He never got back on his feet financially or regained his hard-won status as a successful businessman. On one of Christos's visits home to the village, a partner sold the business out from under him. '' 'REO,' as my father called it, was as famous in our village as the winged horse Pegasus.''
A prodigiously hard worker, he had a business there delivering fruits and vegetables to private homes, by means of first a horse and wagon and then a resplendent truck, an REO Speedwagon. As was customary, his wife stayed behind when he returned to Worcester. Christos had left Greece in 1910 as an impoverished teen-ager, and 16 years later returned to take a bride. She was killed in retribution.Įight months later, in March 1949, the 9-year-old Nicholas and three of his four older sisters, Olga, Kanta and Fotini, came to Worcester, Mass., to join a father they thought was a millionaire, a father they barely knew and whom Nicholas had never seen. Having learned that the guerrillas were about to send the children of the family's mountain village in northern Greece to indoctrination camps behind the Iron Curtain, she arranged her children's escape. Gage's task is to make readers want to hear a familiar story one more time, simply because it is so well told.Įleni Gatzoyiannis was executed by guerrillas who were her own countrymen.
Gage acknowledges at the end of the first chapter, ''The particular calamities, heartaches, and triumphs in these pages are unique to my sisters and me, but our odyssey is as old as the nation.'' Many other writers and film makers have given us their versions of that odyssey. ''A Place for Us,'' that book's successor, is a less horrific and less singular story about immigrants coming to America and making new lives.Īs Mr. In ''Eleni,'' the former New York Times correspondent told of his mother's murder by Communist guerrillas during the Greek civil war. This book stands in the long shadow cast by Nicholas Gage's previous book about his family, which was an international best seller. Boston: A Marc Jaffe Book/ Houghton Mifflin Company.
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