This is the sequel to Eleni, following the lives of Nicholas Gage/Nikola Gatzoyiannis and his sisters after they joined their father in Massachusetts, following the murder of their mother during the Greek Civil War. Many aspects of it could be about any immigrant family and any immigrant community – trying to adapt to a new country, trying to find a balance between fitting in in that new country without losing all the ways of the old and the clashes between the generations that that entails, the striving for prosperity and the pride in success. Other aspects are more specific to the experiences of Greek-Americans – which, unlike the experiences of many other “hyphenated-American” groups, haven’t been “covered” very much (except in My Big Fat Greek Wedding!). And some, of course, are specific to the Gatzoyiannis family themselves.
Particularly interesting was the idea that it wasn’t appropriate for a Greek-born immigrant to America to marry someone who’d been born in America even if that person was of Greek heritage and they and their family were all completely respectable. Nick Gage himself, however, eventually married a Protestant of Scandinavian and British heritage. I hope he appreciates his wife, by the way! He kept her hanging on for years because she wasn’t Greek, dated other people at the same time and even went to Greece on a wife-hunt, and he goes on and on in the book about how there were loads of other women he could have married instead! And then she converted to Orthodoxy and agreed to them naming their first two children after his parents. As I said, I hope he appreciates her!
Christos Gatzoyannis, Nick’s father, originally went to America with the intention of earning money there and then returning to Greece. Nick and his sisters, by contrast, went there as people who were fleeing a country where terrible things had happened and wanted to make a new start. Those two very different types of immigration are still with us today. This book was set in the 1950s-1980s but,. thinking back to earlier times, there was a period in which the USA, and other countries, actively sought out immigrants, even offering them free land … and it’s a tragedy for the desperate people who try to make it to Lampedusa or to the northern coast of Australia that those days are gone. Anyway, that’s rather beside the point. I have to say that the author himself does sometimes come across as being a bit up himself, but this is a very interesting book about the experiences of a young man and a family settling into a new country.
setinthepast 