Armenian Escape; Armenian Escapism : ZORA<i> by Arelo Sederberg (Tudor Publishing: $19.95; 606 pp.) </i>

This is not a subtle book. One should add, however, that the issues the novel addresses are not subtle either: questions of survival, revenge and criminal culpability in time of war. In World War II, as all the world knows, Adolf Hitler committed crimes against humanity with the extermination of the Jews. All the world is not so well aware that during World War I, the Turks committed crimes against humanity in the merciless extermination of the Armenian population within their borders. Clearly, Arelo Sederberg’s novel “Zora” intends to redress the world’s ignorance of this atrocity. As one character says, “What happened to the Armenians is not alone a shame of Turkey. It is a shame of the world.”

In this regard--illuminating outrage--the novel is successful. It opens on the eve of these terrible historical events. A brother and sister, Arra and Zora Kazorian, live with their wine-making parents in the Euphrates Valley, and the novel opens with the children returning home after stashing food for the flight their father knows they must make. Soon the Turks descend on the village; Arra and Zora, at their parents’ command, collect their mule and embark on a journey of hundreds of miles to the sea, through a land where their people are being marched to death, men, women and children slaughtered with equal abandon. Their father, a man of indomitable spirit, survives; the mother dies at the hands of the butcher, Kemal Gokalp, the self-styled Gray Wolf. Zora sees her mother’s dismembered body floating downstream.

This powerful, old-country opening heralds a tale that, at its best, chronicles survival and revenge across three continents and four decades. Three individuals are bound together by history: Zora, the butcher Kemal Gokalp and the priest Avedis Zaven. While the publishers have included the usual fictional disclaimer at the front of the book, the author’s Afterword makes clear that these are people as well as characters.

Zaven directs the fleeing Zora and her brother away from the carnage and to a seaport where they can find passage to America. After the children leave, the Turks descend on Zaven’s town, disemboweling his bishop and wreaking carnage. Zaven escapes, but in his flight he finds a tiny near-dead baby by the body of his mother. He rescues the baby and wanders with him; soon they are caught and dragged before the Gray Wolf, who is prepared to kill them both. The moral stature of the priest stays the killer’s hand and both priest and child escape, eventually to France. For the Gray Wolf, though, the moment is his sole display of weakness. He rectifies the moment six years later, killing the boy in France.

The intersecting motives, lives and struggles of these three characters are rich and complicated. Zaven, bereft and soul-stricken after the boy’s death, leaves the church and wanders through the Mediterranean and Middle East for years, coming finally to America where he once again embraces the church. He returns to Europe as chaplain of the American troops during World War II. Gokalp, after the ignominious defeat of Turkey by the Allies in 1919, moves to Germany, where the newly nascent Nazi Party attracts him. Using forged papers, he changes his identity, becomes a German citizen, joins the SS and spends the war persecuting French Resistance workers. After the war, he escapes Europe, changing his identity once again; he becomes a man of power, money and culture in La Paz, Bolivia. The Gray Wolf’s addiction to opera, oddly, proves his undoing. In La Paz, he hears the beautiful diva, Marie Sowell, whose recordings he has cherished throughout the war. He does not know that Sowell is a creature of fiction, and that her real name is Zora Kazorian.

Zora is committed to survival and revenge. Her adventures are many and complicated, indeed, too complicated. Her talents finally culminate in an opera career in which she achieves tremendous success. Though she sings as Marie Sowell, the novel makes clear, she remains always Zora Kazorian.

One would like to close there, but unfortunately the story does not always keep to these three powerful characters. Instead there are whole chapter-chunks about Zora’s brother, who often dominates the narrative. Arra moves from frightened boy to flying ace to swaggering multimillionaire and Howard Hughesian drug addict and on to martyr in a series of shallow and progressively drearier incidents. This material intrudes on Zors’s tale, distracts from it and, alas, finally drains the novel of its power and purpose. Arra’s story is, or ought to have been, a different book. Sederberg should have heeded his own title.