Peter Jeffreys
America (Greek) America: A Reflection

By chance I acquired a signed first edition of Elia Kazan’s novel America America which the opportunity to reflect on “The Other Greek America” prompted me to grab from my bookshelf. It serves as a powerful point of reference on why the “Ethnic Greek Village” remains a challenge and how the “parochial and now antiquated predictable cultural box” might be expanded. These concerns have been raised by Yiorgos Anagnostou in various essays that point out the perils of perpetuating narrow “homogenized” portrayals of Greek America at the expense of “non-normative subjectivities” and more “syncretic identities.”¹ In an effort to sort out my own position on this topic as a third-generation Greek American and a professor of literature, I decided to compare Kazan’s acclaimed migration narrative to a more obscure but equally poignant novel by Charles E. Jarvis and read them contrapuntally against the grain of received notions of this master narrative² and contrast them with recent examples of Greek-American writing that engage with the shared topics of migration and inheritance—namely non-fiction essays by David Sedaris and a memoir essay by Lisa Nikolidakis. Although these contemporary Greek American writers do align with these older narratives in certain ways, they have very different and uniquely creative understandings of their own particular hybrid identities. I feel that we may be too hasty in despairing over a crisis in “intellectual vitality” when, on the contrary, there are many opportunities to reassess the legacy of Greek-American writing, beginning with two pioneers in the field and comparing them to a new generation of writers whose work points us in different directions and to new ends.

America America is a unique text given that it was written by a first-generation Greek American who achieved notoriety and fame both as an artist and intellectual. The blurbs on the back cover of the 1962 popular library paperback edition of the novel are worth noting: James Baldwin called it “a marvelous story” and Robert F. Kennedy “couldn’t put it down.” Notwithstanding these endorsements by famous readers, Kazan created a narrative that paved a path for Greek-American writers in both the written and filmic versions of the story.³ The “favorite of all the films” he’d made,⁴ America America remains a subversive story that both sensationalizes the plight of the first immigrants while also exposing the fraught process of migration. Kazan does this by sidestepping any overt nostalgia and largely rejecting the “Ethnic Greek Village” paradigm. The novel’s protagonist Stavros Topouzoglou flees his pogrom-ridden village in Cappadocian Anatolia (Kayseri/Caesarea) for a better life in Constantinople/Istanbul, one that in an almost mock-picaresque way brings him to the brink of extinction working as a “hamal” porter. He manages to hatch a plan to dupe a wealthy family of their daughter’s dowry in order to buy his passage to America, only to back out last minute by forging an amorous relationship with the wife of a wealthy Armenian American rug dealer. This plan is also ultimately thwarted although Stavros manages to procure passage on the SS Kaiser Wilhelm. By the end of the two-week voyage, his affair is discovered and he is threatened with being jailed and returned to Turkey. But he finagles a last-minute sponsorship as a shoeshine boy, taking the place and even the name of his consumptive friend from back in Anatolia—Hohanness Gardashian—who ultimately throws himself off the ship upon landing in New York rather than face deportation. Stavros’ stolen name is changed to Joe Arness by the corrupt and bribed Ellis Island immigration officials, and the novel ends with Stavros/Joe shining shoes in New York for an exploitative Greek. He vows to bring the rest of his family to America for what the novel holds forth as the implicit “American Dream” sequel, the success story to which Kazan’s own remarkable life bore witness.

Based as it was on the details of Kazan’s own family,⁵ the novel presents the plight of the first-wave of immigrants in an unvarnished and disturbing narrative that is at once avant garde in its modernist prose (the movie achieves even more in terms of its filmic realism) while staying true to the classic Greek American migration story where success looms just off the horizon of suffering and misery. Notwithstanding the luscious and ludicrous irony of Stavros arriving in America as a “Kardashian,” Kazan offers a text that veers in both ambivalent and sentimental directions. Stavros is very clear about rejecting the ethics and mores of the Greek village, telling his fiancée “I don’t want to be my father. I don’t want to be your father. I don’t want that good family life” … All those good people, they stay here and live in this shame! The church goers who give to the poor, live in this shame. The respectable ones, the polite ones, the good manners! But I am going. No matter how!” (157–58). Yet to expend such effort, risk and sacrifice, only to find work shining shoes was a common story, one that I can relate to, as my own paternal great-grandfather emigrated the same year as the fictional Stavros (1897) to arrive in Lowell Massachusetts where he traded his professional skills as a stone mason for those of a lowly boot black.

This connection leads me to the second narrative by a less illustrious but equally compelling author who was deeply invested in the stories of first-wave migrants. Charles E. Jarvis wrote about the Greeks of Lowell in his novel Zeus has Two Urns (1976). Lowell had the third largest concentration of Greeks after New York and Chicago owing to its textile mills. It is fictionalized by Jarvis as “Cabot City” in this novel where he chronicles the hardships and struggles of the American-born Socrates Genos whose family endures the ethnic rivalries with Irish and French immigrants who dominated the city’s urban and political life, foregrounding the economic hardships of the looming Great Depression that would decimate the economic boom of the city’s textile industry.

