The Second Endless Crossings: Reflections on Armenian Art and Culture in Los Angeles

GLENDALE  – After the success of Endless Crossings: Reflections on Armenian Art and Culture in Los Angeles (September 2019), the second collection of literary and artistic reviews by critic, Arpi Sarafian has been released. The Second Endless Crossings is a compilation of essays written roughly between 2020 and 2024. Copies of the book could be purchased at Abril Bookstore (www.abrilbooks.com).

While exploring the artistic and the cultural life of Armenians in contemporary America remains the prevailing focus of the essays assembled in this second collection, preserving our identity as Armenians has acquired a new urgency. Diaspora Armenians no longer have the luxury of finding their way into the mainstream with the tacit confidence of “Armenia forever.” The recent fall of the Republic of Artsakh and the ongoing threats to Armenia’s territorial integrity pose an existential threat that necessitates new strategies of survival.

In their desperate attempt to reform, Alan Semerdjian and Micheline Aharonian Marcom, among others, shift their gaze inwards. Indeed, the predominance in the collection of works that explore this inner reality — not at all a deliberate choice — might suggest that when we have allowed superficialities to take control of our lives, it makes sense to reach into something deeper, a spirituality perhaps, to find solace for the mood of hopelessness and discontent that plague people’s lives.

While many of the reviews highlight the work of emerging authors, a few call attention to new releases of older works, such as the translations into English of Nigoghos Sarafian’s The Bois de Vincennes or of The Book of Adam by Hakob Karapentz.

The articles have been organized into groups — book reviews, translations, art and politics etc. — to make the content of the collection more easily accessible to the reader. It was perhaps in response to faithful reader the late Yervant Kochounian’s comment, “You seem to find endless material to comment on and encourage Armenian Diaspora cultural endeavors, especially feminine or feminist ones,” that Sarafian decided to devote a separate section to the Armenian woman.

Arpi Sarafian holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and a B.A. and M.A. from the American University of Beirut. She was a lecturer in English Language and Literature at the California State University, Los Angeles from 1978 to retirement in 2014. She has published articles in The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, The Armenian Observer, Ararat Literary Quarterly, Armenian International Magazine (AIM), Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), Journal of the Society of Armenian Studies (JSAS) and the Los Angeles Times.