Dr. Nina Garsoïan begins her masterfully written autobiography by introducing the reader to the émigré world into which she was born. She paints candid pictures of her parents and grandparents, ethnic Armenians who had never lived in Armenia. In the early pages of her memoir Dr. Garsoïan relates what is known of the family’s history in Rostov-on-Don, Russia and Tbilisi, Georgia and how, despite a series of trials and tribulations, they came to live in France.

Dr. Garsoïan’s memoir is the story of a survivor. Not only did she live through the loss of her father and maternal grandfather when she was very young but she also survived being transplanted from her native Paris to New York at the tender age of ten. Reading this superbly written autobiography with its rich vocabulary it is hard to believe that she arrived in the United States not knowing a word of English. She describes very emotively the amount of time and effort it took to adjust to the American educational system and to life in the US.

Having become enamored of the piano before she was four, Nina had begun lessons in Paris and continued her studies in New York. For many years music was her intended career. Raised in a well-educated and well-read family, it was taken for granted that Nina would go to university. Due to the onset of World War II a return to Europe was out of the question. Instead Nina went to Bryn Mawr College beginning in the fall of 1940. Following graduation she returned to New York and supported herself by giving piano lessons. She also occasionally performed as a pianist.

This autobiography is also a story of transition and evolution. Dr. Garsoïan describes how in her late twenties she made the transition from an intended career in music to the role of a graduate student and an academic and how over the succeeding decades she completed a PhD and began teaching at prestigious American universities. She guides her readers through the evolution of her academic focus from Classical Archaeology to Byzantine History and relates how her interests turned first from Byzantium to Armenia and then to the relations of Armenia with its neighbor to the east, the Sasanian Empire of Iran. She traces the development of her unique multicultural approach to the study of early Armenian history.
In addition the memoir relates Dr. Garsoïan’s prominent role in the evolution of the Armenian Studies Program at Columbia University from the first classes she taught there beginning in 1962 to her appointment in 1979 to the newly created chair in Armenian History and Civilization through to her eventual retirement from the university in 1993.

Dr. Garsoïan shares with the reader numerous anecdotes regarding well-known personalities in the arts and in the academic world with whom she interacted both on the East Coast of the US and in Europe. Throughout the memoir she paints very vivid word pictures of time spent in various countries in Europe, the Middle East and the Caucasus either while becoming reacquainted with her roots or as a music student or as a history graduate student or later on as a researcher. She also describes at length her travels as a trustee of the Ford Foundation from 1977 to 1989 and the insights gained from those trips.

For anyone interested in the effect on people’s lives of events in 20th-century Europe, in the world of the émigré, and in the history of Armenian Studies in the United States this autobiography is essential reading.