A Tale of Armenian Rug-Washing Day in ‘Bábo’

A whole book about a bunch of kids washing rugs with their grandmother? Author Astrid Kamalyan says she’d understand if you heard that pitch and thought, “Huh?”

But — of course — it is so much more than that.

“It’s actually a book about Armenian joy and the beauty of Armenian family,” says Kamalyan. “It has so much of what made our childhoods so happy.”

In Bábo: A Tale of Armenian Rug-Washing Day, a little girl named Tato steals some cherry plums before grabbing a brush. She joins friends and siblings outside, where they soak, soap, and wash the rugs.

“We scrub. Brushes bop-bop-bop,” Kamalyan writes. “Until our hands are warm. Until our knees and toes tingle a little. Until it’s time to clear the foam. Time to slide!”

“I think it’s the most favorite activity in Armenia,” says Anait Semirdzhyan, who illustrated Bábo. Both Kamalyan and Semirdzhyan are from Armenia — they moved to the United States within three years of each other — and they both grew up washing rugs with their grandmothers.

Semirdzhyan says her grandmother would usually set it all up, and then leave her and her cousins to it. “And then she would come back and check if everything is done properly,” she says.

“There is no formal rules or ways,” Kamalyan explains. “You kind of just do it and have fun with it.”

“Swoosh. We glide. Swoosh. Droplets splash,” she writes. “We twirl. Bubbles pop-pop-pop.”

Kamalyan wrote Bábo in 2020, right before conflict broke out in Armenia. She says it was important to have her book illustrated by someone who shared her background. She recommended Semirdzhyan, whose work she had long admired.

Semirdzhyan was thrilled when she got the manuscript. “I never, ever expected that I will illustrate a book about my childhood,” she says. Plus, here was a…