Efronia
An Armenian Love Story

Based on a memoir by Efronia Katchadourian. Efronia was born in 1894 to a Christian Armenian family living in the Ottoman Empire. From earliest infancy, her life was stung by tragedy - the brutal murder of her father, World War I and the deportation and massacre of Armenians living within the Ottoman Empire, and finally the civil war in Lebanon, which drove her to the United States in 1976. Of all her losses, though, perhaps the most poignant was unknown to her immediate family - until she wrote a memoir while living in California in her late 80s. That handwritten manuscript, translated by her only son, is the basis for ""Efronia: An Armenian Love Story."" In her memoir, Efronia tells the story of Ramzi, a Persian Moslem with whom she fell passionately in love before she met Herant's father. ""Ramzi was indeed on the other side of a chasm,"" Stina Katchadourian writes. ""He shared his religion with the man who had murdered Efronia's father. If she married him, she was certain to be cast out not only from her family but from the whole community that had been her life until this time."" In the end, such strictures and war itself crushed any hope that they would be united, but Efronia never forgot Ramzi - she headed her chapter on him ""The First and Last Time I Was in Love."" Her story gives a very human face to the strength and suffering of the Armenian people.