Who is an Armenian Gharib in the 21st Century?

I was recently quite moved by one of the fantastic posts of the Armenian Museum of America’s Sound Archive series. It featured the voice of Karnig Kuludjian from 1945. A genocide survivor who ended up in the Chicago area, Kuludjian expresses confidence on the disc now online that the war in Europe would soon come to an end in favor of the Allies and the boys would return home. It is a fun recording, quite organic, made at home — a rarity for the era. You can hear the muffled voices of people in the background, laughing at Kuludjian’s amusing observations. The disc becomes even more compelling with a wonderful à propos song: Gharib Akhper, a work addressed to, roughly, a brother in exile, often framed as brothers in arms, expressing hope that they will come back. It is a song I have heard my father sing many times around many tables. So, I got a good sense of what that gathering in Chicago eighty years and more ago must have been like — beautiful, charming, melancholic.

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