Plot summary
Rise the Euphrates begins with Casard's story. At the time of the genocide, Casard is ten and still goes by her original Armenian name Garod. In Armenian, “Garod” means yearning which is what Casard does the rest of her life: yearn for an Armenia which no longer exists. Casard's mother's name is Seta, the same name given to Casard's granddaughter.
The Turks invaded Garod's town of Harput, murdering the men and raping many women and girls. Among those to escape rape and death, Garod and her mother Seta are driven out of town into the desert. After walking for two weeks without water or food, the caravan reaches the Euphrates River. The river lies in front of the caravan, and a band of murdering Turks emerges from behind, forcing a choice; death by drowning or death by Turkish sword. Seta takes Garod's hand and prepares to jump into the Euphrates. At the last second, Garod remains on the bank and watches her mother drown. Turning around, Garod sees the band of Turks departing. Garod then wanders in the desert for several days, forgetting her name in the process. Later, under the care of nuns, Garod is given the name Cafard, which is a French word meaning melancholy of the soul. She eventually emigrates to the United States. At Ellis Island, immigration officials hear her name as Casard. While at Ellis Island, Casard meets, and after an afternoon of courtship, marries her husband Vrej; another exiled Armenian. Casard and Vrej had one daughter, Araxie.
Araxie grows up and marries an odar, a non Armenian husband, named George Loon. George and Araxie have three children, Van, Seta, and Melanie. When Seta is born, Casard takes Seta into her arms and whispers her story of the genocide. Casard then tells Seta that her task is to recover Casard's forgotten name. Araxie was also given the task to find Casard's name. However, one generation removed from the genocide has left Araxie near Casard's pain to achieve the type of reconciliation Seta is capable of.
Seta's younger years are marked with the tensions occurring between her mother and grandmother. Casard dies unexpectedly when Seta is twelve from a fatal car crash. Similar to the Armenian genocide, the Loon family life after Casard's death is never the same once Casard is gone. The remainder of the book highlights Seta's growing up years. However, with Casard's passing, Seta's life becomes more American and less Armenian-American. Araxie finds herself without a final opportunity to reconcile with her mother and becomes depressed. Later she divorces George Loon. Without Casard, the family structure and its place in the Armenian- American community disintegrates. Despite this, Seta remembers Casard's hidden story and the desire that her lost name be recovered. This recovery is achieved through another Armenian-American girl, Theresa Van.
Several years later, Seta betrays Theresa with a lie in order to secure her own popularity. After this betrayal, the girls do not interact for several years. Shortly after Seta and Theresa turn 15, Theresa's mother dies. A few weeks after her mother's death, Theresa is abducted and severely beaten by a well known member of the town. While Theresa is recuperating, Seta brings offerings of sorts to Theresa's house. Her interaction with Theresa and the offerings she brings draw Seta back into the Armenian community. At the end of the book, Seta and Theresa play the duduk together.
That night after playing the duduk with Theresa, and wholly embracing her Armenian heritage, Seta dreams of the women who were at the Euphrates River the day Casard forgot her name. The women tell the story of what Casard was only able to verbalize as “the indignities”. When she wakes up from her dream, Seta has recovered Casard's name, Garod, which she then relays to Araxie.
Major themes
Matrilineal approach – In Rise the Euphrates, the main characters are all women. Seta discovers her Armenian heritage by interacting with her mother and grandmother. In other words, the book is concerned with a matrilineal approach. Commonly found in Armenian-American literature is what is known as a patrilineal approach. This means the main characters are typically male. The characters discover their Armenian heritage through interactions with fathers and grandfathers rather than mothers and grandmothers. Common to the patrilineal approach is the idea of discovering the Armenian homeland. In the matrilineal approach, discovering identity is highlighted. Each of these, discovering the Armenian homeland and discovering sources of identity, are ways to reconcile- comes to terms with – the Armenian Genocide.
Oral storytelling – For hundreds of years in Armenia, Armenians maintained their sense of identity through the Armenian language and the Armenian Apostolic Church. In the United States this did not change. For Armenians living in the United States, much of Armenian culture is still kept alive through language and religion. Because of the importance of language to the culture, stories and oral story telling are very important. In Rise the Euphrates, the stories themselves are an integral part of the book. The emphasis in the book is on Casard's story; however, through the other stories Edgarian includes, the reader will further understand Armenian culture and the tradition of storytelling.
Betrayal myth – A central myth in Carol Edgarian's Rise the Euphrates is the betrayal myth. Edgarian names several betrayal myths in her book, among them, the biblical stories of Cain and Abel, and Judas and Christ.
The Young Turks was a broad opposition movement against Sultan Abdulhamid II's absolutist government which favored constitutional government in the late Ottoman Empire, eventually prevailing in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. With this revolution, the Young Turks helped to establish the Second Constitutional Era in the same year, ushering in an era of multi-party democracy for the first time in the country's history. Within the Young Turks existed many groups and currents, though the most successful of them: the Committee of Union and Progress became conflated with the rest of the movement.
The duduk or tsiranapogh, is a double reed woodwind instrument made of apricot wood originating from Armenia. Variations of the Armenian duduk appear throughout the Caucasus and the Middle East, including Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kurdistan, Russia, Turkey, and Iran. Duduk, Balaban, and Mey are almost identical, except for historical and geographical differences.
