Introduction
1 the secret womb of the diary: Nin, Anaïs. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947–1955, vol. 5. Gunther Stuhlmann (Ed.). New York/London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. p. 84.
2 Never on Sunday (1960): a comedy about an American tourist in Greece who tries to reform a carefree prostitute with a heart of gold (Melina Mercouri); Topkapi (1964): a suspense film about a caper to steal a jeweled dagger from a museum in Istanbul; Zorba the Greek (1964): a tale of an exuberant Greek peasant (Anthony Quinn) and an inhibited Englishman, based on the 1946 novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis.
3 bouzouki music: Greek folk music played on a bouzouki—a long-necked, pear-shaped, stringed instrument, similar to a mandolin.
4 in the Western imagination: see, e.g., Goldworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1998; Roessel, David. In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
5 the Near East during pregnancy: among the earliest women writers to travel in the region while pregnant were Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) and Lady Mary Nisbet (1778–1855), whose letters were posthumously published, in 1926.
6 strictures of home: see, e.g., Kolocotroni, Vassiliki and Efterpi Mitsi (Eds.). Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2008.
7 a Turkish bath in Athens in 1786: Montagu, Mary Wortley. The Turkish Embassy Letters. Malcolm Jack (Ed.). London: Virago, 2000 [1763], Letter XXVII, p. 57; Craven, Elizabeth. A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople. London: G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 1789, p. 264. See also, Women Writing Greece [note 6, above], Chapter 1: “Lady Elizabeth Craven’s Letters from Athens and the Female Picturesque.”
8 tender of heart: Woolf, Virginia. “Jane Austen.” The Common Reader: First Series. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc. 1953 [1925]. p. 138.
9 labor and birth: see, e.g., Michaels, Paula. Lamaze: An International History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014; Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton, 1976.
10 physically possible for her: see Postscript.
11 Moffat, Mary Jane and Charlotte Painter (Eds.). Revelations: Diaries of Women. New York: Random House, 1974.
Prologue
12 the song has a life of its own: Ben Kremen was a writer and a friend of my parents since their college days. See Introduction, p. xviii.
Hopa nina nina nai: the song was, and remains, popular in Greece, Macedonia, Turkey, and throughout much of the Balkans. Its origins are obscure and it is sung in different languages, but the lyrics can be roughly translated:
Stand up and dance, my girl / So I can see you happy
Dance the Turkish tsifteteli
Hopa nina nina nai, nina nai nai / Nina nai, yavroum, nina nai nai
I will sing for you again / That robust melody
Hopa nina nina nai, nina nai nai / Nina nai, yavroum, nina nai nai
Shake your body a little / We live only once
In this false world / We must enjoy ourselves a little…
13 jalabas: a traditional, long, full-sleeved robe worn in North Africa and in Arabic-speaking countries.
14 muezzin: a crier who calls Muslims to prayer from a mosque.
15 Casbah (or Kasbah): ancient fortifications in the medina (old city) that once guarded the sultan’s palace.
16 La Ronde…round and round: La Ronde (“carousel”) was a waltz in the 1950 French film of the same name. The song’s lyrics include Tournent, tournent, mes personnages (“turn, turn, my characters”). In the film, the carousel is a metaphor for the characters’ revolving romances. She is probably conflating this song with the 1938 song Love Makes The World Go Round, by British songwriter Noel Gay (1898–1954) and perhaps with the proverb which serves as that song’s title.
17 Rebecca West’s book on Yugoslavia: West, Rebecca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia. New York: Viking Press, 1941.
18 Arno’s article: my father was writing an article about Yugoslavia for Holiday magazine.
19 visiting him for a week: Anthony C. West (1910–1988): Irish novelist and short story writer (not to be confused with British writer Anthony West (1914–1987), the illegitimate son of authors Rebecca West and H. G. Wells).
20 a spastic dog: in her diary entry for April 17, 1963, written while my parents were still in the States: “A letter came today from Anthony C. West in Ireland … A baby, he says, will be born where it wants to be—no matter how you plan. An interesting idea, suggesting there is a Will before life—a force that directs a very specific child into being, and when it wants. Perhaps it is not all in the will of two adults.”
21 Rex Morgan: the square-jawed, black-haired, small-town family doctor of the comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D., which launched in 1948.
22 Dick-Read’s chapter on self-delivery: Dick-Read, Grantly. Childbirth Without Fear: The Principles and Practice of Natural Childbirth, 2nd Rev. Ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. The chapter referred to is titled “Childbirth in Emergency.”
Chapter 1: Arrival
23 Antioch College: a small, liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In the 1950s, Antioch had a reputation as an institution combining radicalism with high academic standards.
