozen
Armenian-language bookstores in the United States, is light-filled,
as befits a place of cultural illumination. Open doors, front and back,
send air currents eddying among shelves and stacks of Armenian-themed
books, including the handful that Abril publishes each year, as well
as periodicals, greeting cards and music CDs.
Unseen loudspeakers lightly bathe everything in classical cello music.
The 62-year-old Yeretzian is a small bear of a man with a bristling
mustache and wavy, gray, sweptback hair. His voice is deep and abraded
by a daily succession of Marlboro Lights.
His mission is to help his fellow Armenians maintain their ancient
identity. It’s not an easy matter for a people that, in the 1st
century B.C., ruled an empire stretching from the Mediterranean to
the Caspian Sea but since has been scattered by economic privation
and persecution to the far reaches of the Earth. With only a tiny,
recently independent, Armenian state to serve as a point of contact
for ethnic sensibility, Yeretzian says, literature, art and religion
have had to play central roles in sustaining a sense of cohesiveness
among the world’s Armenian communities.
He cites, as an example, author Krikor Beledian, whom Abril Books
publishes. "This guy lives in Paris and teaches at the Sorbonne. He
writes in Armenian about Lebanon, and I’m here in L.A., and I publish
his books," Yeretzian says.
Abril – in Armenian the word means both "April" and "hope" – contains
about 5,000 titles, among them histories, novels, volumes of poetry
and treatises on Armenian art and music. The books include works in
Eastern Armenian, the language of Armenia proper, and Western Armenian,
the language of Armenians who hail from more westerly parts of the
Middle East, such as Lebanon and Syria. The differences between them,
Yeretzian says, are significant, including variations in word suffixes
and verb conjugation.
The challenge of multiple languages, however, is not insurmountable
for a small ethnic group that has had to live for so long in foreign
lands. As a boy in Lebanon, he says, he had to learn Armenian, Arabic,
English and French.
"It’s not really hard to learn languages," he says, with something
like incomprehension at the American aversion to the task. "But here,
the American people don’t even learn English very well."
Preserving the Armenian language among young Armenian Americans is
becoming a bit of a problem, however. Yeretzian says that at his
original store, off Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, 80% of the
books he carried were in Armenian and 20% in English. In his present
store, which opened in 1998, Armenian-language books constitute only
about half of his stock. The other half is by Americans of Armenian
descent – such as Peter Balakian, author of "Burning Tigris: The
Armenian Genocide and America’s Response" – who write in English.
(Yeretzian notes that nearly half of the books in English refer to
the massacres of Armenians by Turkish authorities from 1915 to 1923,
while barely a quarter of the Armenian-language books deal with the
subject. Both of Yeretzian’s grandfathers died in the executions and
forced starvations, which took the lives, it is estimated, of 800,000
to 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children.)
Abril sold books to the Los Angeles Unified School District when
instruction for newly arrived immigrant children was conducted in
Armenian. Those sales ended, a significant blow to Abril’s business,
in 1998 with the passage of Proposition 227, which virtually banned
bilingual education in California.
As with other ethnic groups, assimilation of the young into American
culture is a concern to many older Armenians. The experience of
Yeretzian’s own son Arno, a 30-year-old filmmaker, is a case in point.
Arno, the only child of Yeretzian and his artist/gallery owner wife,
Seeroon, attended Armenian private schools through high school. All
of his friends were Armenian. Then he enrolled at UC Santa Cruz and,
as one of the relatively few Armenian Americans there, befriended
students of different ethnic backgrounds.
"The clash with American culture was very strong," Yeretzian says.
"Now he says we should have exposed him to more American culture when
he was a kid. Most of his friends are Americans now." Yeretzian has
faith, however, that the strength of Armenian families will keep the
Armenian sensibility intact among the next generation.
"A lot of people who are engaged to marry Armenians, or already
have, come in and ask for books on the Armenian tradition and
language. So, the assimilation goes both ways," he says with a
grin. "If a non-Armenian girl marries an Armenian, she has to learn
some Armenian words just to be taken into consideration as a human
being by his family."
That the bookstore is a sanctuary of Armenian identity is apparent
in the motivations of those who visit.
Narine Gabouchian of Glendale came into the shop one morning and
before long was carrying an armload of books, in Armenian and English,
as gifts for her daughter Margaret’s 16th birthday. Margaret came
with her family from Armenia when she was a toddler, and her parents
strove to teach her to read and speak Armenian.
Now a student at a private school in Pasadena, Margaret "knows she’s
Armenian and is very proud of it," her mother said. "She would like
to know more about her motherland."
Later that day, Avetis Bairamian, a sportswriter for the Armenian
language weekly Nor Or, dropped in on Yeretzian to exchange
pleasantries and discuss Bairamian’s self-published book, whose title
translates as "Famous Armenians in the World of Sports."
It contains the exploits of competitors of Armenian heritage,
including tennis star Andre Agassi, chess champion Garry Kasparov
and a succession of champions in weightlifting, a sport in which
Armenians have long excelled.
Bairamian proudly noted that at the 37th Chess Olympiad this spring
in Turin, Italy, the Armenian team won the gold medal. (China won
silver, and the United States, whose squad included 23-year-old
Varuzhan Akobian of Los Angeles, bronze.)
Ruzanne Barsegyan of Tujunga, meanwhile, was scanning the CD
shelves for a copy of the "Sonatina Toccata" by Aram Khachaturian,
the most famous Armenian composer of the 20th century. Barsegyan,
18, an animated recent high school graduate headed for premedical
studies at UC Irvine in the fall, is also a pianist.
Her conservatory-trained Armenian piano teacher wanted her to begin
learning the Khachaturian piece for a recital, she explained with a
mixture of excitement and dread.
"It’s very structured, and you have to find the rhythm and the rhythm
is hard to find," she told Yeretzian. "It’s very difficult, very,
very …. "
"Strong?" he offered.
"Yes. Strong."
Yeretzian shrugged knowingly. "It’s Armenian," he said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
