Kurdish Library & Museum (former)

By Molly Kleiman

A museum, library, and gallery, home to the largest collections of Kurdish materials and artifacts in the Western Hemisphere. More than a mere container for these items, the space itself is a curiosity.

The brownstone on the corner of Park Place and Underhill Avenue is, at first, indistinguishable from its surrounding row-house neighbors. The metal sign that reads “Kurdish Library” is camouflaged by vines. Be patient after you ring; Vera Beaudin Saedpour, founder, collector, compiler, archivist, activist, editor, character, will greet you at the door. Most likely, she is wearing a light cotton dress, with puckered sleeves and hems, traditional for Kurdish women. Visit the museum and she may offer you a cup of coffee, a cigarette or a fudgesicle. But just ignore the dogs, she warns, because they will become jealous of one another and then pester you incessantly.

Daughter of an orthodox Jew, Ms. Saeedpour got her surname and her inspiration for the library from her late second husband, who was a Kurd. Her dedication to Kurdish issues began quite accidentally, after reading an entry her husband had found in the Oxford English Dictionary: A “Kurd,” the dictionary explained, was one of a “tall, pastoral, predatory people.” Among the library’s archives, Ms. Saeedpour promises, are the correspondence letters back and forth, between herself and many major dictionary and encyclopedia editors. The offensive entries were, of course, changed.

“I’m a little old lady in a kitchen. I must leave a record so that people who have nothing can be recorded. The poor Kurd has no ombudsman. I am just an old lady,” Ms. Saeedpour repeats, “I howl into a wind tunnel. And I will howl til I die.”

The parlor floor of the Kurdish Library, consisting of two central rooms, is lined with intricately patterned Kurdish rugs. Other textiles lie curled against the walls. Ms. Saeedpour says that they are for sale; as she leans over them and strokes their colorful surfaces, she confesses that she will never actually sell any of them. They are too beautiful. The spaces feel more like living rooms than museum rooms. Bookshelves and artifacts line the walls; a case displays a beautiful Kurdish garment. Mounted between the books and cases are photographs and prints by contemporary Kurdish artists. Comfortable, worn, antique couches invite you to sit. The piano, central in the second room, has been the location for scores of photographs by Kurds, tourists, and dignitaries. People always want to pose in front of it, Ms. Saeedpour explains, a bit bewildered, “I don’t know why.” A small bust rests on an end table. Ms. Saeedpour points, “Socrates,” and laughs, “not a Kurd.”

The basement is the library “archive.” Clean and well-lit, it contains rows of shelves, which house stacks of Tupperware containers, as well as a washer and a dryer and an armless mannequin. Labels read: “cloth,” “belts,” “headdress,” “coffee maker (Turkey),” “music.” Larger green tubs store women’s hats, footwear, magazines on Kurdish issues from Iran, oral history recordings.

With an estimated 2,000 various texts stored in this unusual space, there is much to be discovered. To Ms. Saeedpour, “the greatest threat today is not terrorism, but that our minds are growing flabbier, and atrophying.” Researchers are lazy; too many “suffer from cultural myopia.” Today, libraries boast easy guides to research, accepted sources, databases, Internet. Ms. Saeedpour keeps no computer database in the library, no card catalogue, no hand-written, comprehensive list even. She tells students: “No, no, no. This is an old fashioned place. You sit on your behind, on a chair, and you go through the books.” It is Ms. Saeedpour’s hope that scholars will really dig, see every book, and find information in the most unlikely places. “If you start out with a preconceived notion, or vested interest, at least say it.” She argues, By Camel and Car to the Peacock Throne by Major E. Alexander Powell, from 1923, provides the best description of the British involvement with the Kurdish people. One would never necessarily think to search for that information in that text; but sometimes you find a gem that says more in one page than what is held in an entire treatise.

