Kurdish Children's Books from Soviet Armenia

 

The British Library’s collection of Kurdish material includes Kurdish children’s literature from Soviet Armenia. The collection, writes the curator Michael Erdman, “provides us with a valuable component to understanding a culture fractured along linguistic, political, social and economic lines. Although numerically small, the publishing history of Armenia’s Kurds highlights the importance of education as an agent of reproduction of both national culture and language, and State-sponsored ideologies. While the Kurds of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran faced severe restrictions on the use and propagation of their native language, those living in the Soviet Union were able to transform fully their mother tongue into a literary standard.”

Read Erdman’s overview on the British Library’s website here.