Word: eleni
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...gods continue to smile on Nicholas Gage, a writer who knows how to tell a good story and, even better, has a good story to tell. His 1983 memoir, Eleni, pulled the reader into the pitiless Greek civil war of the late 1940s, when Communists fought to destroy the royalist government. Gage told how the Reds came to his mountain village to round up children for indoctrination in Albania. His mother resisted and smuggled him and three of his sisters to safety. For her defiance, Eleni was tortured, shot, and her body thrown into a ravine...
Gage, a former investigative reporter for the New York Times, spent years researching events that led to his mother's murder. The investigator was indistinguishable from the avenger. He eventually tracked down Eleni's inquisitor and interviewed him at gunpoint. But Gage did not pull the trigger. "There are times when I wake up at night and want to get back on a plane and kill the son of a bitch," Gage said. A Place for Us overlaps that past and goes on to embrace less heroic lifetimes, mainly the author's and that of his father. Yet each life...
...Nikola, his father's biggest failing was not getting his family to the U.S. in time to save Eleni. The resentment colors Gage's transformation from a greenhorn with an unpronounceable name to an American success story bylined Nicholas Gage. Only when the author has his own family does he come to understand the difference between a mother's love and a father...
...Place for Us completes an emotional symmetry that began with Eleni. It also offers a look at Greek-American life as textured as any the general reader is likely to encounter. Gage writes with little separation between his intellect and his senses. There is no straining for effect; moments reveal their natural poetry. How, for example, does one know the time to pack up a family picnic and head for home? "When it was too dark to tell red wine from white." When Gage describes the bread tax that early immigrants levied to support their new churches, one can taste...
...comes exuberantly alive. Vitality and beauty are common enough in star turns; so is warmth, although Nelligan, whose technical gifts are extraordinary, has never before shown it to this degree on the U.S. stage, and only once on film, in her 1985 performance as a heroic Greek mother in Eleni...