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Informationen zum Autor Adam Bagdasarian ’s short story “The Survivor,” also based on his great-uncle’s experiences, won Yankee Magazine ’s fiction award. This is his first novel. Klappentext A National Book Award Finalist. In 1915 Vahan Kenderian is living a life of privilege as the youngest son of a wealthy Armenian family in Turkey. This secure world is shattered when some family members are whisked away while others are murdered before his eyes. Vahan loses his home and family, and is forced to live a life he would never have dreamed of in order to survive. Somehow Vahan's incredible strength and spirit help him endure, even knowing that each day could be his last. Leseprobe Chapter One My name is Vahan Kenderian. I was born in Bitlis, a province of Turkey, at the base of the Musguneyi Mountains of the East. It was a beautiful city of cobbled streets and horse-drawn wagons, brilliant springs and blighting winters, strolling peddlers and snake charmers. Beyond sunbaked mud-brick houses were fields of tall grass, rolling hills, and orchards of avocado, apricot, olive, and fig trees. Steep valleys of stone climbed sharply to grassy plains and pastures, and higher still to the slopes of snowcapped mountains where every summer evening the sun set in deepening shades of red and blue. On your way into town, you would walk on crooked sidewalks past houses so close together that a small boy could easily jump from one roof to another. Weaving your way through a tangle of pedestrians, you passed veiled women sitting on stools selling madzoon, and in shop windows you would see merchants dressed in baggy pants and vests, sipping small cups of black coffee. You smelled the lavosh bread from the bakery and stood aside as the cab driver in his two-wheeled horse-drawn cart drove by. Walking home at sunset, you would see the lamplighter carrying a torch in his hand and a ladder on his back. And as darkness fell, all the flat-roofed, tightly packed houses would become one great house where a thousand small lights burned. As far as an Armenian from Bitlis was concerned, Bitlis was the center of the world: Her mountains were the highest, her soil the most fertile, her women the loveliest, her men the bravest, her leaders the wisest. Of course, not every Armenian from Bitlis was praise-worthy. Some drank, some begged in the street, some swindled their employers, some were vain, careless, licentious, or lazy. But, for the most part, they were a hardworking and honorable people. At least the ones I knew. In 1915, I was twelve years old, the youngest child of one of the richest and most respected Armenians in Turkey. I was small for my age, stocky and strongly built, with curly brown hair, excellent posture, a firm handshake, and a brisk, determined stride. I walked with the confidence of a boy who has grown up in luxury and knows that he will always be comfortable, always well fed, always warm in winter and cool in summer. My father was afraid that I lacked character and discipline. And he was right. As far as I was concerned, character and discipline were consolation prizes given to the meek, the unadventurous, and the unlucky. Mrs. Gulbankian needed character because she was a widow and lived alone. Mr. Aberjanian needed discipline because he worked twelve hours a day selling groceries. Most adults, it seemed, needed character and discipline because their lives had long ago ceased to either amuse or fulfill them. "You'll see," they would say to me with knowing smiles, as though disillusion were a law as inevitable as gravity. But I knew better. I knew that time and destiny were my allies, the twin magicians of my fate: Time would transform me into the tallest, strongest man in Bitlis, and destiny would transform me into one of the wealthiest, most admired men in Turkey. I did not know if I would be a lawyer, like my father, or a doctor or a businessman, ...
