PRESS RELEASE
ARMENIAN GENERAL BENEVOLENT UNION
2495 E. Mountain St, Pasadena, CA 91104
Tel: (626) 794 7942
Fax: (626) 794 2622
E-mail: info@agbuca.org
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A Book Signing Event with Michael Bobelian at the AGBU Alex Manoogian Center
With the collaboration of Abril Bookstore, the AGBU Glendale/Pasadena
Chapter is hosting a special presentation and book signing of author
Michael Bobelian’s `Chidren of Armenia’ due to be published by Simon &
Schuster on September 1st, 2009.
Michael Bobelian, a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism, is a lawyer, journalist, and grandson of Genocide
survivors and currently resides in New York City. His work has
appeared in Forbes.com, American Lawyer, and Legal Affairs magazine
and has been featured on NPR’s Leonard Lopate show.
After uncovering his family’s experiences during the Genocide, Michael
Bobelian struggled to rationalize how an event as widely reported as
the Genocide – more than a hundred articles ran in The New York Times
in 1915, with a typical headline exclaiming `Wholesale Massacres of
Armenians by Turks’ – could fade from public consciousness. Why was
the Genocide ignored, forgotten, and, worse, relegated to fiction for
so long? What role did America’s national self-interest play in
helping Turkey evade public accountability? Why did Armenians
themselves initially stand silent? Based on years of archival research
and personal interviews, Children of Armenia is the first book to
trace this post-Genocide history and reveal the events that have
conspired to eradicate the `hidden holocaust’ from the world’s memory.
At the close of World War I, the upsurge of support for the Genocide’s
survivors, considered one of the world’s first international human
right movements, inspired the few remaining Armenian leaders – such as
Simon Vratsian, the ravaged nation’s last prime minister, and Vahan
Cardashian, Armenia’s chief advocate in the United States – to seek
relief and justice for their people. But despite their tireless
efforts, the promises made to them by the war’s victors were
systematically cast aside during postwar negotiations. In the end, the
Armenians received nothing, not even an apology, and decades of
silence would pass before the Genocide’s survivors – dispersed,
stateless, and on the verge of extinction – would produce a new
generation of activists who would renew their fight for justice.
In Children of Armenia, we meet Gourgen Yanikian, a seventy-seven year
old terrorist bent on revenge, whose act of terrible violence in
southern California galvanized a movement for recognition=3B Vartkes
Yeghiayan, a lawyer who brought a class action suit against New York
Life, seeking to win a judgment for thousands of unclaimed policies=3B
and Van Krikorian, who teamed up with Senator Bob Dole to gain public
acknowledgment of the Genocide from the U.S. government. From the
initial acts of revenge-fueled terrorism to the birth of an organized
movement seeking recognition for these unacknowledged crimes –
including political maneuvering to get a resolution passed by the
U.S. Congress – this is a groundbreaking account of the Armenian
struggle to seek redress in the face of recalcitrant perpetrators and
an indifferent world.
Bobelian delivers a powerful lesson on the price that is paid when
injustice goes unacknowledged and a moving story of a people living in
the shadow of a century-old genocide.
The presentation and book signing will take place September 24th at
7:30PM at the Boyajian Hall of the Alex Manoogian Center at 2495 E
Mountain Street in Pasadena, CA. For detailed information, please
contact the AGBU offices at (626) 794 7942.
Established in 1906, AGBU () is the world’s largest
non-profit Armenian organization. Headquartered in New York City, AGBU
preserves and promotes the Armenian identity and heritage through
educational, cultural and humanitarian programs, annually serving some
400,000 Armenians on five continents.