Jarvis’s novels⁶ serve a veritable archive (sadly there is no museum or permanent exhibit of the history of the Greeks in Lowell) that vividly recreates the harsh reality of the first wave of migrants and the challenges faced by their first-generation progeny who had to grapple with creating a hyphenated identity. The details of Jarvis’s novel are hardly sentimental in their presentation of Hellenism or romantic in their evocation of the village life that the first wave of immigrants brought over with them. On the contrary, Socrates struggles with making sense of his own stigmatization by other immigrants and Greeks, his father’s failed restaurant, and the death of his brother by consumption. The affluence and success of many members of this first generation who often fall into the predictable pattern of celebrating “family, heritage, and philotimo”⁷ are nowhere in evidence in Jarvis’s novels, which problematize all these notions (much like Kazan) and call them into question, offering instead a highly critical, agonistic and subversive perspective. “The ‘depresho’ (depression) as the Greeks of Cabot City labeled the economic stasis, had invaded the lives of all in Columbus Village and in the microcosmic misery of their plight, it was, at times, not easy for them to realize the larger, national scope of this force. This narrow view served to increase their moanings, most of which were concerned with the idea that God had singled them out to bear the chief burden of the depression” (103). When contrasted to the popular narratives of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Mamma Mia that increasingly serve as superficial cultural touchstones for many Greek Americans today, these novels offer a sobering corrective and can serve as a point of departure for more heterogeneous appraisals and explorations of Greek America.

Satire offers a radically different way into the complexities of the Greek American identity, as David Sedaris sardonically illustrates in his essay “get your ya-ya’s out!” (1997). This humorous but poignant portrait exposes the cultural and societal presumptions of the “success story” of his father’s generation by focusing on his unpretentious and comically eccentric grandmother. Ya Ya Sedaris is both a caricature and ironic tribute, a telling distortion of a recognizable type: “Ya Ya owned a newsstand/candy store, a long narrow room fitted with magazine racks and the high, wall-mounted chairs the townspeople occupied while receiving their shoeshines. She lived above the store in the apartment my father had grown up in. ‘A shithole,’ my mother said, and even at the age of seven, I thought, Yes, she’s right. This is a shithole” (23). There is not a hint of folkloric romance in Ya Ya’s peasant background: “We would pass the afternoon at Ya Ya’s table, eating stringy boiled meat served with spinach pie. The food tasted as though it had been cooked weeks beforehand and left to age in a musty trunk. Her meals had been marinated in something dank and foreign and were cooked not in pots and pans, but in the same blackened kettles used by witches. Once we’d been served, she performed an epic version of grace. Delivered in both Greek and broken English, it involved tears and excessive hand-wringing and came off sounding less like a prayer than a spell” (26).

Much of the essay deals with placing Ya Ya in a nursing home and the comical tensions between her and Sedaris’s non-Greek mother Sharon who has to tend to her in her final years and whom Ya Ya dismissively calls “the girl.” When Ya Ya finally dies after being admitted to a dingy nursing home, her son Louie becomes the focus of the narrative, arguing with Sedaris to remove his newly acquired earring before the funeral: “I removed the earring and never put it back in. Looking back, it shames me that I chose that particular moment to make a stand. My father had just lost his only mother, and I assumed that, like the rest of us, he felt nothing but relief. He’s been cut lose from his Greek anchor and could now drift freely thought our invigorating American waters” (39). The essay closes on a note of sentimentality and wistfulness, with Sedaris’s father weeping before the casket and a sobering reflection on the legacy and sacrifice of his grandmother: “Ya Ya left behind no money or real estate, no priceless recipes or valuable keepsakes, nothing but a sense of release; and what sort of legacy was that? … Life had sentenced her to die among strangers” (39).

Memoir offers yet another pathway into the exploration of Greek identity and in her essay “Family Tradition” (2016),⁸ Lisa Nikolidakis writes about her Greek father in a raw narrative that chronicles a harrowing family story of crime, suicide and trauma. The essay deals with her abusive father who was born in Crete and led a life of deceit, violence and crime, culminating in the murder of his girlfriend and her daughter and his own suicide. Conflicted about her Greek heritage owing to her father’s distorted sense of being Greek, Lisa struggles with her paternal inheritance: “My father spoke about Greece with fire, his accent thick as stew, recounting its perfect green sea, plentiful olives, and passionate people …” (176). After coming to terms with the sins of her father, she must deal with the settling of his affairs. The narrative ultimately converges on a framed painting of Crete that had been on her parents’ bedroom wall. She and her brother decide to destroy it and in the process discover it wasn’t a painting at all but a framed beach towel: “taking turns stabbing the beach towel my father had often pointed to when recalling tales of his home. I pierced the Minotaur forehead, slicing from the tip of one horn down to the center of its dark and broad torso … carving the faded blue fabric of the Aegean Sea into foamy white shreds until finally there was no decipherable picture left” (184). This final sentence leaves the reader with an incredibly negative and brutally emotional variation on the “predictable cultural box” by deconstructing the myths and mythologies of Greek American sentimentality and any ideal notion of family.⁹

