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Issue Date: May 22, 2005
Books
Finding home far away
In a new memoir, an American confronts her family's tragic past in Greece.
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Imagine being able to reclaim your ancestral home two generations after it was lost. That's exactly what Eleni N. Gage did. In her new memoir, North of Ithaka (St. Martin's Press, $23.95), the American-born magazine editor retells how she went in 2002 to the village of Lia in Greece, where the grandmother she was named for was executed by communist guerrillas in 1948, during the country's civil war. Gage, 30, spent a year rebuilding the house where her father was born. She spoke with us:
Your dad, Nicholas, wrote the 1983 best seller "Eleni," documenting the loss of his mother. Why did you decide to go back?
I still feared the village. It seemed like a scary place, so I felt I needed to go back and build a relationship with the real place. If not, I felt it would be lost to future generations of our family.
What did you learn from people there?
How close happiness is to sadness. People would say, "I remember going to your father's baptism," but the next person would say, "I remember playing with a girl who stepped on a mine." That's the way life is; in real life, these emotions are very close to the surface.
Is it true you didn't read "Eleni" until you began restoring your grandmother's house?
I was only 9 when the book came out, so there was no question of me reading it at that point. As I got older, I knew it was a family tragedy that made my aunts cry every time I asked about it, so I stopped asking.
How did you feel when you finally read it?
I felt relieved. I actually found it comforting to know all the details of what happened and to have experienced that time in my family's history myself, in a way, by reading about it. I had a deeper understanding of our past.
-- Lewis Beale
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