A Room in Athens Read online

  And yet, even the most sophisticated young people—how young they were!—can become dodos, as my mother might say, in the face of romantic fantasy. And Greece, land of ancient myths, had, by the early sixties, itself become a romantic, semi-mythical place for many young Americans and Europeans, and a fashionable tourist destination. In the postwar years, Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, a celebratory account of his travels in Greece in 1939, along with the writings of Lawrence Durrell, portrayed a Greece not of Homer’s wine-dark, deadly sea and barren, war-scarred land, but one drenched with life-giving sun in a sparkling Aegean, its people bursting with elemental vitality, a land to rediscover one’s soul. The books were embraced by young people, and their representations of Greece were amplified by international hit films such as Never on Sunday, in 1960, and Topkapi and Zorba the Greek,2 in 1964, which also set off a craze for bouzouki music.3 In Philadelphia, where my parents were living, Greece beckoned from travel agents’ windows with posters that portrayed the Parthenon beneath an azure sky, and dancing rings of peasants in festive, traditional garb.

  My parents claimed no ancestral link to Greece; their families were American Jews whose forebears had emigrated from the Pale of Settlement, Romania, and Western Europe. But they were among those lured to the Aegean by Byron, Miller, Durrell, bouzouki music, and films. In the 1950s, my parents had danced to bouzouki music on the grassy campus at Antioch College, in Ohio, where they had met as teenagers. Later, in New York, they went to the Greek nightclubs and listened to the tales of bohemian friends who had returned from Greece and urged them to go. Avoid Athens, they counseled, the true spirit of Hellas was in countryside and on the islands. A writer-friend, Ben Kremen, from their Antioch days, had toured Greece with his wife four years earlier, and he is mentioned several times in the diary. His fervor for Greece and his poetic tales of quaint villages were especially seductive for my parents. In a letter I recently found among my parents’ papers, Kremen wrote:

  Get into your car and drive out into the country—up north might be best. Get as far off the road as possible. When you come to a tiny village, tell the people that you’re lost or tired—anything. Ask them for a place to stay for the night. You might do without the barest conveniences. But you’ll find joy in the utter openness and warmth and trust of those villagers…All of our hopes and expectations for Greece were fulfilled and even surpassed as soon as we left Athens and went into the country and the small villages. There are two totally different Greeces…

  In 1963, my parents resolved to finally spend a year leisurely exploring Europe. My father had lived in Paris in the mid-fifties while studying at the Sorbonne, and was familiar with London and a few other European capitals. My mother would be going abroad for the first time. Their plan had been to sail to Tangiers and to conclude their grand tour at a Greek island, probably Hydra or Crete. It was to be the perfect end to their journey, a pastoral idyll of seashore and peasant dancing: “For a year we had read Lawrence Durrell and dreamed of this time in Greece,” my mother wrote. But like so many best-laid plans, it went awry.

  • • •

  The Athens that confronted my parents when they drove south from the rugged villages of Yugoslavia was modern, flashy, crowded, and polluted. New white apartment buildings had been sprouting beneath the Acropolis to house the flood of arrivals from Greek villages and islands seeking a better life in the capital after the Second World War. Old Athens—the city of red-tile roofs, of yellow plaster houses with wrought-iron balconies, of neoclassical hotels for touring Europeans—had been mostly destroyed by war and rebuilding. During the Second World War, Greece had suffered terribly under German occupation—hundreds of thousands died in battle or of starvation—then endured a devastating civil war from 1946 to 1949. When my parents arrived, most remnants of that carnage had been swept away by bulldozers and with aid from the Marshall Plan. The Greek economy had rebounded and was in the midst of the spectacular growth dubbed the Greek Economic Miracle, which would last into seventies; the new government of Georgios Papandreou and his Center Union party promised urgently needed political stability; and Athens’ population had soared to 1.8 million, setting off the frenzy of housing construction that appears in my mother’s diary. Greek society was rapidly modernizing and an educated middle-class of lawyers, doctors, architects, and other professionals trained in Europe or America was emerging. On the world’s geopolitical stage, Greece’s strategic position in Southern Europe made it newly valued by the Western powers as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and its allies in the Cold War.

  Even so, Greece could hardly bear comparison with the powerful Western European nations, let alone with the United States. The country held only 8.3 million people in the early sixties, and in size could comfortably fit into the state of Louisiana. In 1964, the World Bank recorded Greece with a GDP per capita of slightly under $800, among the lowest in Europe, while that of the United States was about $3,500, among the world’s highest. There was widespread illiteracy and destitution of the sort hardly known in most of postwar America. Many of the new Athenians were rough-hewn, fresh from the fishing village or farm, and they had brought with them the traditional country ways. And, as modern as Athens appeared, it lacked much that was taken for granted in America, such as television and supermarkets.

