Word: greekness
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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...
...author's and that of his father. Yet each life is gallant for its own reasons. Christos Gatzoyiannis passed through Ellis Island first in 1910, and again in 1938. He headed for Worcester, Mass., where he built a steady vegetable-delivery business while his wife remained in the northwestern Greek town of Lia. It was not uncommon for married immigrant men to settle in America before sending for their families, although Gatzoyiannis took much longer than most. He returned periodically to Greece, where he played the rich American and sired four daughters and the author, born Nikola. During...
...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...
Gage relives his father's American Dream more passionately than his own. The author's exploits are subordinated to the old man's: his struggles to sustain his clan and make sure that his daughters find suitable (meaning Greek) husbands. Gatzoyiannis' death at age 90 provides a classic resolution. Surrounded by his children and grandchildren, he drifts off on old memories. It is a scene that evokes Chekhov and his observation that "any idiot can face a crisis. It is this day-to-day living that wears...
Jewish parents too often encourage their teenage children to consort only with other Jews, and Jewish fraternities and sororities across the country reinforce this sentiment. After graduation, some of these Jews consciously seek out Jewish networks--a direct carryover from college Greek life--to break into employment...