Efronia

by Stina Katchadourian

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 gir