24 Greeks, embassies, and foreigners: “Far from basking on the Aegean, pounding octopus on its shores for lunch and standing in sunny excavations on an Island Hellenic,” she wrote home, “we are settled in the equivalent of Madison Avenue—Kolonaki Square.” This comparison with the fashionable street in Manhattan is roughly accurate. The Athenian neighborhood, on the slopes of Mount Lycabettus, the city’s tallest hill, had been a bastion of affluent conservativism since the late nineteenth century. Its well-to-do families largely survived both the Second World War and the Greek Civil War into the postwar years. The neighborhood retains its character today. See, e.g., Smith, Michael Llewellyn. Athens: A Cultural and Literary History. Oxford: Signal Books, 2004.
25 good Diners Club restaurants: Diners Club was among first credit cards, but the phrase describes expensive restaurants anywhere.
26 ouzo: a potent, anise-flavored aperitif popular throughout Greece. Ouzo is usually combined with water, which makes the clear liquid turn into a cloudy-white mixture.
27 my eyes… morning dips: the ancient city-state of Sparta was a warrior culture, in which boys began hard military training, including swimming, at a young age.
28 the Eighth Avenue clubs: New York’s Greek nightclubs, with their exotic, exciting atmosphere, greatly shaped my parents’ vision of Greece and their resolve to journey there. From the mid-1940s, the “Greektown” clubs had clustered along a few streets of lower Eighth Avenue, a working-class neighborhood since gentrified as Chelsea. They had picturesque names—“The Grecian Palace,” “Port Said,” “Egyptian Gardens,” “Istanbul,” “Ali Baba,” “Arabian Nights,” “The Britania”—and flamboyant décor, with “Arabian” and “Oriental” motifs. (There was also the famous “Roundtable” in midtown and the “Feenjon” in the Village, a favorite of my parents).
Although the clubs were known as Greek, they drew crowds and musicians from across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. Starting in the early 1950s, most clubs featured belly dancing, or “Oriental dancing,” and were sometimes called “bouzouki-and-belly-dance clubs.” The 1960s was the heyday of the Greektown night spots, when flocks of tourists, along with jazz and classical musicians and celebrities, packed in with the regulars for revelries lasting into the early hours. The bands included some of the Middle East’s finest musicians, and their robust, virtuoso music spread from the Eighth Avenue clubs into American and then international popular culture. The clubs remained popular into the 1970s, but had faded away by the end of the 1980s.
In January 1966, the year after my parents returned from Greece, Holiday magazine published an affectionate and lengthy article about Greektown written by my father. The piece provides a fascinating glimpse into a lost New York enclave whose music was as complex, authentic, and thrilling as that played in the city’s jazz and folk clubs of the time. In one passage, he described the flavor of clubs in their early years, which was largely unchanged when my parents enjoyed Greektown:
The audience was mostly Near Eastern—Greek, with some Turks, Armenians, Lebanese, Arabs, Syrians. Many were from the surrounding “Greektown” and the crews of Greek ships. They would give a few dollars to the band to hear their favorite songs; men did the shuffling zeibekiko dances, and lines of men linked hand to hand by handkerchiefs performed the folk dances of their native regions of Greece. If a man had money, he would get drunk and throw fistfuls of bills at the band, at the dancers, at friends as they danced and downed shots of Greek brandy—much the scene, except for the dancers, that many Americans first saw in Never on Sunday…
… When Never on Sunday came out, and the tourist rush to Greece began, what had been neighborhood clubs became tourist spots…But often the spontaneity remains: Greeks still come in to drink, dance, throw money. The music is always amplified too much, the noise is terrific, the atmosphere relaxed and gay. The performers chat; the dancers may leave the stage to do Greek folk dances with each other or with customers.
During my parents’ stay in Athens, they could not find nightclubs similar to those they had loved in New York. In December 1964, my mother, recalling their nights in Greektown, wrote home drolly: “I long for where the real, authentic atmosphere is—in New York, in the Feenjon, the Britania, the Hellenic Pallas.”
29 omphalos: a central point. Literally “navel” in Greek.
30 a friend, Alice: Alice Boehm was a school friend of my mother’s who had moved with her husband, an anthropologist, and their two sons to Yugoslavia about a year before my parents’ trip. My parents visited them at their mountain home near the town of Cetinje, in Montenegro, while traveling. The phrase quoted here about a “clinic run by a woman who practices natural childbirth” is from a letter that Alice had written to my parents before they left America for Greece. In the letter, Alice had promised that her sister, Mary, who had lived for three years in Greece and had given birth at the clinic in Athens, would provide them with the clinic’s name and address. However, Mary was in Japan, and was about to return to Afghanistan with her husband, so her reply to Alice’s letters did not arrive until after the birth (part of one of Mary’s belated letters was included in the book (p. 77). My mother ended up finding the clinic by the fortuitous encounter she describes with the Greek woman Liesel.
