A Greek Odyssey in the American West

An accomplished ethnographer and historian gathered the oral histories, anecdotes and journals of her Greek immigrant parents, combined them with archival research and interviews, and wrote this evocative dual biography of a typical immigrant family journey from Greece to America during the late 1800s through the 1930s.

The author has written a vibrant picture of the poverty and social upheavals in Greece at the time that made immigration and family breakup the only choice for survival. Often, the industrial coal mining and railroad interests exploding in the United States, especially in the Intermountain West, orchestrated this immigration boom. A complicated “padrone” system of Greek labor agents recruiting their fellow Greeks (for a fee/commission) to work in mines and on railroads, often as strikebreakers, became the accepted way of entry into American life. But rarely did it offer a way towards good relations with non-Greek neighbors or assimilation of American culture.

While this book is written by one of the daughters of this Greek immigrant couple, she doesn't minimize or gloss over the poverty or conflicts she witnessed, nor does she seem to insert her own subjective analysis of the events in her parents' lives. She has made a coherent whole of a variety of facts and history, but also describing in rich detail the Orthodox Church and the immigrant folk culture that was dying out as she came of age.

The last few chapters of the book take a more personal turn as the author describes how she tries to care for her aging parents, their needs and wants often in conflict with the author's different season of life. She is very honest about the reality and frustrations of caregiving. Concluding the book in this way left me somewhat dissatisfied, but I don't think it could end in any other way.