  All of this forms the backdrop of the diary. But words and acronyms such as Cold War, elections, NATO, and GDP are absent from these pages—as is even major international news, such as Leonid Brezhnev succeeding Nikita Khrushchev as leader of the Soviet Union in October 1964, or the dangerous conflict that raged between Greeks and Turks that year for control over the island of Cyprus. My parents were quite alert to world affairs—they regularly read the International Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, Life, and French and British newspapers on the road—but my mother lopped away all references to them. Nor does she mention the political and cultural mayhem that was wracking their own country.

  Nineteen-sixty-four was a watershed year in America, bringing to the headlines, and to millions of televisions, issues that would convulse the nation during the rest of the decade and which reverberate today—the Vietnam War escalation, passage the of Civil Rights Act, the Freedom Summer and the murders of three civil rights activists in Mississippi, the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of president Kennedy in November 1963. The year also brought harbingers of the impending revolutions in popular culture with the arrival of the Beatles and the road trip in a psychedelic school bus of Ken Kesey’s proto-hippies, the Merry Pranksters. Moreover, 1964 was an election year, setting President Johnson against the conservative Republican Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. The months that my parents were away from America happened to be historic. Yet none of these events reached the published diary. Among the pages cut, for instance, was this Paris entry of July 21, 1964, about the looming election and the mounting civil unrest, which had just exploded across Harlem in six days of riots and looting, ignited by a police officer’s shooting of a black student:

  Senator Barry Goldwater is, after all, the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Civil rights news fills the papers with violence. Each day, the news from home is more upsetting. The impossible seems to be happening lately everyday—I read the papers with disbelief, with sadness. And I am surprised that I can feel hurt by what happens in my country. Perhaps for the first time I am beginning to feel I have a country.

  But in the published diary, the large picture is curtained off for the sake of the story’s cohesion, as it was not quite in life. My mother’s attention is instead dedicated to the intensely intimate—the miracle occurring within her own body, her new infant, and the strangeness of her immediate surroundings. The postwar economic, political, and cultural forces transforming Greece and Europe are indicated only indirectly, as refracted through her life in Athens and its memorable images: the taxi-drivers with feather dusters endlessly brushing off the construction-dust from their cars; the rustic men plodding the urban streets wear
ing homemade suits; the movie theater full of couples of arranged marriages watching a Hollywood tale about romantic love; the leather-faced peasant women on park benches, sharply watching all, guardians of the fading old ways in this new, white city. The book’s artificially myopic focus lends a peculiar and compelling insularity to the story and also a sense that it is floating in timelessness, even while it is so firmly stamped by its time, with its references to telegrams and transistor radios, to cheap travel by freighter, and even to the sixties’ vogue among Athenians for Nescafé instant coffee. (“No one here in our neighborhood would dream of drinking Greek coffee,” she wrote in a letter home. “That’s old-fashioned. They prefer instant Nescafe. It feels Western.”)

  At first, as my parents settle into their apartment and gather initial impressions of Athens, my mother is simply elated to have finally arrived in Greece. She sees the people as “the most beautiful in Europe” and discerns poetry in the white city cupped in its legendary violet hills. But as she shops for baby clothes and diapers, consults doctors, and searches for the maternity clinic she has heard about, she begins to encounter much that surprises her and offends her sensibilities as a white, middle-class, college-educated American woman. Most of her observations concern, in some way, what she sees as Greek men’s domination of women, and traditions’ domination of seemingly everyone, at least when it comes to domestic life.

  America, with its new suburbs, barbecue parties, and driveways with spangled Cadillacs and Chevrolets, also had slums and rural poverty, but no ancient customs of dowries or arranged marriages. Moreover, the United States was already embarking on a revolution in women’s rights. In 1964, the bestseller list was topped by Bette Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, signaling the launch of the second wave of feminism, which saw women fight for equality under the law and in the workplace, and for freedom regarding reproductive rights, among many other issues. The same year, a film appeared based on Helen Gurley Brown’s book Sex and the Single Girl. Brown’s ideal “Cosmo Girl”—the glamorous, sophisticated, and uninhibited young reader of her magazine, Cosmopolitan—was a rare enough species in America, but she would have been far rarer, maybe impossible, in Greece. (Even in America, though, the view that a woman was an appendage to her husband lingered; the diary’s original subtitle reflects this, quaintly describing it as recounting the experiences of an American “wife” in Greece.)

  My mother did not consider herself a feminist—I think the word and the movement implied a militancy she felt didn’t suit her—but she embraced the principle of female empowerment even as a teenager in the Midwest in the fifties, and was forthright about her views to friends, family, and in her diary. She believed it a self-evident truth that women deserved equality in marriage, the same opportunities as men in education and professions, and were entitled to make their own choices regarding their bodies, including reproduction decisions. When I was growing up in the seventies, my mother’s bookshelves held, in addition to Friedan’s book, such feminist classics as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Nancy Friday’s My Mother/My Self, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. My mother’s intended title for her book, A Room in Athens, echoes Woolf’s title, and she knew this, although I suspect she did not intend to imply a direct link.

  All of which is not to suggest that my mother’s diary should be construed as a feminist text. She certainly hadn’t considered it as such. A feminist perspective was simply of a piece with her naturally frank and egalitarian way of looking at the world. And she brought this view to Greece.