31 Minimal Infant Wardrobe: the U.S. Government, through the United States Children’s Bureau, published many pamphlets on children’s health, including Prenatal Care, Infant Care, and Child Care. The pamphlets sold millions of copies from their first publication in 1913-14.
32 like small sheets: these were swaddling sheets. Infants were wrapped snugly in the sheets after a triangular cloth was wrapped, diaper-like, at the groin. See note 56.
33 Braxton Hicks contractions: named for British obstetrician John Braxton Hicks (1823–1897), who first described them, in 1872. Braxton Hicks contractions refers to sporadic, brief tightening of the uterine muscles during pregnancy. The contractions become stronger and more frequent as childbirth approaches and may be mistaken for labor pains (known as false labor). The contractions also can be caused by activities such as walking, by dehydration, or by stress. Women experiencing discomfort are generally advised to stop activity or change position, drink water, and use visualization and breathing techniques.
34 a sonnet read by Olivier: Laurence Olivier (1907–1989): English actor, famed especially for Shakespearean roles.
35 KΛAΔKH: Kladaki.
36 Madame Kladaki: Charis Kladaki (1912–1990), who ran the little clinic, was a gynecologist/obstetrician and a pioneer in Greece’s medical profession, who overcame strong resistance from the medical establishment as both a woman physician and a crusader for the Lamaze method of natural childbirth.
According to her daughter, Ada Kladaki, and a nephew, Petros Kladaki, Charis Kladaki was born on the island of Symi, in the Dodecanese archipelago, near the Turkish coast, north of Rhodes, Kladaki was of a distinguished family. Her father, a lawyer, was a longtime mayor of Symi, her grandmother was a well-known midwife in Symi and Rhodes, and her brothers included lawyers, a mathematician, a psychoanalyst, and a high-ranking army officer during the Second World War.
An exceptional student, she finished high school at age fifteen, then studied painting in Athens at the Doxiadis School of the Arts. She was among the few women admitted to the medical school of the University of Athens. After receiving a medical degree, she specialized in gynecology and obstetrics, serving as assistant to Dr. Nikolaos Louros, a prominent gynecologist and academician schooled in Switzerland and Germany, and a lecturer at the University of Berlin. Louros was a founder of the Alexandra maternity clinic in Athens, in 1954, which was credited with introducing the Lamaze method to Greece.
In 1955, Kladaki moved in Paris, to study the Lamaze method at Rothschild Hospital, under Dr. Pierre Vellay, a protégé of Dr. Fernand Lamaze who became a leading advocate of the Lamaze method internationally. Returning to Athens two years later, Kladaki sought an academic career but faced obstacles from colleagues. In 1958, she established her natural childbirth maternity clinic, at 26 Bouboulinas Street, a few doors from the Alexandra clinic. In 1961, she wrote a doctoral thesis on the Lamaze method.
After the clinic closed, in 1972, Kladaki continued to practice as a gynecologist/obstetrician until her death, of liver cancer, in 1990, at the age of seventy-eight.
During her career, Kladaki regularly spoke at medical conferences in European cities such as Paris, London, Cannes, Bordeaux, and Strasbourg. Widely respected in her profession in Greece and abroad, Kladaki was known for her idealism, resolve, intelligence, and compassion, often treating women without means for a nominal fee or at no cost. She married a lawyer, and her daughter, Ada, became a pianist.
37 psychoprophylaxis: see Introduction, p. xxxi.
38 C’est merveilleux, Madame!: “It’s marvelous, Madame!”
39 in illustrated copies of Grimm: Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the nineteenth century compilation of German folklore by brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
40 Quasimodo: this surprisingly cruel nickname was derived from the famous character of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Quasimodo, the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame Cathedral, is described as a repulsively ugly mute with a bowed back.
41 Never on Sunday: see Introduction, p. xix and note 2.
42 worry beads: strings of beads, made of amber, wood, bone, coral, and other natural and synthetic materials. The beads are similar in appearance to Catholic rosaries and the prayer beads of many religions. According to one Greek legend, the beads originated with monks in Northern Greece in the Middle Ages as an aid to keeping count of prayers. However, the beads had lost any religious significance long before the 1960s: back in 1854, in England, John Murray’s Handbook for Travelers in Greece, observed: “It may be worth mentioning, that all Levantines, whether Greeks or Moslems, may frequently be seen twirling a string of beads in their fingers. This is mere restless habit, and is nowise connected with any religious observance, such as the use of rosaries among Latins.” Traditionally, the beads were used by Greek men, although they have become more commonly used among women.
