Daddy's War: Greek American Stories

2. Recounting Daddy’s War: Family Stories

[ 2 ] Recounting Daddy’s War Family Stories I n this section I have organized the stories I heard when I asked family members between 2004 and 2006 what they thought had happened to my father and his family during their stay in Greece from 1937 to 1945. In order to achieve the “scan” of family memory I explained at the conclusion of chapter 1, I am presenting these anecdotes to my readers in as close a form to the way I received them as possible. That is to say, where I received written replies, I have reproduced here that writing. And where I received oral recitations, I have reproduced the way that speech sounded during interviews and is recorded on tape. Thus I have included hesitations, false starts, back-channeling (“uh-huh”), hedges, repetitions , and so on, because the kernels of additional, alternate, or contradictory stories are often to be located in such comments and sounds. To those who have never read transcribed speech, it might be helpful to think about what your eye is reading as a play script: the cues are given for where to pause, falter, and restart, or rather, where I or my interviewees did pause, falter, and restart. Nevertheless, this transcription style can be misleading: transcribed speech often conveys an exaggerated inarticulateness or at best inelegance on the part of the speakers, whereas in point of fact almost all of my interviewees are highly educated, and RECOUNTING DADDY’S WAR [ 55 ] most transcribed spoken discourse bears some of the same characteristics readers will notice in these stories. Additionally, though, these stories ’ structures are highly marked by Greek oral storytelling style (a topic I will address more fully in chapter 3). For those who have never been exposed to Greek storytellers, I suppose the most prominent characteristic is the rambling, or as my Swiss husband puts it: “Greeks tell for the sake of telling.” I did not try to reduce the meanderings of the stories I received, though I did obviously decide in the case of written and oral communications, where an anecdote begins and ends. Also toward my goal of tracing how stories travel through and metamorphose among family members, I have included my early memories of specific stories for comparison’s sake; they can serve my readers as an approximate summary of my knowledge when I started conducting these interviews. My childhood memories appear here, as they did in chapter 1, in bold letters for my earliest memories, or, as I would like to call them borrowing from my friend Marianne Hirsch, my postmemories , and in italics for my incipient narratives. Readers will thereby notice that as a child I did not have any awareness whatsoever of some of these topics. The introductions to each story and anything placed in square brackets stem from me, the adult compiler of these stories. 1 Immigration and Return or How George and Chrysoúla Met, Married, Ended Up in the United States, and Chrysoúla Left for Greece Again Daddy, Yiayia, Aunt Pearl, Uncle Harry, and Uncle Nick went to Greece because Daddy was having trouble in school since his English wasn’t so good. Pappou stayed behind to earn money. The cultural commentator and Holocaust scholar Eva Hoffman wrote about her own childhood: “In the beginning was the War.” In my case, [ 56 ] RECOUNTING DADDY’S WAR I would say that: in the beginning was the Trip to Greece. I knew very little about what had preceded the fateful trip to Greece that my father’s nuclear family, minus his father, embarked on in 1937. For instance, I had heard almost nothing about my grandparents’ youth or how they had met. There was a large photograph of their village wedding hanging in their house—and after their deaths in our own. I know I spent a lot of time staring at this picture as a child, but I never remember asking about it, though at some point someone must have told me the scene was in Chryssó, near Delphi. This added to its mythical aura: set in a steep village street, with a church and houses lining the sides, the handsome couple was in the center with the musicians and children in front of them, and all the other villagers lined up behind them. It was paired with a studio wedding portrait, taken post facto in the United States, in which my grandfather...