I close by returning to David Sedaris and his essay “Unbuttoned” (2020) where he recounts the death of his father and what amounts to his struggle to process Greek American family trauma. Sedaris’s father had disinherited him presumably because he was gay: “All he’s ever cared about is money, so it had hurt me to learn, a few years earlier, that he had cut me out of his will” (378). On his deathbed Louie recants and offers David an inheritance on the condition that his partner Hugh doesn’t “touch the money.” David refuses but manages to receive a somewhat enigmatic and baffling confession from his father: “‘David,’ he said, as if he’d just realized who I was. ‘You’ve accomplished so many fantastic things in life. You’re, well, … I want to tell you … you … you won’” (385). Not quite sure how to interpret this bizarre victory and perverse paternal blessing, he begins to wonder about his father’s grit—Greek American grit one could call it—taking “everything life has thrown at him” and finding “a way to deal with it.” “Where did that come from? … And how is it that none of his children, least of all me, inherited it?” (387). The essay ends with an ambivalent Sedaris struggling to write his father’s obituary, an effort that in many ways overlaps with his unspoken but devastating realization that this is an inheritance that wasn’t quite bequeathed to him. The obituary he fails to write could be seen as that of Greek America. At a certain point it will have to be written. But we’re not quite there yet.

February 16, 2026

Peter Jeffreys is an Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston. His books include Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography (co-authored with Gregory Jusdanis); Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster and C. P. Cavafy; The Forster-Cavafy Letters: Friends at a Slight Angle; C. P. Cavafy: Selected Prose Works; Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits; and Approaches to Teaching the Works of C.P. Cavafy (co-edited with Demetres Tryphonopoulos).

Notes

1.These terms are taken from Yiorgos Anagnostou’s blog post “Beyond Greek America as a Village” (2025a) and from his invitation for reflections on the topic in “The Greek/American Inheritance” (2025b)

2. These include ancestry, uniformity and timelessness, as outlined by Anagnostou (2025a).

3. In his autobiography Elia Kazan: A Life, Kazan notes that the novel was originally the screenplay for the movie which Sol Stein and Kazan’s wife Molly “with some deft additions and a few explanations” converted into a book (p. 616). The original titles of the screenplay were “Hamal” and “The Anatolian Smile.”

4. Elia Kazan: A Life, p. 658.

5. Stavros was modeled on Kazan’s uncle Avraam (Joe).

6. Jarvis also wrote two other novels—The Exile, The Tyrants—and a biography of Jack Kerouac with whom he was an intimate friend.

7. Philotimo—“love of honor”—remains famously untranslatable: The Greek word that can’t be translated.

8. Nikolidakis’s essay was expanded into a longer memoir—No One Crosses the Wolf (2022)—which was named a Best True Crime Book of 2022 by Audible.

9. In the memoir, Lisa travels to Crete to meet her father’s family and reconcile her conflicted feelings about her Greek heritage: “There was a magic to that evening I’m afraid I’ll never accurately capture. . . . . Some kind of pure joy was there, something rare and beautiful I have never felt anyplace else, even in other truly happy moments. More than anything, I felt full: full of food, full of gratitude, full of love” (244).

Works Cited

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2025a. “Beyond Greek America as a Village.” Immigrations-Ethnicities–Racial Situations, November 20. https://immigrations-ethnicities-racial.blogspot.com/2025/11/beyond-us-greek-village.html

–––––. 2025b. “The Greek/American Inheritance.” Ergon: Greek/American & Diaspora Arts and Letters, December 19. https://ergon.scienzine.com/article/essays/voices-of-the-other-greek-america-yiorgos-anagnostou

Jarvis, Charles E. 1976. Zeus has Two Urns.Lowell: Ithaca Press.

Kazan, Elia. 1962. America America. Stein and Day Publishers.

–––––. 1989. Elia Kazan: A Life. Anchor Books.

Nikolidakis, Lisa. 2016. “Family Tradition.” In The Best American Essays 2016. Edited by Jonathan Frazen. 171–84. Houghton Mifflin.

–––––. 2022. No One Crosses the Wolf. Little a.

Sedaris, David. 1997. “Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out!” In naked. 23–39. Little, Brown and Company.

–––––. 2020. “Unbuttoned.” In The Best of Me. 375–88. Little, Brown and Company.