43 Melina Mercouri (1920–1994): Greek actress who became internationally famous for her role as a carefree Greek prostitute in the film Never on Sunday.
44 Bouzouki music: see Introduction, p. xix and note 3.
Chapter 2: Birth
45 my dearest friend: Shirl Root, a decorator, and her husband, Billy Root, a jazz musician, were my parents’ close friends and neighbors in Philadelphia.
46 Sonny Liston: boxer Charles “Sonny” Liston (1932–1970) became World Heavyweight Champion in 1962 by knocking out Floyd Patterson. He lost the title in 1964, to Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali).
47 Madame, la tête de votre bébé!: “Madam, the head of your baby!”
48 est ce que la tête? … Ah, oui, Madame: “Is that the head?” “Ah yes, Madame.”
49 levez-vous, Madame: “Get up, Madame.”
50 egg-lemon soup, yogurt, and fruit: traditional Greek foods. Egg-lemon soup is known in Greece as Avgolemono soup. Spanakopita, which she is also served at the clinic, is a traditional spinach-and-cheese pastry; the custard she is later given is galaktoboureko, a dessert of custard in phyllo dough.
Chapter 3: The Clinic
51 I had lost two pregnancies: see Postscript, p. 147.
52 Seth … Saul, the tragic king … Joshua: Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve, born after the murder of their son Abel by his brother, Cain; hence, the name’s meaning as “compensation” or “appointed” one. (“And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.” Genesis 4:25.) Saul: the first king of Israel. She refers to him as the “tragic king” because he died in battle against the Philistines after he transgressed the will of God by keeping the enemies’ cattle and sheep, rather than destroying them. Joshua: a leader of the Israelites. Joshua brought them to the Promised Land of Canaan after the death of Moses.
53 uncaring professionals: breastfeeding had indeed been declining in the United States for several decades, as women turned to feeding infants by bottle and formula. By the early 1970s, when the numbers began to increase, less than 30 percent of women breastfed their infants. See, e.g., Hirschman, C. and J.A. Sweet. “Social Background and Breastfeeding among American Mothers.” Social Biology, vol. 21, issue 1, pp. 39–57, spring 1974; Hirschman, C. and Marilyn Butler. “Trends and Differentials in Breast Feeding: An Update.” Demography, vol. 18, issue 1, pp. 39–54, Feb. 1981.
54 colostrum: the first milk from the mammary glands after a woman gives birth. Colostrum, which the mother’s body produces for several days until it is replaced by milk, is a thick liquid, either yellowish or clear in color, and is rich in protein, nutrients, and antibodies.
55 Dr. Spock: Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903–1998): influential postwar American pediatrician, author of bestselling books on childcare, including The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), which, in various editions, has sold more than 50 million copies.
56 swaddling was still practiced: in the 1960s, swaddling—the wrapping of infants snugly in cloths, leaving only their heads exposed—was still practiced throughout much of the world, although it had begun to wane in Western Europe and America as far back as the eighteenth century, partly as a result of criticism by Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Locke. Few young middle-class Americans had actually seen swaddled infants outside hospital nurseries. The practice, if known of at all, was considered akin to a medieval legend. Hence, in the diary, her delayed recognition, and shock, at finding swaddled infants in Athens. But throughout Greece (as in Turkey and the Middle East) swaddling had been ubiquitous for millennia. Like their ancient counterparts, 1960s Athenian families swaddled their infants. The belief endured—and the Greek women insist throughout the diary—that swaddled infants were kept warm, slept better, did not scratch or hurt themselves by fussing, and developed straight limbs. Today, advocates of swaddling assert these same benefits, and also that the practice helps prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Critics contend that the custom negatively affects infants, resulting in overheated bodies and damage to hip joints, and that it in fact can cause SIDS. While swaddling is practiced in many countries, and has arguably seen some resurgence in recent years, it has generally been on the decline. See, e.g., Stearns, Peter N. Childhood in World History, 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge, 2011; Shapiro, H.A. (Ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Coleman, Marilyn J. and Lawrence H. Ganong (Eds.). The Social History of the American Family: An Encyclopedia, vol. 3. Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc., 2014.
57 how to use their hands: a note in the original diary: “Infants here are swaddled first three months (at least).”
58 Fifth Day Black Bile: a facetious, but probably correct, allusion to the use of archaic humoral medicine at the clinic. In the 1960s, childbirth in Greece was rapidly moving from the home and midwife to the hospital and obstetrician—in 1960, fully 60 percent of Greek women still gave birth at home; by 1970, more than 82 percent of births took place in a maternity hospital. Nevertheless, the practices at 26 Bouboulinas Street, and throughout the mainland and islands, were still strongly infused with a mixture of folk customs and ancient medical beliefs, such as humoral medicine.
