Austin Lunch: Greek-american Recollections

This book was loaned to me by my mother, who got it from her older sister. Her older sister had married a young man who immigrated here from Greece in the 1950s, and this man, my uncle, has always been a source of fascination for me. Now I have a frame of reference for some of the family stories or brief anecdotes I've grown up hearing and the Greek culture my aunt adopted.

The recollections in this book were sparked when some family members found an old sack of letters in an abandoned family farmhouse in a rural Greek city during the 1980s. The family members who had left their Greek homes as teenagers and emigrated to the U.S. had faithfully written home during all those years, and the letters had been saved as a testament of the family's sacrifice and the children's eventual prosperity in the U.S.

The author collected her mother's memories and those of her older siblings into this oral history of one Greek-American family living in Chicago, opening a restaurant/saloon during the Depression years, describing not only the hard work, but also the deep bonds of family necessary for survival.

There's a lot of incidental history to learn from this book–not only about Chicago in the 1920s, but also about blatant prejudice and discrimination against immigrants in the U.S., a regressive “dowry” policy in Greece that made parents send their girls away rather than bankrupt the family, and the pain and disruption caused by WWII for those at home in the U.S. and at home in Greece.

If you're at all interested in immigration or oral history in general, this would be a book to look for.