Bagdasar Bagdasarian was around 24 years old when, in 1888, he permanently left his village Verin Khokh (current name Deveyolu) and immigrated to the United States. He had been educated in the Armenian school of the village, which meant he never had the opportunity to study past primary school. He wrote in simple, conversational Armenian;
Most would be discouraged from embarking on a writing project if they hadn’t yet mastered a language, or couldn’t write without making mistakes. But Bagdasar Bagdasarian ignored this hurdle, and in the process left us a memory book of about a hundred pages, in which he tells the story of Verin Khokh until the time he left it.
We present here his Armenian original with only minor changes.
