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  • North of Ithaka: A Granddaughter Returns to Greece and Discovers Her Roots
  • Martha Klironomos
Eleni N. Gage. North of Ithaka: A Granddaughter Returns to Greece and Discovers Her Roots. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. 2004. Pp. 284. Paperback $13.95.

In North of Ithaka, Eleni Gage chronicles a third generation Greek American’s reclaiming of her ancestral homeland. Over the course of a two-year stay in a village in Epirus, she undertakes the project of rebuilding the patriarchal house and acquaints herself with her roots to reconcile her feelings of hybridity between her American and Greek “sides” (p. 15). In moving between two nations, she reflects upon the transnational condition and observes “the essential dilemma of immigrants and their children, who shuttle back and forth between two homes. . . . The generation that leaves a country always wants to assimilate and move forward, while those of us in the new homeland can’t resist looking back, like Orpheus, to see from where we came” (pp. 10–11).

As she reckons with the family’s past, her decision to revisit and renovate the ancestral house does not merely fulfill a common social rite of passage in the rediscovery of her ethnic roots—for the Gatzoyianni’s family saga is not a typical [End Page 491] Greek immigrant story. The prospect of renovating the house, which belonged to her paternal grandmother, Eleni Gatzoyianni, forces the author to confront the history of the violence of the Civil War in Greece during the late 1940s with which her grandmother’s memory is inextricably linked. Before setting out, remarkably, Eleni Gage had never read Eleni (Random House 1983), the popular account written by her father, Nicholas Gage, a product of his investigation into the events that led to her grandmother’s execution by the communists during the Civil War. Despite its popularity in America, the book went on to become contested terrain between the right and left within the domain of the social history of the Civil War, sparking counter-interpretations in Greece of Eleni Gatzoyianni’s position within the village’s political divisions, a controversy fueled by the fact that Nicholas Gage’s account was seen as having been written from the vantage point of an outsider.

In a strikingly different approach, Eleni Gage, cognizant of her position as an outsider, inscribes a space in which to write about the present-day village of Lia while still paying homage to its tragic past. Writing in a style that fuses the genres of family memoir, travelogue, popular culture, and ethnography, Gage’s narration presents the process of uncovering the family’s past as one of testament and recovery through which she embarks on her path to self-discovery living among the Liotes. The memoir generates a reading of the past that is nevertheless ideologically charged. It raises essential questions over who is entitled to represent this past, for which audiences and for what purpose is the history she rekindles. And in a single stroke, she obliterates the boundaries between private and public memory.

At the outset of the memoir, the abandoned house, standing in ruins before her, “which now looks cozy and benign,” has become a repository for the remnants of a traumatic history (p. xvi). As Gage recounts: “Communist guerillas occupied the village and took over the house as their headquarters. The basement stable, where my family kept sheep and goats, became a jail where the soldiers herded prisoners. Our garden was turned into a makeshift burial ground” (p. xvi).

Her grandmother was among the prisoners, later shot by guerillas in retribution for securing passage for her children, not to communist countries as had been mandated, but to America to join their father who had immigrated before the outbreak of the war and left his wife behind. Gage upholds the view that her grandmother was an innocent victim caught in the village’s political schism. While her reading of the past is politicized, as is her father’s, in its critical stance towards the left, she provides relatively little factual knowledge of the turmoil wrought by the Civil War and does not probe into the deeper issues at hand that may have...

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