Vera B. Saeedpour, Scholar and Archivist of the Kurdish Culture, Dies at 80
Posted on 09. Jun, 2010 by KSSO in News
“A chance meeting in midlife led to a lifelong interest in an obscure, long-oppressed ethnic group.”
On the 30th of May, 2010, Vera B. Saeedpour, a longtime friend to and scholar on the Kurdish nation died at the age of 80. She spent many years of her life dedicated to highlighting and raising awareness of the plight of the Kurdish nation in the Middle East, as well as helping to preserve Kurdish culture through the establishment of a library and museum.
In 1981 the first Kurdish Program in the United States was established in New York City by Vera Beaudin Saeedpour, widow of Homayoun Saeedpour, a Kurd from Sanandaj in Iran, with the aim of informing Americans of the existence and plight of his people, the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East. Initially operating under the aegis of Cultural Survival Inc., the Program subsequently established the Kurdish Heritage Foundation of America solely to support the Kurdish Library and Museum.
Amanj S. Yarwaessi
Scholar and Archivist of the Kurdish Culture, Dies at 80
By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: nytimes, June 7, 2010
Vera Beaudin was newly divorced and a recent arrival in Harlem when a
stranger knocked on her door one night carrying flowers and coffee cake. She
fell in love, married and learned about the plight of his oppressed people.
When he died five years later, Ms. Beaudin, who had taken her new husband’s
name, Saeedpour, responded by starting the first library and museum in the
United States dedicated to Kurds, an ancient, stateless people straddling
three nations in southwest Asia.
She did this in a Brooklyn brownstone where five or six cats and a dog or
two prowled and where people rented rooms on the upper floors. Soon,
scholars, journalists, government officials, homesick Kurds and the just
plain curious were beating a path to her door.
“I’m dealing with the whole world from this brownstone,” Ms. Saeedpour said
in an interview with The Associated Press in 1988. “I’m like an old lady
holding fast to a balloon that’s going up in the sky.”
Ms. Saeedpour (pronounced sah-EED-por) died at age 80 on May 30 in
Schenectady, N.Y., not far from the Victorian house she had recently moved
into in Fort Plain, N.Y. Her daughter, Rebecca Beaudin, said she had died of
a heart attack.
Ms. Saeedpour had planned to move her library and museum to her new home,
but now the fate of her collection – more than 2,000 texts in Kurdish and
other languages as well as artifacts, costumes, ancient maps and artworks -
is uncertain. So is the future of the two journals about Kurdish concerns
she started, edited and published.
When Ms. Saeedpour opened the library in 1986, The New York Times quoted a
Kurdish scholar at Columbia University about the event’s importance. He
asked to be identified by his pen name, Samande Siaband, because he feared
reprisals against his relatives in Iraq and Iran.
“It is extremely important to have a center of Kurdish research because our
people are politically fragmented and our culture is threatened with
extinction,” he said.
In 2003, Lokman I. Meho, a Kurdish scholar and an archivist now at the
American University in Beirut, told The Times, “People from all over the
world doing research on Kurds and Kurdistan get in touch with Vera.”
There are libraries and museums dedicated to Kurds in Britain, France and
Sweden, but Ms. Saeedpour’s is often called the only one in the United
States.
Kurds live mainly in Iran, Turkey and Iraq, where they were leading
opponents of the regime of Saddam Hussein and now control an autonomous
region.
“What’s a Kurd?” was Ms. Saeedpour’s first response when she learned her
husband-to-be was one, The Associated Press reported.
A little more than a decade later, she said. “I know the Kurds better than
any Westerner living.”
Vera Marion Fine was born on March 27, 1930, in Barre, Vt., where her father
made a living collecting and selling scrap rags and metal. At 17, she eloped
with Marcel Beaudin. They moved to Brooklyn, where he studied architecture
at Pratt Institute and she worked in a bakery and as an assistant to a
professor.
They had four sons, in addition to their daughter: Marc, Paul, Adam and Jeb.
All survive Ms. Saeedpour, as do two grandchildren.
When Ms. Saeedpour was about 40, she entered the University of Vermont,
where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in sociology and stayed on
to earn a master’s in philosophy. When she and Mr. Beaudin were in the
process of divorcing, she left for New York to enroll in Teachers College,
where she earned a Ph.D. in 1976.
While at Columbia, her apartment in Harlem was robbed. She saw a man in the
window of a nearby building and shouted at him, asking if he had seen anyone
escaping down her fire escape. The man was Homayoun Saeedpour, then 26. He
would soon knock on her door, carrying gifts.
By 1981, Mr. Saeedpour had leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant. Ms.
Saeedpour was able to get some of his family members out of Iran to donate
marrow, but a doctor, mistaking her husband for a Persian, would not perform
the procedure, according to several reports. He said he had a friend who was
held hostage in Iran. Mr. Saeedpour soon died.
Ms. Saeedpour had already learned much about Kurdish suffering from long
talks with her husband. These shared emotions became the foundation of their
relationship.
“We had nothing in common except a sadness, maybe,” she said in 1991. “Sort
of a mystical sadness.”
The year her husband died, she started what she called the Kurdish Program
with the help of anthropologists at Harvard. An inspiration was her
increasingly strong Jewish faith and comparisons she made between the
Kurdish experience and the Holocaust.
The library came in 1986; the museum opened in 1988, and began regular
exhibitions. Admission was free, but by appointment. In 1991, Ms. Saeedpour
began a foundation to help finance her efforts.
Last year, in an interview, Ms. Saeedpour more or less summed up her life.
She said, “Nothing that happens to normal people happens to me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/nyregion/08saeedpour.html
