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Miriam Setrakian (nee Sacher) was Abraham Setrakian's wife.

Biography[]

Miriam survived polio as a child and walked with arm & leg braces. A Romance languages expert at the University of Vienna, she enrolled in many of Professor Setrakian's seminars, and the two eventually fell in love. They kept their relationship a secret, under the guise of Abraham being her private tutor, since it was technically a violation of the University's rules.

After Setrakian refused to help Eldritch Palmer locate the Master, Palmer, who had arranged Setrakian's appointment to the University in the first place, revealed the truth of his relationship with Miriam. Setrakian was dismissed from his post in disgrace, but this left him free to marry Miriam, in a secret ceremony in Mönchhof.

Because she was a Christian by upbringing, Miriam's parents did not approve of her marriage to a Jew.

Miriam was fully aware of Abraham's secret work as a vampire hunter, and followed him faithfully on many of his quests. In 1971, she accompanied him to Albania, when he was following a rumored sighting of Thomas Eichhorst. He left her in a small village outside Shkoder, but it turned out to be a trap. While he was away, Eichhorst attacked her and turned her into a vampire. According to him, her last word before turning was simply, "Abraham." When Abraham found her, he was forced to kill her rather than let her infect him or anyone else. He cut out her heart and kept it in a jar in the basement of his pawnshop, feeding its infestation of vampiric worms regularly with drops of his own blood. Initially secretive about this act, he told Ephraim Goodweather and Nora Martinez that the heart had come from a "young widow" recently turned.

Trivia[]

A flashback in the Season 1 episode "Last Rites" shows a young Abraham embarking on a mission to locate the Master, that left his wife vulnerable to attack. This parallels the journey abroad made by Jonathan Harker to rendezvous with Count Dracula, that left his fiancée Mina Murray along with her best friend Lucy Westenra vulnerable to the Count. After being trapped at their destinations, Setrakian and Harker both escape in an urgent bid to return home to their loved ones.

Canon Conflicts[]

In The Strain (novel), the first book of the trilogy, Abraham names his deceased wife as Anna, and states that she died seventeen years before the Master's incursion (i.e., around 1992), rather than 1967 or 1971.

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