Word: eleni
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Peasants of the steep Mourgana region, the northwest roof of Greece, were horrified by the pedomasoma, but they were battered and half-starved by a decade of war, and few had the strength or cunning to resist. One who did was Eleni Gatzoyiannis of the little farm hamlet Lia. Though she had spent her life deferring to her father, a prosperous miller, and to her husband, a cook at a diner in far-off America who returned periodically to visit, Eleni was transformed by crisis into a leader: she organized the escape of 20 people of Lia, most of them...
...foreign correspondent for the New York Times. Gradually, the grief of his childhood returned as an obsession. In 1979 Gage quit the newspaper to learn how and why his mother had been killed. He planned a crime of vengeance. He failed at that, but he has achieved instead, in Eleni, a kind of resurrection...
...Eleni was beautiful and eventually outspoken, but she was not a feminist, not even a matriarch. She was a country woman, brought up to a life of ceaseless, selfless duty to men and her elders. Wedding ceremonies in Lia traditionally included a moment when the groom stamped on the bride's toes to establish his dominance; on wedding nights, brides in Lia customarily slept with their mothers-in-law rather than their husbands, as a symbolic lesson in obedience to the new clan. Eleni scarcely thought of leaving her rigid culture until it began to shatter violently around...
...transformed Eleni's simple life, and bought out in her family a crafty brutality needed for survival. When the guerrillas wanted to take her eldest daughter Olga as a soldier, Eleni seared the girl's foot with boiling water and a glowing poker so that she could not go. A male cousin of Eleni's escaped being drafted by lacerating his neck with nettles and painting his throat every morning with diluted hydrochloric acid...
...gratification ahead of his duty to his children, his living family. In a final sentence that is prefigured from the book's beginning, as in a classical Greek tragedy, Gage explains: "Summoning the hate necessary to kill Katis would destroy the part of me that is most like Eleni." -By William A. Henry...