Şehriban Aslan/JINHA

NEWS CENTER –Zabel Yesayan was one of the Ottoman Empire's and the Armenian community's first feminists. Zabel, who witnessed firsthand the massacre of Armenians and herself escaped being rounded up on the notoriousnight of April 24, 1915 at the start of the Armenian genocide, dedicated her life and her writings to peace. She stands today as one of the most important Armenian intellectuals of her period.

Zabel was born in 1878, in the Istanbul neighborhood of Üsküdar—childhood years she was later to recall in her autobiography, 1935's "The Gardens of Silihdar."As a young woman, in 1890, Zabel joinedthe literary salon of Kayiane Madagyan, an Armenian feminist who worked to found schools for Armenian children in the city. During this period, she published her first poem, at 17.

Zabel went to the Sorbonne to study literature and philosophy, where she supported herself by proofreading Guy de Lignan's French-Armenian dictionary and publishing on issues of women and poverty. In Paris, Zabel married the Istanbulite Armenian painter Dickran Yesayan, whom she had first met in Kayiane Madagyan's literary salon. They had two children, Sophie and Hrant.

The family returned to Istanbul in 1902, where Zabel made her name as a writer with her first novel, "The Waiting Room." She is today remembered for her early contributions to Ottoman and Armenian feminism, which she made by editing the first women's page of Armenian newspapers and publishing prolifically.(One of her novels, satirizing Armenian male intellectuals, was left unpublished by her male editors.) The family, finding it difficult to get by in Istanbul, returned to Paris in 1905, but came back to Istanbul in 1908, in the wake of the Young Turk Revolution.

What she saw on her return led Zabel, a staunch anti-militarist, to increasingly openly propound the necessity of a people's rebellion, in the wake of what she saw as a falserevolution. She also broke from the Armenian Dashnakstsutyun Party in this period, saying they had left behind the socialist principles on which they had been founded.

In 1909, a series of massacres of Armenians took place in the region of Cilicia, in southern Turkey. News of the events in Cilicia deeply affected Zabel. She headed to the city of Adana as part of a fact-finding mission to investigate the massacre, producing a report on her findings. Zabel took up the subject of the massacresand what she witnessed in Adana in her 1911 book "Among the Ruins."

"When we first set foot in Mersine, my impression of it was very clear. It was as though we were crossing the threshold into the realm of death," wrote Zabel, as translated by Jennifer Manoukian. "People received us with unspoken sadness…. Who knows what was so foreign about us that made them not want to talk to us?"

The events of 1915 were to nearlyend Zabel's life. Zabel, long engaged in her writings in advocating peace policies by the Ottoman Empire, was on the list of 234 Armenian intellectuals rounded up on the night of April 24 in Istanbul—the only woman targeted in the notorious action that marked the beginning of the Armenian genocide. She managed to escape by hiding in a hospital, after which she was forced into exile.

Her journey took her from Bulgaria to Baku, Azerbaijan, where in 1917 she began working to aid Armenian refugees there. In 1920, she returned to Cilicia to work in orphanages, also living in France during her exile.Zabel moved to Soviet Armenia in 1933, when she was invited to become a professor of French and Western Armenian literature at Yerevan State University.

Soviet officials arrested Zabel, a longtime patriot of Soviet Armenia, in 1937, allegedly for producing "propaganda," and exiled her to Siberia. She lost her life in prison under unknown circumstances in either 1942 or 1943.

Today, only two ofZabel'smany bookshave been translated into English: her memoir "The Gardens of Silihdar" and 1919's reflections on her work with Armenian orphans, titled "My Soul in Exile." Her prolific body of work includes novels on the theme of exile and alienation; impressions on the social conditions of Soviet Armenia; and the Armenian experience of genocide and massacre that she witnessed.

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