Description
Includes a CD of songs. Intended mainly for young readers but of interest to adults of all ages, Dzalabadig is an unprecedented photographic journey into Aleppo, Syria, the Western-Armenian Diaspora’s first community following the Genocide. In the decades between the two World Wars, renowned photographer Vartan Derounian captured on film the daily vicissitudes and joys of Aleppo’s fledgling community of Genocide survivors. His camera candidly observed children, men and women at work and play, as families eked out a living and children were schooled in ramshackle refugee camps. Agbabian’s book presents a narrative reconstruction of those formative years and relays the story of how our forebears regrouped, reorganized and reinvented themselves and fashioned dignified lives against formidable odds after the Catastrophe. Derounian’s photographs offer ample clues about the psychology and socioeconomic of survival as a community. The stories in Dzalabadig are written in the engaging style of fairy tales, even while presenting subject matter based on history. Dzalabadig’s photographs and text are complemented by a compact disc containing an Armenian folk song, “Koghtan Mangdi.” Originally sung by Hayrig Mouradian, it is interpreted on the CD by Lucina Agbabian-Hubbard and Areni Agbabian, accompanied by Lilit Khodjayan on the kanon. The book features notations and lyrics to the song.