Ms. Saeedpour complains that most of those who contact her have vested interests and want to use her or the Kurds for their own agendas–whether they be Kurdish nationalists, American government employees, or journalists. During the first Gulf War, the Kurdish Library attracted much attention. “Journalists were calling me; they were driving me nuts. I couldn’t even rest. And in the library? There were so many cords wrapped around, I didn’t know where to walk!” Ms. Saeedpour’s greatest concern is not to be quoted, but to provide a comfortable, welcoming environment for students to become scholars: “I think two or three of them out of the scores of them really end up scholars. Because you know, I say to them,” she laughs as she describes herself, “‘I’m going to make you so miserable. But when you get done, you will be able to apply what you’ve learned. When you leave, you won’t accept any of this garbage that doesn’t make any sense. You will have the tools you need to be skeptical, really critical, and have no friends.’”

The artifacts and manuscripts extend everywhere; there is no delineation marking where Ms. Saeedpour’s personal space begins and the Museum/Library ends. She opens the closet off her kitchen. There she stores one of her most precious artifacts: a box filled with issues of a Kurdish newspaper from Mahabad. In 1984, these papers arrived through the mail as an unsolicited package from Archibald Roosevelt Jr. Ms. Saeedpour remembers meeting Roosevelt, some time after receiving the gift, at a reading of his work. In asking him to sign his book, she directed, make sure you dedicate it to the library. His note: “To the Kurdish Library (Vera).”

The Library and Museum also serves as headquarters (i.e., the location of the computer from which Ms. Saeedpour types and edits) for two publications. The first, Journal of Kurdish Studies, was first issued in 1986 and comes out either twice a year or once as a double issue. Its focus is historical, cultural, and contemporary affairs. As Ms. Saedpour writes in the editor’s note of the Volume 13, Number 2, 1999 issue, dedicated to Kurdish folktales: “We can read these tales and find ourselves in them. What better indication that the Kurds are not as remote as the mélange would tend to indicate?” Ms. Saeedpour began Kurdish Life, a quarterly, in 1991. Past titles include “Pristine Chaos,” “Rocks of Separation,” and “Pursuit of Wind.”

Ms. Saeedpour, the library, and, particularly, the publications, have been the focus of criticism. Some accuse her of politicizing the library. As Barham Salih, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) representative in Washington, told Brooklyn Bridge magazine in February 1999, “If you read Kurdish Life magazine, it is full of one-sided political commentary. I don’t think that type of thing is compatible with a place of learning. I say this with deep regret.” True, Life is written primarily by Ms. Saeedpour, as opposed to the Journal which is composed of essays by many voices. In Life, Ms. Saeedpour comments on current events, criticizes public figures, and, as she says, “generally get myself into trouble. I write the way I do and make everybody angry.”

But Ms. Saeedpour is insistent: “I am not an advocate for the Kurds. I am an advocate for justice.” Ms. Saeedpour paraphrases Margaret Mead on her relationship to her subjects: “You don’t have to like what they do. You have to record what they do.” Perhaps this was not always the case. Ms. Saedpour admits that when she first began, she viewed the Kurds generally as an oppressed minority group with no independent nation of their own, and believed only stories that described their victimization. (“All Kurdish poetry is protest poetry!” she says, wryly). But as she learned more about the factions and power struggles within Kurdish populations, and studied the subtleties of their history, her perspective, she argues, became more objective. Today, she frankly describes Kurd-on-Kurd betrayals as well as the oppression of Kurds by other nations.

In 2004, Ms. Saeedpour is 74 years old. (When people compliment her on her youthful appearance, “They say, ‘You could look 64,’ and I laugh, ‘What are you crazy? Do you live in a dream world?’ This is the tragedy for us: that same façade mentality that applies in appearances applies in the information you get.”). She describes her insistence and passion as an inability to stop. It is beyond her control: “Things in the world bother me because I take the world very personally. We are all stuck on the earth and none of us are getting out of here alive. I don’t have any reverence. That’s what makes this place strange.” But what will happen to the library when Ms. Saeedpour can no longer tend to it? She refuses to let it get absorbed into an enormous library, where books and artifacts will be disseminated throughout a larger collection. Nor does she want it hijacked by special interest groups. To continue to write and work, to determine the future of the space, she says, “That’s what keeps me alive.”

Dr. Vera B. Saeedpour passed away on May 30, 2010 at the age of 80. The Brooklyn brownstone is now a private residence. The Kurdish Library and Museum collection have been moved to Binghamton University, where they are preserved as the Vera Beaudin Saeedpour Kurdish Library and Museum Collection.