Rise the Euphrates - Hardcover

Edgarian, Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679426019 ISBN 13: 9780679426011

Publisher: Random House, 1994

Synopsis

A modern-day Armenian American girl, Seta Loon finds herself caught between her grandmother, a survivor of the Turkish massacre of Armenians, and her mother, and struggling with her own feelings of conflict and alienation

About this title

About the Author:

Carol Edgarian is an author, editor, and publisher. Her novels include Three Stages of Amazement and the best-selling Rise the Euphrates, hailed by the Washington Post as "a book whose generosity of spirit, intelligence, humanity, and finally ambition are what literature ought to be and rarely is today." Her articles and essays have appeared in many national magazines, and she coedited the popular collection drawn from great writers' diaries,The Writer's Life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame. In 2003, Edgarian and her husband, editor and writer Tom Jenks, founded Narrative Magazine (www.NarrativeMagazine.com), the leading digital source for storytelling--publishing more than three hundred artists each year--and Narrative in the Schools, a program to encourage reading and writing in schools across America. Edgarian lives in San Francisco with her husband and their three daughters. Learn more about Carol and her work at www.caroledgarian.com

From Kirkus Reviews:

Edgarian's tale of a displaced victim of the Armenian genocide and the impact of her experience on her daughter and granddaughter in America makes for a deeply affecting story, told with a confidence and lyricism that belie its author's status as a beginner. In 1915, nine-year-old Garod witnesses the deaths of her parents and brother as the Muslim Turks brutally murder a million Armenians, who they fear will otherwise fight with Russia against them. Orphaned, starved, and so traumatized that she has forgotten her own name, the girl christens herself Cafard, after the French word for melancholy, but is inadvertently renamed Casard at Ellis Island when she immigrates to America. There Garod/Casard immediately marries a fellow Armenian refugee, settles into an immigrant enclave in Memorial, Connecticut, and gives birth to a daughter of her own. Seventy years after her arrival in America, her favorite granddaughter, Seta Loon, tells how Casard fought with her growing daughter, beautiful, rebellious Araxie, who wanted only to shed her mother's terrible legacy, live a glamorous life, and see the world. Nevertheless, as Seta herself would eventually learn, ``the daughter assumes what is unfinished in her mother's life''; middle-aged Araxie finds herself rejecting her non-Armenian husband while fighting to keep her own elder daughter at her side. But Seta flees to California as soon as possible to escape Araxie's and Casard's pain. Will her grandmother's friends be happy for her, a calmer 33-year-old Seta wonders as she returns to Memorial pregnant and unmarried, now that she has used her foremothers' experience to create an independent existence? A highly accomplished first novel spanning three very different generations on two continents--and an unusually intelligent look at the American immigrant experience. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0679426019
• ISBN 13: 9780679426011
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 370