Humoral medicine was based on the theories of Empedocles (495–435 BCE), Aristotle (384–322 BCE), and the physicians Hippocrates (460–370 BCE) and Galen of Pergamon (130–200 CE), and was prevalent across the Ottoman Empire and the West until the nineteenth century and the emergence of cellular pathology. Humoral principles held that matter was composed of four basic elements, each with a primary characteristic: Fire (hot), earth (dry), water (wet), air (cold). The human body, too, was composed of four fluids, or “humors,” each with two elemental qualities: blood (hot/moist), phlegm (cold/moist), yellow bile (hot/dry), and black bile (cold/dry). The humors were both fluids and “vapors,” which suffused the body and dictated health and temperament. Illness resulted when the humors were not in equipoise (e.g., an excess of black bile resulted in a melancholic personality). Humoral medicine sought to restore the “delicate balance of humours,” as she rightly describes it in the diary, through the use of opposites.
After childbirth, it was believed, a woman’s loss of “warm” blood and her “open” womb left her in a dangerously “cold” and receptive condition. Humoral medicine dictated dry heat and closure of the womb. New mothers were urged to ingest warm foods and to stay heavily covered in bed, with windows and doors closed against drafts. Windows and doors were also kept closed, in traditional belief, to ward off daemonic forces from the vulnerable mother and infant.
Another instance of lingering traditions appears in a sentence cut from the published diary: “[Miss Elleadou] … insists that I rub my belly with olive oil at night, for inexplicable reasons.” Oil massage of the abdomen was a traditional technique used by midwives to ensure the womb was in the proper position before birth and to prevent stretch marks. See, e.g., Georges, Eugenia. Bodies of knowledge: the medicalization of reproduction in Greece. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008; Nusbaum, Julie. “Childbirth in Modern Athens: The Transition from Homebirth to Hospital Birth.” Penn Bioethics Journal, vol. II, issue ii. Spring 2006; Trichopoulos, Dimitrios and George Papaevangeou. The Population of Greece. Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Athens Medical School, 1974.
59 A Farewell to Arms (1929): Ernest Hemingway’s novel of the First World War, a love story about a wounded American soldier, Frederic Henry, and an English nurse, Catherine Barkley, who cares for him at a hospital in Italy. The novel may have come to mind because she, too, is an American abroad in a hospital, and because in the novel Barkley repeatedly takes Henry’s temperature, by mouth, which prompts intimate discussions about it. Perhaps she also thinks of the story because Catherine Barkley dies during childbirth in a foreign country.
60 De Vries: she was reading The Mackerel Plaza, a 1958 comic novel by Peter De Vries.
61 clean binders: a binder is a broad, girdle-like bandage applied to the abdomen after childbirth to provide support for the abdominal walls and for the womb to return to shape. Prenatal binders were also used, to support the uterus. Binders were worn by women in ancient Greece and in much of the ancient and modern world, and they are still used today. However, American women would have bought their binders, rather than sewn them together themselves, as the women do at the clinic.
62 Hava Nagila (“Let us rejoice”): a Jewish folksong, often sung at celebrations.
Hora: a traditional circle-dance of Romania and Israel.
Michael Row the Boat Ashore: her nostalgic affection for the song was rooted in her years at Antioch College, in the mid-fifties, where she took part in folk-singing parties, called hootenannies (“although I had no degree, I had had lots of folk dancing” she remarks on p. 13). The song, a slave spiritual, had been recorded by the Weavers, The Highwaymen, and Harry Belafonte, among others, in the fifties and early sixties during the American folk-music revival, and it became an anthem of the civil rights movement.
63 baby blues: a mild depression experienced by a majority of women after childbirth. Baby blues is believed to be caused by hormonal changes, and fades within a week or two. The condition is sometimes mistaken for the more severe, and rarer, postpartum depression.
64 language, says Durrell, creates character: “…we spoke French: language creates national character…” From Justine. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, p. 39.
Chapter 4: Him
65 infants and animals: such questions remain unanswered, fifty years later. When this diary entry was written, the revolutionary discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep had occurred only eleven years earlier, in 1953, opening the door to scientific knowledge of dreams. Newborns spend about half of their sleep in the REM stage, which is a period of dreaming but also of other neurological activity. Most mammals and birds experience REM sleep but, as with newborns, their dreams, if any, are yet unfathomed.
