Selected Reviews

www.dorasakayan.com > selected reviews


Genocide by the front door
By Eva Pfister
It is astounding what the Armenian Professor of German Studies Dora Sakayan has brought to light from the Swiss Archive for Contemporary History: The railway engineer Fritz Sigrist and his wife Clara not only witnessed the brutal persecutions and killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, but also actively fought against it.
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Remembrance of a Genocide
By Paul Starzmann
Germans were also involved in the Armenian Genocide. A new book is now providing an eyewitness account of the vicious crimes committed 100 years ago. And even the Deutsche Bank played an important role in it.
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Lest We Forget
By Brigitte Schmid-Gugler
Dora Sakayan has deciphered the eye-witness account of Clara Sigrist-Hilty and her husband, who lived in Eastern Switzerland. The couple witnessed the deportations of Armenians between 1915 and 1918.
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Witnesses of the Armenian Genocide
By Reto Neurauter
The written testimonies of Clara and Fritz Sigrist-Hilty from Werdenberg on the Armenian Genocide during WWI have been published. Last evening the book was launched.
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Eastern Armenian for the English-speaking World
By Sergey Galstyan
For Armenologists in and outside Armenia, Dora Sakayan does not need introduction. She is the author of several Armenological studies, and the present textbook, Eastern Armenian for the English-speaking World, is the sister edition of an earlier textbook of hers, Modern Western Armenian for the English-speaking World. Published in Montreal, Canada, in 2000, this manual was very well received all over the world.
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To Sustain a Language
By Eddie Arnavoudian
Every effort to preserve the Armenian language in the Diaspora is welcome. Dora Sakayan’s, in the form of her ‘Modern Western Armenian’ text-book is particularly so. Nowhere in the Diaspora is Armenian an everyday language anymore, the way it used to be in Lebanon for example. To secure and fashion their lives in the Diaspora Armenians have to employ the dominant local language, their own acquiring secondary, and for the vast majority almost exclusively domestic use...
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Review of Dora Sakayan's Modern Western Armenian
for the English Speaking World.

By Bernard H. Bichakjian
Who wants to learn Armenian? – In the first place, probably second and third generation Armenians born in the diaspora, also language historians interested in Armenian and Indo-European linguistics and scholars doing research on the early period of the Christian Churches in the Middle East, and perhaps a few undergraduates who will choose to fulfill their language requirements with something other than the regular Western European languages. Whatever their motivation, all these students will be grateful to Professor Sakayan for the excellent manual that is now available to them for acquiring proficiency in West Armenian...
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Grandfather honoured in act of remembrance
By Elaine Kalman Naves
Smyrna, a coastal city on the Aegean as old Troy, has been one of the major centres of Asia Minor for millennia. Today, under the name of Izmir, it belongs to Turkey, but at various times in its 5,000-year history it has had Greek, Macedonian and Roman masters. According to local tradition, Homer was born in its environs; it was also one of the earliest seats of Christianity. More recently, a tragedy of vast proportions has strained the city's name. In her book, an Armenian Doctor in Turkey, Dora Sakayan presents an eyewitness account of the 75-year-old catastrophe in which several members of her family perished along with 30,000 Greek and Armenian Christians at the hands of Turkish nationalist forces...
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Recent Updates


Book review 2016 (3)
Review of "They drive them into the desert": Clara and Fritz Sigrist-Hilty, eyewitnesses of the Armenian Genocide 1915-1918, by Paul Starzmann, Vorwaerts, 21 November 2016.

Book review 2016 (2)
Review of "They drive them into the desert": Clara and Fritz Sigrist-Hilty, eyewitnesses of the Armenian Genocide 1915-1918, by Brigitte Schmid-Gugler, St. Galler Tageblatt, October 28, 2016.

Book review 2016 (1)
Review of "They drive them into the desert": Clara and Fritz Sigrist-Hilty, eyewitnesses of the Armenian Genocide 1915-1918, by Reto Neurauter, Werdenberger & Obertoggenburger, 27 October 2016