Eddie Arnavoudian, a diasporan Armenian (born in Kenya!) who calls himself “longs distance Armenian,” wrote this moving letter after reading the issues of Shrjadardz. He calls on diasporan Armenians to support the magazine.

There isan immense amount of stuff in Shrjadardz that I disagree with strongly,
and that is putting it mildly. But for all that reading it I felt joyfully at home.

Here is a magazine in which one could sense and feel
concern for the people of Armenia, for the future of the land, one could
get an inkling of the way in which existing power was undermining the
future and how the effects of globalisation and its Armenian agents was
acting against the interests of the Armenian people.

Reading these issues was akin to being in Armenia, living like Armenians instead of
just being Los Angelo-Armenians or other variants of vanishing
species. As I walked through the large hall, a transformed barn, that we
occupied my mind was buzzing with ideas Armenian, both from Shrjadardz
about the conditions of Armenia and its people today and from Charents,
the problems of early 20th century Armenian state formation as expressed
in Antranig's clashes with the leadership of the first Armenian
republic. And much else.

As I pondered and delighted in these issues that I so love to engage with I was also exchanging glances with the people I loved. But there was an abyss between these two loves. No one
in the hall aside from my two children (6 and 3) and myself were
Armenian, and no one, including my two children had the least concern,
interest, knowledge let alone love for the matters I was pondering. It
was an eerie feeling.

To be Armenian in the Diaspora is just too lonely sometimes, especially if one lives isolated from any Armenian community. But even if one lives in dense Diaspora communities we then
become not Armenians but Los Angelo-Armenians, Anglo-Armenians, or
Franco, or Lebano, or Irano or any other o-Armenians. But here the
Armenian is the secondary particle. The hyphen denotes the process of
transition and assimilation.

As an article in one issue of Shrjadardz put it, the only enduring things Armenia are those that are made and exist in Armenia. It is no good being a long distance Armenian…

One must be an Armenian or just a Los-Angelo-Armenian or any other type of
Armenian. One can remain an excellent and admirable human being in all
these forms of course. So no ill judgments on any one. Just a thought
this is, as we plough the fields of life hoping for rich returns for our
children and their children's children too.

Anyone able to help get Shrjadardz back into print will do a great deal of good, even if they
disagree with almost everything in it! Eddie Arnavoudian

via e-mail communication