Vision, for newborns, has been shown to develop gradually, through the first six months or so of life. Studies have indicated that, initially, a newborn perceives its environment in shades of gray and is near-sighted, seeing most clearly at less than twelve inches away; however, differences in light and shapes are discerned, as is movement. The precise age when infants begin to perceive colors is uncertain, although it is generally thought that color perception emerges during the first eight weeks of life. A newborn’s sight is, as she notes, pristine, but apparently far from perfect. See, e.g., Foulkes, David. Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999; J. Bremner, Gavin and Theodore D. Wachs, 2nd ed. (Eds.). The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Infant Development, vol. 1. Basic Research. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
66 the Plaka: the old, picturesque section of Athens, at the northeast base of the Acropolis, a hub for nightlife and music.
67 the king: Constantine II (b. 1940) had succeeded his father, Paul, as king, in March 1964, at age twenty-three. Young and dashing, he was married to Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark. He was effectively ousted from power by a military coup, in 1967. When the monarchy was abolished in Greece, in 1973, he fled the country for England. In 2013, at age 73, Constantine and his wife returned to live in Greece, after 46 years in exile.
Chapter 5: The Visit
68 ‘going to Europe’ for a vacation: the phrase has faded in recent decades, but English travelers had long remarked on its use among Greeks and throughout the Balkans. In 1889, the English novelist George Gissing, while in Athens, wrote in a letter: “The Greeks always talk about ‘going to Europe’ & indeed this is not Europe but the East. It will be a very long time before Greece rids itself of its Orientalism.” In 1898, William Miller, an English historian of the Balkans, stated: “When the inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula are meditating a journey to any of the countries which lie west of them, they speak of “going to Europe,” thereby avowedly considering themselves as quite apart from the European system.” And a century afterward, the Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova prefaced Miller’s remark in her book Imagining the Balkans with this statement:
What did exist in the Balkan vernaculars of the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth, and may still be encountered among a certain generation, was the phrase “to go to Europe.”
See: Mattheisen, Paul F., Young, Arthur C., and Pierre Coustillas (Eds.). The Collected Letters of George Gissing, vol. 4 (1889–1891), Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1993, p. 146; Miller, William. Travels and Politics in the Near East. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898; Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1997], p. 43.
69 special delivery: although she makes light of the matter, she did indeed write to her doctor, who was indeed named Edward Wingheld, and he replied by letter, in part: “I am a little puzzled by what they meant by the statement “the wall has fallen.” Are you sure the doctor didn’t say that the womb had fallen? In either case, the implication is that there has been some relaxation of the supporting ligaments of the uterus…” It appeared she had a prolapsed uterus.
70 the Pill: the revolutionary and controversial oral contraceptive had been initially approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration only four years earlier, in 1960, and was given approval for general use as a contraceptive in 1962. By 1964, 2.3 million women were on the Pill.
71 name him Joshua: a joking reference to the Old Testament Book of Joshua, in which the Israelite leader miraculously destroyed the walls of the city of Jericho with a blast of trumpets.
72 according to Dr. Spock: their discussion would have been quite different today. In the mid-twentieth century, Dr. Spock had been an important force in promoting the widespread belief in the United States that babies should be put to sleep on their stomachs to prevent choking. However, evidence emerged in the 1970s that infants who slept on their stomachs were more susceptible to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), or Crib Death. SIDS, which was not medically identified until 1962, usually occurs during sleep but remains unexplained. It is believed that SIDS is linked with abnormalities in breathing patterns. In 1992, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that infants be put to bed on their backs or on their side to prevent SIDS. It was also determined that an infant would have no greater chance of choking when lying on its back than on its stomach. See, e.g., Ember, Carol R. and Melvin Ember (Eds.). Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World’s Cultures, vol. 2. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004; Spock, Benjamin and Robert Needlman. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, 8th Ed.: New York: Pocket Books, 2004.
73 the ability to think: such surmises about the lasting psychological impact of swaddling on European children (and by implication, on the European “national character”) may appear far-fetched to some readers today, but they would not have seemed so to many Americans at the time. During and after the Second World War, American and British social scientists, especially those affiliated with the influential “Culture and Personality” movement, became particularly focused on the origins and features of “national character,” a concept as old as the modern nation-state itself but which had fallen out of favor.
