Anouche Kunth, Au bord de l’effacement: Sur les pas des exilés arméniens de l’entre-deux-guerres [On the Brink of Erasure: In the Footsteps of Armenian Exiles in the Interwar Period]. La Découverte, 2023, 288 pages

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Anouche Kunth, Au bord de l'effacement: Sur les pas des exils armniens de l'entre-deux-guerres [On the Brink of Erasure: In the Footsteps of Armenian Exiles in the Interwar Period].La Dcouverte, 2023, 288 pages.This book opens with historian Anouche Kunth recounting her experience of coming upon a source: 15 boxes of Armenian exiles' identity papers duplicated on onionskin.She was struck at once by the abundance of these forms and the aridity of the information they offered up.Out of the paradox created by this profusion of paperwork and the "excessively spare" information in them arose an approach that "tells the story of a historian's experience in contact with paper," but also far more.At the beginning lies a collection of boxes stored in the basement of Ofpra (the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and the Stateless) containing bundles of identity certificates-most issued between 1929 and 1941 by the Office for Armenian Refugees in Marseille (two other such offices operated in Paris and Lyon but no documents have been recovered from them).The documents in these boxes represent an incomplete collection (the first form bears sequence number 19,701).The forms record only first and last names, date and place of birth, addresses, and parents' identities; however, here and there, they feature comments in pencil in the margins, a few illustrative photos, fingerprints, or some other additional element.Drawing on her expertise as a historian and the sensitivity and imagination needed for interpretation, Kunth retraces and pieces together trajectories of exile, from the confines of Asia Minor to the shores of the New World-the echoing aftermath of a genocide in the interval between two global conflicts.In this work, she does not hesitate to draw on literature and the graphic arts, guided by the fragmentary materials she is working from.In the process, she never loses sight of the need to anchor her reasoning in concrete information from the archives and to support the connections she draws in converging evidence from different sources.In her search for widely dispersed information to complement her initial sources, she consulted archives in New York and Washington.For many of these Armenian exiles, France was just one step along the way: a place where they could establish a certificate that allowed them to recover a place in a family configuration-most often elective or of convenience-but also to continue their travels to reunite with relatives or a future spouse.Over the course of the book, we learn of the successive measures taken by national and international agencies to create rules around the status of "stateless refugee"-measures that marked out irregular trajectories of flight, processes of destruction and recomposition leading to futures possible and impossible.Between the lines, in the empty spaces, violence lurks.The book consists of three parts, entitled "Ellipses," "Margins and parentheses," and "Cross-references and page breaks."They are accompanied by a rich apparatus: 35 fascinating pages of notes, as well as a timeline; descriptions of sources; and an indicative selection of studies on the Ottoman Empire, Armenian