Listening to the Next Generation >> Adam

I see Greekness as a part of Middle Eastern culture, Mediterranean culture. So although I haven’t made Greek friends, I have made Turkish friends, Egyptian friends, Italian friends, and Spanish friends. I have been to Morocco where I talked with many people. I see real similarities in the way people approach life and values.

Got Greek? interviews Adam S. from Columbia University

My father is Greek and my mother’s side is Irish. Both of my dad’s parents came from northern Greece. My grandfather came from Kastraki and my Grandmother was from Kalambaka on the opposite side of the Meteora. They came at the end of the 19th century and did not know each other until they met in the United States in New Hampshire. My grandfather came for economic reasons, a failure of the vineyard that the family owned. My grandmother came for reasons that I am less clear about. But she came when she was very young, only 11 or 12, and she started working immediately in the mills in New Hampshire.

Q: What did your grandparents end up doing in New Hampshire to earn a living?

A: My grandmother initially worked in a textile mill. She basically took care of the family later in life. My grandfather established a barber shop. They lived their entire lives in New Hampshire with the exception of the Great War. He went for basic training but never actually made it to the European theater.

Q: Did you know your grandparents at all?

A: They passed before I was born. My grandfather much before I was born.  And my grandmother passed just before I was born in 1982.

Q: When you were growing up, what was your connection to your Greek heritage?

A: In my case, it was a very tentative relationship to Greece because my father had an ambivalent appreciation and attitude towards Greek culture. He was the victim of much racism growing up in the 1930s in New Hampshire, where to be Greek was to be “the other.” He really didn’t reconnect with his Greekness until later in life when he became a professor and started questioning what he took to be the imposition of identity, and he sort of developed a more conscious relationship to his Greekness. But he was never passionate enough to want to impose it upon me. He kind of presented it as an option. It was a part of the aesthetic of our domestic life.  It was certainly a part of a lot of the food we ate. He had nostalgia for the meals his mother would cook for him. He would always be trying to recreate dandelion soups from the back yard, and various different stews that she would make. The point is, I had a very superficial relationship to Greekness until he took me to Greece when I was a teenager.

Q: What was that experience like for you to go to Greece?

A:  It wasn’t the first time I’d been to Greece. I had gone with him as a child. He had received an honorary degree from the University of Athens when I was just a kid. But it was the first time I had gone in my “cognitive life,” when I had the ability to process what was going on around me. My appreciation for Greece was greatly abetted by a graduate student who had come from Greece on a Fulbright. Her name was Mina and she was very charismatic. A very lovely woman, who took a lot of time to introduce me to Greece on the terms on which a 13 or 14 year old person would like to encounter this new world. So the combination of her introduction, and then my new ability to process what was going on around me, made that experience one which excited my interest to pursue Greek identity cognitively. It had never been for me a matter of passion.

Q: So what do you remember from that trip?

A: I have two anecdotes, and probably one more general statement. The first anecdote was that Mina -  this woman who was my father’s student and who introduced me to Greece – began to teach me the language. And in fact, following that trip, I would go to her house every Friday for a few years and she would teach me. But she gave me some basic rudimentary Greek and also a brief history of Modern Greece. When I was in Greece once, I remember one time going to a kiosk and trying to buy some chocolate, and absolutely conflating my history with my language. When the man behind the kiosk presented me with my chocolate, I told him “Kolokotronis.” Everyone just laughed. But of course, it was appreciated because he’s a hero [from Greek War of Independence] and I was just a kid. The second anecdote is that we took a trip to, I believe, Mystras. And if I was correct, there was a Byzantine fortress up on a hill and there were some ruins below. They were also very beautiful but my dad was tired that day. So we went to the ruins at the bottom of the hill, and my dad was tired and he didn’t want to go to the fortress on top of the hill. Perhaps it was an Oedipal moment. In any case, I resented him for not taking me, so I started calling him “malaka” [a Greek insult] over and over again in public. He was so ashamed of me. I knew what it meant and I knew it was a real insult to him. I behaved this way not really caring what people around would think of us as a family, as a Greek family. Whereas later in life, I was much more interested in representing us not as a Greek family, but as a respectable family, anywhere. So the general impression I have of the trip, that incident aside, is that I felt and desired a longing to be connected to Greece. But I knew that it would take an enormous effort to overcome the years of not knowing it. So I began to try to learn the language. But I really felt from the beginning that it would be a hopeless task.

Q: Since then, what has your connection then to Greek culture been like?

A: Since that time, I have made no Greek friends. So I haven’t had the opportunity to pursue Greekness or language in any kind of sustained way. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to assimilate Greekness in its specificities, and in particular its modes of practice as much as I wanted to when I was 13. But I see it in a larger context. I see Greekness as a part of Middle Eastern culture, Mediterranean culture. So although I haven’t made Greek friends, I have made Turkish friends. I have made Egyptian friends, Italian friends, Spanish friends and I have been to Morocco where I talked with many people. I see real similarities in the way people approach life and values. So to the extent that there is a kind of a deeper meaning to being Greek or a deeper set of values, I think that’s become profoundly important to me as a kind of fortress against what I take to be an American culture, which really constitutes an assault on family and so forth.

Q: Can you elaborate on what you consider Greek values?

A:  Of course “Greek values” are not definable in any objective way. They’re simply a matter of how you want to invest them. But for me, my understanding of Greek values is related to the broader context of the family, the sanctity of family. Beyond that, I would say, the willingness to listen to people, to treat the encounter with another person as an ethical reality as opposed to a superficial passing that happens in post-industrial counties like the United States. My basic understanding of the Greek value is to treat other people as a real part of your experience of living. To treat them as human beings as opposed to mere aberrations, to oppose the notion that once they are out of sight, they are out of your mind.

Q: Do you see yourself going back to Greece, or having continued connections with Greek culture?

A: Absolutely. My friend Mina lives there and teaches at the University of Athens. She comes here once in a while, and I go visit her and stay with her family, her husband and two children.  We are very close. I call her my sister even though we are not related by blood. That’s a very important friendship to me. I also have plans to take my girlfriend to Greece next summer, to introduce her not only to my family but to this world that I love. I love going there not to vacation, not to go the beaches; but just to be there, just hang out. That’s the plan. I want to take classes on Modern Greek culture and so forth. But the demands of fulfilling a degree at Columbia are tough so I don’t know if I will be able to pursue Greekness academically in a systemic way. I don’t have the free time.

Q: How do you see yourself being connected to your Greek heritage going forward in your life?

A: Interestingly, I think that in terms of family identity, I identify most with my uncle who has been the archivist of our family’s history. It’s very important to pass on the memory of not necessarily Greek values, but the memory of our particular family and how we came to be in the United States. I have at least written down and recorded the testimonies of my family, my dad, and my uncle. I definitely want to pass those stories on. But it is an extraordinarily difficult question about whether one wants to teach one’s children Greek. I think I could arrange for that to happen even though it didn’t happen to me. But the problem is whether it would be better to teach them Spanish, or a language that is more useful in our society and in the world, given how spatially isolated Greece and Greek language is. So I haven’t decided about that.

Q: Do you identify yourself at all like Greek, Greek American, American, or something else to describe yourself?

A:  No. I don’t use labels in any way with respect to my nationality, ethnicity, or political affiliation, because I find them restrictive. I certainly want to understand myself as this hybrid mixture of both things that I’ve inherited and that I have chosen. But I think that to the extent that I engage in cultural sharing with people, when I meet someone from a strange culture, I tend to foreground my Greekness. For example, my girlfriend is Iranian. Her father is from Iran and her mother is a long-time American. When I talk to her father, what I speak about is Greekness. I share anecdotes and values and experiences of Greece. I think that I do that for two reasons.   One, I think Greekness is the most important of the various national or ethnic communities that I have inherited. But also because I think that if I was forced to choose to represent my Americanness or my Greekness, I would rather choose Greek because America has such a degraded identity, given the contemporary political circumstances [interview conducted in Sept. 2008]. Not that I want to just present myself so as to seek approval in the eyes of whomever I meet. But there is very little that is defensible about America’s role in the world right now, and anyway it’s such an embattled identity. I think that an American can really establish an identity with people anywhere in the world by drawing on his or her ethnic group— whether it is Greek or Hungarian or Chinese or anything, as long as you’re willing to see that you are more than American. I think that people want to understand or want to hear from Americans today that they are not so ideologically committed to Americanness and that they’re unwilling to enter in debate or see themselves as more than just Americans.

Q: Where you live right now, do you have any objects you associate with your Greek heritage?

A: I have a set of komboloi [worry beads] that I hang on the wall. It’s very ornate. I have one that is made of cracked stones that I carry with me. I have a Greek coffee pot. I have some Greek coffee in my freezer. I don’t always drink it. Let’s see, what else? I have baklava in my fridge, some feta cheese. I have a lot of things that I’ve just kept that I didn’t want to throw away. I think there was a certain sanctity to them, and I had a hard time giving them away.

Q: What’s your take on the movie, My big Fat Greek Wedding? Do you think it hurts or helps Greek American identity?

A: It’s funny because my experience of Greek people has generally been limited to those who are very well-educated. My father studied ancient Greek. He studied many different languages, and so he’s able to talk about the roots of words in ways that the father in the movie does. And that’s something that I really picked up from my father, although I’m not sure where I got it from. I do it all the time. People always laugh when I give the roots of words and they identify me with that movie. I don’t know if that’s a particularly Greek trait. I would say that it’s more of an intellectual trait. But the father in the movie is not an intellectual. But I will say that the utilization of strange items, like Windex, is a common phenomenon in the rest of world. For example, my girlfriend’s father who is Iranian uses pomegranates for everything. And so the belief in a cure-all is not common to just Greekness, but is common to perhaps the old world generally. This movie could stand in for any identity. So does it hurt or help? In my opinion, it both helps and hurts. It hurts by presenting supposed stereotypes of Greekness, while failing to also note these are also features of people from many different places. But I think the movie helps because the experience of interracial, interethnic, international dating is ever more common. I think that love will be one of the solutions for our contemporary lack of peace, for our contemporary warring condition. So any project that facilitates loving relationships, I think, is helpful.

Q: How about your mother’s Irish background? How does that come into play with your Greek identity?

A: My mother never knew her real father, and her mother was absent for a lot of her childhood life for personal reasons. She didn’t have a strong identity, a strong relationship to her family. There wasn’t a lot to teach me by way of family legacy on her side. So when it came time for my parents to get married, they actually were married in Greece on Kalymnos and she wore a traditional Greek dress. The people who came to the wedding were members of the community and villagers from this town, but really no family. So it was really strangers who came to the wedding, and that appreciated what my mom was doing in this way. And so, the dynamic has always been more Greek than Irish.

Q: Before we wrap up, is there anything else you wanted to bring up?

A: For me, the Greek American identity has been under constant attack because of my father who found Greek American politics very regressive. He really identified more with the radical politics of Greeks in Greece. Our family, his cousins actually, fought in the Greek civil war as communist guerillas. My dad has never been a communist per se, but to the extent that they resisted the Greek state and the U.S., essentially because it was backing that dictatorship, I think he admired them. My dad is much more comfortable amongst Greek people than he is amongst Greek Americans. That’s another thing that has been passed on to me. My experiences with Greek Americans have been mostly the children of small business owners who vote Republican and really understand politics in the very local sense, a fact which I find very hard to accept. So I think this juncture between Greek American and Greek is so wide that it is also a major part of the problem I have of identifying as Greek American.

Q: Thank you for the interview.

A: No problem. Thank you.