BEDROS: An Historical Novel

by Irene Rudolf

Bedros is the inspirational saga of one man, who, his father butchered before his eyes, survives the first, untold holocaust of the 20th century, and struggles on to achieve greatness in the new world. The story of immigrant fortitude and struggle has been told before, but never against the backdrop of the Armenian holocaust. It is two stories in one because Bedros lived two lives in one—the victims, struggling to survive, and the entrepreneur, struggling to realize himself.

Bedros is an epic novel, seeded in a field of Turkish genocide, nourished by hope, defiance, and animal courage, and flowering at last in the streets of Philadelphia. It spans half a century, and three continents. Never before in Armenian literature has the village life of Armenia under the oppressive rule of the Turks been so vividly limned! Irene Rudolf has the power to evoke another world with a few strokes of her pen. With shocking realism yet magic imagination, the author sweeps us effortlessly into another world and time.

The personal saga of Bedros is at once symbolically the national saga of a victim people, like the Jews, but heretofore unrecognized and unrecorded. Bedros is a literary rollercoaster. Written for the general audience, the reader is lulled, them electrified, dropped into a pit of despondence and then transported to a world of delight. We are cuffed mercilessly and then stroked by a writer in complete command of her narrative. Bedros is at once particular, and universal, and inspiratyion to the descendants of all those persecuted immigrants who dreamed and triumphed in the new world.

Hyst'ry Myst'ry House (1983)