Popularized by anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, the Culture and Personality movement (later described as “psychological anthropology”) emphasized the reciprocal relationships of the individual and society in the formation of national character, beginning with a culture’s methods of child-rearing. Mead, in And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942), and Benedict, in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946), wrote of the “national character” of Japan and of America, respectively, with conclusions tied directly to these countries’ child-rearing practices. Perhaps still more to the point in the diary’s context is the controversial book The People of Great Russia: A Psychological Study (London: The Cresset Press, 1949), in which English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer and psychoanalyst John Rickman developed what became known as the “swaddling hypothesis.” They concluded that the swaddling of infants in Russia for long periods not only caused later negative personality traits, such as emotional coldness and sudden mood swings, but also was a key aspect in forging the Russian national character. The concept of national character would be increasingly disputed during the fifties and sixties even while it remained commonly referred to among educated people, and in travel magazine articles. See also, Mead, Margaret. “The Swaddling Hypothesis: Its reception.” American Anthropologist, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 395–409, 1954. Generally, see, e.g., Gilkeson, John S. Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Chapter VI: The Spartan Athenian Couch
74 the persons, yes … some of the time: “The People, Yes”: Carl Sandburg’s 1936 poem celebrating the American people; People Are Funny: game show on radio, and later, television, which aired from 1942 to 1960; “Of the people, by the people, for the people”: from President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address; “Just plain people”: may refer to Lincoln’s famous phrase “the plain people,” used in a July 4, 1861, speech, or to the expression (and turn-of-the-century popular song) “just plain folks”; “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”: attributed, in various forms, to Abraham Lincoln (and also to American showman P.T. Barnum).
75 much more solid: in retrospect, the Wellesley girl gains significance as a face of the revolution to come, like the long-haired students my mother saw that summer in the Latin Quarter (see note 81) or the backpackers in Kolonaki Square (p. 112). They were among the first of the sixties’ “flower children.” In a letter home, she uses the recent word “hippy” in her description of the girl, which was far more acerbic than in the book: “She was talking hippy talk from between her teeth: ‘Man, it’s a gas…a gaaasss…I’m going to make the scene, man, like in India. I’m going to smell the flowers in the Himalayas…man, I gotta go there…’ Arno is going to throw her into his novel. Someone should throw her into the Ganges.”
76 music of Theodorakis: Greek composers Mano Hadjidakis (1925–1994) and Mikis Theodorakis (b. 1925) brought bouzouki music to world renown in the 1960s. Hadjidakis received an Academy Award for his music for the film Never on Sunday. Theodorakis wrote the music for the film Zorba the Greek. See Introduction, p. xix and note 2.
77 prey of the Athenian man: she is referring to the kamakia (literally, “harpoons”), a class of men, married and unmarried, who had appeared in Greece with the growth of postwar tourism, and amid the more restrictive customs governing relations between Greek men and women during that era.
78 the most glib bust … a young bottom-pincher: the bronze bust honors Panagiotis Anagnostopoulos (1790–1854), a leader during the Greek War of Independence. Cesar Romero (1907–1994): versatile film and television actor of Cuban descent. Darkly handsome, with a trademark trim mustache, he was known as “The Latin Lover.”
79 Misirlou: a traditional song in the Eastern Mediterranean region, in which the singer declares his passion for a sprightly, beautiful Egyptian girl (the song’s title is an Arabic word for “Egyptian girl.”). First recorded in the United States in the 1920s, the song hit the Billboard charts in the 1940s, when it was covered by big band leaders Harry James and Woody Herman, among others. The melody, with its slow, winding, hypnotic quality, appealed to Americans with its evocation of sultry romance in the exotic East, and it became a popular standard. This versatile tune has been reinterpreted endlessly, from klezmer and R&B versions to manic-paced surf-rock songs by Dick Dale & the Del Tones and the Beach Boys. It continues to be inventively referenced in pop culture today. See, e.g., Sullivan, Steve. Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, vol. 2. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013; Bendix, Regina F. and Galit Hasan-Rokem (Eds.). A Companion to Folklore. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. The lyrics, as roughly translated:
My Misirlou, your sweet eyes / Have lit a flame in my heart
Your lips are dripping honey / Ah, Misirlou, your magical, exotic beauty
Drives me crazy, I can’t stand any more/ I will steal you from this Arab land
My black-eyed, wild Misirlou / My life changes with a kiss
From your little lips…
80 ouzo: see note 26.
81 we saw them all over the Left Bank: she made the following caustic observation in her diary while in Paris, on August 18, 1964: “In Latin Quarter in Paris this summer—fad of long hair for males. Many young English, Germans, and Scandinavians of the Bizarre School wearing hair to the shoulders. They all look like Liszt, or Edvard Grieg on his way to a guitar lesson.”
82 cooked into cakes: a New Year’s Day tradition in Greece known as Vasilopita, in which coins are baked into cakes or breads in honor of Saint Basil the Great (c. 329–379 CE), the archbishop of Caesarea who died on January 1. Those who find the coins are believed to have good luck for the year. The custom follows various legends that St. Basil had coins or valuables baked in cakes or breads for needy citizens of Caesarea.
83 Stadiou Street: one of Athens’ oldest major thoroughfares, running between Omonoia and Syntagma squares.
84 D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930): English writer known for celebrating a return to primitivism, including the regenerative power of male bonding.
