Zabelle - Softcover

Nancy Kricorian

4

511 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380732114 ISBN 13: 9780380732111

Publisher: Bard, 1999

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As Zabelle's family assembles for her funeral in present-day Massachusetts, it becomes clear that her children hardly knew her. But as this alternatively comic and heartbreaking novel unfolds--beginning with Zabelle's survival of the 1915 Armenian Genocide in Turkey and her subsequent emigration to America for an arranged marriage--an unforgettable character emerges.

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About the Author:

Nancy Kricorian, author of the novels Zabelle and Dreams of Bread and Fire, is a widely published poet, essayist, and activist. After graduating from Dartmouth, Nancy studied and worked in Paris before earning an MFA in writing at Columbia University.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Poet Kricorian's first novel offers a tender but thin portrait of an orphaned Armenian woman who starts over again in America but has a life there as mother, wife, and grandmother that's steeped in sorrow. In 1916, her father is lined up with the other men in town and shot by the Turks; soon after, Zabelle loses the rest of her family on a forced march into the Syrian desert. She survives, is placed in an orphanage, then later is handed over to a wealthy Turkish family as a servant. A chance encounter, though, allows her to be claimed by her own people, and she blossoms into a lovely young woman as part of a wealthy Armenian household. Her adopted family arranges a good marriage for her, and soon she's arriving on Ellis Island with her mother-in-law-to-be, ready to begin a new life. Not long after, however, her Bible-thumping husband Toros proves less than doting as he defers to his mother, who runs their household in Watertown, Massachusetts, with thinly veiled contempt for Zabelle. Meanwhile, Zabelle herself, pregnant with their first child, has fallen in love with a man she's met at the shirtmaking factory where she works. She squelches her feelings, though, resigning herself to motherhood and her unhappy marriage. Two more children follow; years later, the older son leaves home to attend missionary college, hears a voice telling him to have his nose changed surgically, and thereby severs his family ties--unlike Jack and Joy, who stay nearby when they grow up, offering some comfort to their mother. Zabelle's burden is eased further when her mother-in- law finally fails to wake up one morning. But when widowhood arrives after 44 strained years of marriage, there's no relief-- only sadness. Zabelle's childhood is the most fully embroidered section here, with all that follows offering only flashes of insight into the full complexity of character and family that Kricorian might have made far more rich and real. -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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