Efronia: An Armenian Love Story (Women's Life Writings from Around the World) - Hardcover

Katchadourian, Stina

4.37

35 ratings by Goodreads

9781555531720: Efronia: An Armenian Love Story (Women's Life Writings from Around the World)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555531725 ISBN 13: 9781555531720

Publisher: Northeastern Univ Pr, 1993

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When eighty-two-year-old Efronia Katchadourian fled civil war in Lebanon for the United States in 1976 she brought little except pistachio nuts, dried figs, dates, and the searing memory of her secret, lost love.
Efronia was born in 1894 to a Christian Armenian family living in the Ottoman empire. Though her father was brutally murdered when she was an infant, his death was only a foreshadowing of the greater tragedies that would befall the Armenian community and dramatically alter the young girl's life.
Efronia grew into a beautiful young woman and was pursued by many elegible suitors. Despite her desires for stability and freedom from her irresponsible brother, she spurned them all. But Ramzi was different; she fell in love with him when they first met. However, their passionate feelings for each other could not surmount the cultural, political, and religious obstacles to their marriage, for he was a Persian Moslem, she an Armenian Christian. Even if there was some hope that her family would eventually consent to the union, that hope was destroyed after the eruption of World War I and the massacre and deportation of Armenians living within the Ottoman empire.
For half a century, Efronia told no one of her secret love for Ramzi. Only when she was in her late eighties, living in northern California with her son and his wife, did she write her memoirs, finally revealing the one love of her youth, which never diminished throughout her lifetime.
After his mother's death, Herant Katchadourian translated her tragic account, discovering much that was new even to him. Stina Katchadourian has woven into the work her memories of her mother-in-law and provided the historical backdrop that is frighteningly familiar in this age of "final solutions" and "ethnic cleansing." The result is an unforgettably poignant and moving narrative.
Told with great warmth, this gripping account of a strong and spirited woman evokes a place and time that, though destroyed forever, will never be forgotten by Armenians in exile throughout the world.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

A timely reminder of another not-so-distant ethnic cleansing, one that devastated the life of Efronia Katchadourian, subject of this affectionate memoir by her daughter-in-law. A Christian Armenian living in the dying days of Ottoman Turkey, Efronia survived the persecution and genocide brought on by the Turks, then married, and moved to Beirut only to flee that city in the 1970's and join her son and his family in California. There, she began her memoirs, which the author--a journalist and translator--has freely drawn upon. Efronia's entire growing-up was shadowed by the persecution of the Turks, who--unable to govern their decaying empire--turned on the Armenians, with whom they'd previously coexisted peacefully. Efronia's father was killed by a Turkish Moslem when she was a baby; and Efronia herself narrowly escaped the WW I deportation into the Syrian desert, during which thousands perished. The end of the war meant further dangers as the defeated Turks massacred the remaining Armenians in Smyrna and in the interior. But it's Efronia's star-crossed love affair with Ramzi, a young man of great promise, that adds an extra twist of pathos to her story. Because Ramzi was a Persian and a Moslem, Efronia's family forbade her to marry him, even though his family warmly endorsed the match. Efronia later married a fellow Armenian, but, even in her 90s, she'd not forgotten her first and only love. A bittersweet story of a woman and her enormously gifted people, whose tragic history continues today. (Illustrations) -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

The story of Efronia Katchadourian, written by her scholar daughter-in-law and based upon her son's translation of her autobiography, rewards the reader on several levels. As a record of an Armenian woman's formative years and survival in Ottoman Turkey during the 1915 massacres, it documents the historical crisis of a people. As an account of Efronia's lifelong devotion to a Muslim youth whom she loved and lost during World War I, it stands as a moving story, testifying to the nature of women's lives and to both the strengths and limits of culture and society in that time. Finally, the memoir is absorbing for the force of character that emerges as we read about a woman whose life spanned much of this century and several nations. Recommended for women's literature and regional collections.
- Rena Fowler, Humboldt State Univ., Arcata, Cal.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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