Creator of U.S. Kurdish library dies, what a fantastic woman.

Some two years ago I started having phone conversations with an elderly woman named Vera Saeedpour, who was one of the U.S.'s eminent scholars of Kurdish history.

I called The Kurdish Library in New York to get some basic information for some research I was doing. When I asked if I could speak with the curator of their collections, she laughed and said "You got her." I soon found myself in an hour-long conversation with this remarkable woman: a razor sharp, twice married mother of five who changed how the Kurds' story has been recorded in history.

She told me how she, a young Jewish divorcee pursuing a degree at Columbia, had met her neighbor across the air-shaft after her apartment was robbed, and how they started having conversations by talking out the window to one another. How one day he brought her a cake and he was so dressed up she thought he was a delivery man and almost chased him away. And how soon after, they fell in love.

I will never forget what she said about their marriage: "The only thing we had in common was a sort of sadness."

Her marriage, while short (he died just a few years later) introduced her to a new passion. Previous to meeting her husband, she had no idea what a Kurd was.

Shortly after they were married, they were both studying when he interrupted her and asked, "What does predatory mean?"

When she asked him why, he brought over the Oxford English dictionary and showed her the entry for "Kurd," which, she told me, described them as "a tall, predatory people."

She looked at him and said, "but you're not even tall."

Soon after, Vera lobbied to have the definition of Kurd changed in the Oxford English Dictionary and sowed the seeds of what would be a lifelong mission to change perception of Kurds on a global level. She amassed arguably the best Library on Kurdish history and modern culture in the U.S.

I was shocked to find out today that Vera died at the end of May. I feel great sadness over this, because in the last conversation I had with her I promised to come visit her in New York the next time I was there.

In reading over her obituaries, I found that I was definitely not the first to hear Vera's epic life story... in fact some of the quotes included in those articles are ones she told to me verbatim.

But I also learned something about Vera from these obituaries that I wish I could have laughed about with her. Her maiden name, like mine, was Fine.

I'm a sucker for signs, but it's nice to think that I'm carrying her mission in some small way.

If you'd like to read more about Vera Saeedpour, head over to the New York Times.