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a 1933 novel by Austrian-Bohemian writer Franz Werfel based on events that took place in 1915, during the second year of World War I and at the beginning of the Armenian genocide.
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Halide Edib Adıvar was a Turkish novelist, teacher, and a nationalist and feminist intellectual. She was best known for her novels criticizing the low social status of Turkish women and what she saw from her observation as the lack of interest of most women in changing their situation. She was a Pan-Turkist and several of her novels advocated for the Turanism movement.
Ravished Armenia is a book written in 1918 by Arshaluys (Aurora) Mardiganian about her experiences in the Armenian genocide.
Armenian genocide denial is the claim that the Ottoman Empire and its ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), did not commit genocide against its Armenian citizens during World War I—a crime documented in a large body of evidence and affirmed by the vast majority of scholars. The perpetrators denied the genocide as they carried it out, claiming that Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were resettled for military reasons, not exterminated. In the genocide's aftermath, incriminating documents were systematically destroyed, and denial has been the policy of every government of the Republic of Turkey, as of 2023, and later adopted by the Republic of Azerbaijan, as of 1991.
Aram is a 2002 French action drama film written and directed by Robert Kechichian. The film is set primarily in France between 1993 and 2001 around Aram, a young French-Armenian militant attempting to supply arms to Nagorno-Karabakh and dealing with the aftermath of assassinating a Turkish general. Aram was released in 2002 in theatres in France, and made its American debut in 2004 at the Armenian Film Festival in San Francisco.
Operation Nemesis was a program to assassinate both Ottoman perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and officials of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic most responsible for the massacre of Armenians during the September Days of 1918 in Baku. Masterminded by Shahan Natalie, Armen Garo, and Aaron Sachaklian, it was named after the Greek goddess of divine retribution, Nemesis.
Fethiye Çetin is a Turkish lawyer, writer and human rights activist of Armenian origin.
Anahit Misak Kasparian is an American political commentator, media host, and journalist. She is the main host and a producer of the online news show The Young Turks, having begun working as a fill-in producer for the show in 2007. She also appeared on the television version of the show that aired on Current TV. She formerly hosted The Point on the TYT Network and co-hosted a Jacobin YouTube show, Weekends with Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila.
Altuğ Taner Akçam is a Turkish-German historian and sociologist. During the 1990s, he was the first Turkish scholar to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, and has written several books on the genocide, such as A Shameful Act (1999), From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (2004), The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity (2012), and Killing Orders (2018). He is recognized as a "leading international authority" on the subject. Akçam's frequent participation in public debates on the legacy of the genocide have been compared to Theodor Adorno's role in postwar Germany.
Carol Louise Edgarian is an American writer, editor, and publisher. Her novels include Rise the Euphrates, Three Stages of Amazement, and Vera. She is the co-founder and editor of the non-profit Narrative Magazine, a digital publisher of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art; and founder of Narrative for Schools, whose programs provide free learning and teaching resources for students and educators.
Henry H. Riggs was a Christian missionary stationed in Kharpert during the Armenian genocide. In his book Days of Tragedy in Armenia: Personal Experiences in Harpoot, 1915-1917, Riggs provides an important eyewitness account of the genocide and concluded that the deportation of Armenians was part of an extermination program organized by the Ottoman government. The book is considered to be one of the most detailed accounts of the Armenian genocide in the English language.
Ruth Azneve Parmelee was a Christian missionary and a witness to the Armenian genocide. She served as a nurse of the American Women's Hospitals Service to a local hospital in Kharpert. She was also instrumental in the founding in 1922 of the hospital of the American Women's Hospitals Service in Salonika, Greece.
The Road from Home: A True Story of Courage, Survival, and Hope, earlier titled The Road from Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl, is a non-fiction book written by David Kherdian, originally published in 1979. It is based on the life of the author's mother, Veron Dumehjian (1907-1981), who survived the Armenian genocide. During the deportations, the rest of her immediate family died. She returned to her native town, only to be displaced again by the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22). After settling in Smyrna, she was forced to flee once more due to the Great Fire of Smyrna. Veron escaped to ultimately settle in the United States. The book is widely read by middle school children throughout the U.S. and has been published throughout Europe. It has received a number of prestigious awards.
Amberin Zaman is a Turkish journalist and a chief correspondent for Al-Monitor based in London covers major stories on the MENA. Having started as a journalist in the early 1990s in Turkey, Zaman contributes to various newspapers throughout the world. Her reporting focuses on geopolitical trends, conflicts, diplomacy and human rights. She studied political science at Franklin College in Lugano Switzerland, speaks fluent English, French, Turkish and Bengali.
Katherine (Chakoian) Magarian was a survivor of the Armenian genocide whose testimony was widely published.
Fatma Müge Göçek is a Turkish sociologist and professor at the University of Michigan. She wrote the book Denial of Violence in 2015 concerning the prosectution of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, for which she received the Mary Douglas award for best book from the American Sociological Association. In 2017, she won a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from the university.
Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide is a 2015 book by Vicken Cheterian and published by Hurst that aims to be a "political history of the genocide since [1915] and the consequences of denialism". The book was praised for its comprehensiveness and accessibility to a wide audience.
