A valuable book for Greek Americans: Stavro Nashi's memoir "Ithaka on the Horizon"

Ithaka on the Horizon: a Greek-American Journey, by Stavro Nashi (2013). Available on Amazon.

I just finished Stavro Nashi's wonderful family memoir, "Ithaka on the Horizon". I think it's a valuable book, particularly for Greek Americans and their families. Many of us will read our own family histories in the book. It's particularly interesting to read about Nashi's having been born and grown up in Constantinople/Istanbul. The episodes of the anti-Christian pogroms in the 50s, and his family's sad decision to leave their home are timely and worth reading.

My own parents brought me to America when I was two years old, in 1957, from Thessaloniki. Both sets of grandparents came to Thessaloniki via the refugee route from Smyrna and Asia Minor. I thought Nashi's book affectionately presented those refugees and their plight, and their resilience. It's a bit sentimental at times, but that's okay. He captures an important sadness for us that's hard to describe -- as Greek Americans, if we are aware of the sacrifices made by our parents' generation, how will we ever live up to their expectations? You can't repay a mother or father for having abandoned the village or neighborhood that they loved so they could emigrate to America to raise a family.

I thought it was a good thing that Nashi went on at length about current Greek realities, since even many Greek Americans (most) are unaware of what Greece is going through. But it's hard to summarize those realities in a few chapters. There's a lot to love in Greece, but frankly, there's also a lot to dislike.

Regarding some of what Nashi says on Greek political life, I thought he got a lot of that right. I would note that many Greeks learn Left-leaning and often anti-American ideas from their youth. At times in Greece, even among friendly Greeks and family, it seems everybody believes America is behind everything bad or destructive. Greek culture values rebellion and independence, the Left has been very strong in Greek life for a long time, and the Right wing dictatorships there left a corrosive legacy. It'll take a long time for new attitudes to take hold.

I think Nashi is a bit hard on modern American life (that kids are overprotected, that we're essentially selfish, that we've forgotten our core values). Yes, I can agree with him on a lot of it (kids are overprotected, and we are often pretty selfish, a ton of other stuff), but the society children grow up in now is not the one we grew up in fifty years ago. There are also big improvements in our society that are easy to forget (the greater visibility of racial minorities in all walks of life, the greater freedom afforded to handicapped people, the technological advances). True, the changes can drive you crazy, but a lot of people have benefitted.

I enjoyed reading this book. I'm grateful to Stavro Nashi for making the effort to write and publish it.

The daughters doted on the father, the sons stuck with the mother - Rosamund Bartlett's biography of Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy: A Russian Life, by Rosamund Bartlett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

I enjoyed Rosamund Bartlett's biography of Leo Tolstoy for the large picture she paints of Russian life and history, and Tolstoy's place in that picture. As a reader, I of course knew about Tolstoy's importance as a novelist -- War and Peace and Anna Karenina are enough to keep his name alive for many future generations -- but I did not know the impact Tolstoy had as a political and spiritual thinker. Tolstoy societies and communes, pacifist movements, vegetarianism, opposition to despotism, an inspiration to Gandhi, a threat to the church and the Czarist government -- Bartlett wonderfully describes all of these currents around this great, irascible, and conflicted man.

I sometimes felt that Tolstoy himself seemed a bit obscured in the book. There are surprisingly few quotations from Tolstoy's letters, diaries, essays or fictional works -- surprising for a man who documented so much of his life. We briefly and abruptly read about events in his life -- of Tolstoy holding a dying brother in his arms, of Tolstoy angry with his wife Sonya (which he frequently was), of Tolstoy as a shrewd businessman negotiating with publishers for his work -- but we don't see enough Tolstoy in his own words or in his day to day life. It's minor criticism to what I think is otherwise a wonderful book.

Tolstoy's importance as a foundational figure in the growing Russian intellectual opposition to the czars, and even as an inspiration to the Marxists and Socialists came as a revelation to me. Not that he was a revolutionary (Bartlett makes pains to show that he was not, and he did not advocate the overthrow of the czarist government), but his voluminous writings on peasant education, the immorality of the caste system, the immorality of war and nationalistic fervor, the corruption of the capital system, all of it made him a patron saint to the Russian opposition.

Poor Sofya Bers, his wife. Bartlett sympathetically depicts her struggle to run a huge household and act as secretary to a writer who became a semi-religious saint of biblical proportions. (In fact, Sofya almost has as much flesh and blood in this book as Tolstoy himself.) Leo wanted to relinquish his wealth, give up his copyrights, become a wandering prophet, spend his time in religious and philosophical discussion. Tolstoy was stern and endlessly demanding. How could a practical woman like Sonya have put up with him all those years? And how could he with her?

Interesting that the Tolstoy daughters revered and doted on their difficult saintly father, while the sons tended to rebel against him and sided with their mother.