85 Dan Dailey-Betty Grable Technicolor festivals I absorbed: film stars Dan Daily and Betty Grable co-starred in four Hollywood musicals for 20th Century Fox, in which they play romantically involved stage performers: Mother Wore Tights (1947), When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948), My Blue Heaven (1950), and Call Me Mister (1951).
86 Blue Fairy: there was a fairy character in Carlo Collodi’s 1883 book The Adventures of Pinocchio but the reference here is to the Blue Fairy of the Disney film Pinocchio (1940). The Blue Fairy, who magically bestows life to the wooden puppet, appears as ideally beautiful, in a gossamer, pale-blue gown, with the demeanor of a perfect, loving mother-figure.
87 natural man … is mean: West, Rebecca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007 [1941], p. 172.
88 Italo Svevo: the 1930 Beryl de Zoete translation of the 1923 novel Confessions of Zeno is quoted here. The book was newly translated in 2001 by William Weaver and published as Zeno’s Conscience (New York: Vintage International).
89 in childhood or adolescence: Rank, Otto. Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. Foreword by Anaïs Nin. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989 [1932].
90 never evolved here: while visiting her friend Alice Boehm in Yugoslavia a few months earlier, she wrote in her diary: “Going around with Alice on various errands. Saw her knocked about in a huge milling crowd at the bakery when the bread was ready. She was pushed and crushed and finally gave up, saying she didn’t feel like being bruised today. The idea of a line does not exist here. You go in and push your way as far as you can go. No matter if people had been waiting half an hour before you came. One wonders if the idea of a line is very simple or very complex.”
91 dear to us ever … and sleep: Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by S.H. Butcher and A. Lang. London: Macmillian & Co. Ltd., 1912 [1879]; p. 123.
92 if only to die by it: a reference to Ajax’ prayer to Zeus at the battle of Troy. It is a rough paraphrase of Edith Hamilton in her book The Greek Way (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993 [1930], p. 33): “Homer’s hero who cried for more light even if it were but light to die in, was a true Greek.”
Chapter 7: Return
93 the Alhambra…the castles of Wales: The Alhambra: Moorish medieval palace and fortress, famed for its romantic and exotic fountains, courtyards, gardens, arches, and mosaics. Flamenco dancing: a vigorous, passionate, highly stylized dance. Carcassonne: French medieval walled town and fortress, among the best-preserved in Europe. Castles of Wales: the country has long been known as “the land of castles.”
94 Athena’s temple: the reference is to the Parthenon, rather than to the older, smaller Temple to Athena Nike. The Parthenon stands on the highest part of the Acropolis and is the largest surviving structure, celebrated as the greatest example of Doric architecture. Some of the Parthenon’s marble blocks exceed ten tons.
95 carytid: a column in the form of a draped, standing female figure which supports the entablature of a Greek-style building. The famed “porch of the carytids,” or “Porch of the Maidens,” is on the south side of the Erechtheion, a temple honoring legendary Greek king Erechtheus. The porch has six larger-than-life carytids.
96 the museum: the old Acropolis Museum, located on the Acropolis itself until 2007.
97 poliza!: not quite a word, but similar to “police” in many European languages (e.g., Spanish: policía; Italian: polizia). The Greek word for police is astynomía.
98 a new breed: a remark contrasting the Hebrew-speaking, Israeli Jews of the airplane crew with Yiddish-speaking, pre-war European Jews (“Yiddela”). He is affirming the truth of the postwar image of Israelis as a tough, young people determined to build a strong nation, while repudiating (“never again”) the past. A typical description of the Israelis during the period appeared in Life magazine: “A whole new society is being created in an atmosphere charged with vigor, pride, and optimism.” (Coughlan, Robert. “Modern Prophet of Israel: After a decade Ben-Gurion still leads his people through a wilderness of constant crisis.” Life magazine, Nov. 18, 1957, p. 154.)
99 briss (or bris): the circumcision ceremony for Jewish boys is first mentioned in Genesis 17, when God ordered Abraham to circumcise his descendants as part of the covenant with the Jewish people. The ceremony occurs on the eighth day after birth and is a festive occasion, when infant boys are given their Hebrew names.
100 mohel (Yiddish: moyl): a person who performs circumcision, usually with a ceremonial, double-edged knife. Since ancient times, it has been a tradition for the mohel to cut the foreskin of a baby’s penis and then suck the first drops of blood from the wound, for hygienic reasons.
101 the relationship between those objects: “That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without.” The Magus. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965, p. 356.
Postscript
102 “A stubborn Little Hold on Life” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in On the Issues magazine, in February 2013.