  Still, her criticisms of Greek culture, whether classified as feminist or not, may seem to some readers as the uncharitable swipes of an “ugly American” toward the people of a smaller, poorer, more traditional country. And this view would, unfortunately, be justified in places. But traditional ways, as such, do not offend her; far from it. My mother rejoiced in the freedom of the elemental, the traditional, the “primitive”; she had eagerly sought these in Greece. It was her disappointment at encountering such unexpected cultural constraints which prompted much of her criticism. What particularly outrages her are those old ways that appear to stifle Greek women and children. Today, feminists and human rights advocates are increasingly concerned with traditional societies that practice customs hurtful to women and children, such as, at an extreme aspect, the genital mutilation of girls that occurs across much of Africa and the Middle East. She was confronting what she saw as questionable practices in another country, alone in her diary, years before there was widespread public debate or, for that matter, high school and college courses exploring them. To her, for example, the ancient practice of swaddling infants—the wrapping of newborns tightly in cloths, restricting their limb movements—appears simply as a form of torture, whatever its rationale, as evil in its way as foot-binding of girls in old Japan. When she protests the practice—with some misgiving—the other mothers and their families, and the nurses in the maternity clinic, are horrified: an unwrapped newborn will catch cold, or scratch itself with its fingernails, or have misshapen legs. She exasperatedly dismisses such rationales as “Balkan logic,” by which she means reasoning that appears unsound to her as an American. It is, at best, a patronizing phrase, and it is true that she was a daughter of an ascendant postwar America, and had also absorbed certain Western stereotypes about the Greeks, despite her genuine abhorrence of prejudices.

  Nevertheless, it is always asking much for writers to thoroughly transcend their times; and it should be remembered that the identification of “national characteristics,” stereotyped or not, was far more accepted in academic and social discourse—and in travel writing—a half–century ago. In a December 1961 article on Greece for Holiday, for instance, the distinguished English author V.S. Pritchett, with help from a Zorba-like companion, freely dispenses insights into the Greek “character,” casually linking it to Europe’s North-South divide and then all the way back to the country’s pre-Christian past:

  The Greeks speak of romantic love, but only as one of the many aspects of love, unromantic love being regarded as more desirable. Our romantic temperament of the north does not appeal to these people who have a very unshocked, worldly, pagan eye for ways and means.

  Pritchett then tallies more of the Greeks’ apparent national characteristics, in a delicately calibrated order: “Sympathy is their first impulse, inquisitiveness their next, along with a quite unguarded openheartedness, and all contained within a natural sense of fineness and consideration.” Yet he also states: “They are nervous, active, and volatile in temperament.”

  And in June 1965, only four months after my parents had left for America, another British writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, a philhellene who had fought on Crete in the Second World War, presented Athens for Holiday, and he, too, offered an inventory of Greek characteristics, including “kindness, hospitality, humor, originality,” and so on. He also felt compelled to look back millennia for the origins of the Greek’s contemporary qualities: “The famous Athenian passion for novelty, which St Paul observed on the Areopagus, is equally pronounced today.”

  Like my mother, both Pritchett and Fermor described the Greek “character” without our concern about charges of stereotyping, prejudice, or condescension. In this aspect, and in their general perspectives on Greece, writers of the sixties can appear closer to the imperialist British travelers and their Baedeker tourist guides than to us, with our discomfort about making any judgments or generalizations about peoples. (“In character the Greek is cheerful and lively,” the 1894 Baedeker for Greece advised, adding: “In their intercourse with strangers, the Greeks are friendly, civil, and, as a rule, not officious or importunate…”)

  Such an affinity would make sense; the British had largely created modern Greece in the Western imagination.4 Even before Lord Byron’s legendary death at Missolonghi, in 1824, in support of the Greek struggle against the Ottoman Empire, British travelers had been exploring the “Near East.” They penned their experiences and reflections in
letters, journals, articles, travelogues, novels, and poetry. As part of the Ottoman Empire, then as a sovereign country, after the end of the War of Independence, in 1832, Greece was represented as a tantalizing, darkly ambiguous region: the decayed birthplace of Western civilization; the exotic Mediterranean province of the brutal, “Oriental” Turk; the impoverished, superstition-bound Balkan country on the distant frontier of the West. Greeks themselves were portrayed as primitive, debased, pagan, semi-European curiosities, yet also as the noble descendants of Periclean Athens. After the Second World War, with the books of Miller and Durrell, films such as Never on Sunday and Zorba, and the growth of mass tourism, brighter images of Greece were draped over the old. But for educated travelers, steeped in literature and history, the Greece of caftans and silks, of Plato and Marathon, of Byron and ruins and peasants, which had been engraved for centuries deeply into the collective Western mind, was always just beneath a deceptively modern surface—and often broke through. My mother, like Pritchett and Fermor, glimpsed Old Greece even when walking among the new apartment buildings and traffic of postwar Athens: