Word: father
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...There are times when I wake up at night and want to get back on a plane and kill the son of a bitch," Gage said. A Place for Us overlaps that past and goes on to embrace less heroic lifetimes, mainly the author's and that of his father. Yet each life is gallant for its own reasons. Christos Gatzoyiannis passed through Ellis Island first in 1910, and again in 1938. He headed for Worcester, Mass., where he built a steady vegetable-delivery business while his wife remained in the northwestern Greek town of Lia. It was not uncommon...
...however, the myth of the New World plutocrat persisted. This was still the impression that Gatzoyiannis gave when he met the boat that carried his motherless children from Piraeus to New York City in 1949. Gage, then nine, recalls his father's "gleaming black oxfords, gray overcoat, and broad fedora -- an island of style in a sea of weeping and embracing refugees." The reunited family boarded a new blue DeSoto for the ride to Worcester. The car turned out to be rented, the old mill town no Athens, and Christos Gatzoyiannis no big shot...
...Nikola, his father's biggest failing was not getting his family to the U.S. in time to save Eleni. The resentment colors Gage's transformation from a greenhorn with an unpronounceable name to an American success story bylined Nicholas Gage. Only when the author has his own family does he come to understand the difference between a mother's love and a father...
...example, does one know the time to pack up a family picnic and head for home? "When it was too dark to tell red wine from white." When Gage describes the bread tax that early immigrants levied to support their new churches, one can taste the crust. His father's humiliations are palpable. So is his pride when his son receives an award from John F. Kennedy at the White House...
Gage relives his father's American Dream more passionately than his own. The author's exploits are subordinated to the old man's: his struggles to sustain his clan and make sure that his daughters find suitable (meaning Greek) husbands. Gatzoyiannis' death at age 90 provides a classic resolution. Surrounded by his children and grandchildren, he drifts off on old memories. It is a scene that evokes Chekhov and his observation that "any idiot can face a crisis. It is this day-to-day living that wears...