It’s always been a mixed bag, of course. On the one hand: Maria Callas—née Kalogeropoulos—who brought the world so much joy. (Happy centennial to her.) On the other hand: Spiro Agnew—Anagnostopoulos—who didn’t.
There are perhaps three million Americans of Greek descent. Our relatively modest numbers mean that whenever something or someone Greek breaks through to the wider culture—Callas, Agnew, high-end yogurt, Telly Savalas, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, this Sedaris or that Dukakis, moussaka—you get sucked into that story, like it or not. (When it’s Tina Fey, you really don’t mind at all.)
It can manifest itself in strange ways. I can’t tell you how many non-Greeks have called me “George Stephanopoulos.” Actually, I can: four that I remember, one of them not all that long ago. I don’t even know George Stephanopoulos (I met him once). It’s as if there’s a formula that goes “George + x = Greek Male Name,” where x always equals Stephanopoulos.
Some are born Greek, some achieve Greekness, and some have Greekness thrust upon them.
I had a way out, years ago, an option I didn’t exercise. In the mid-80s I was involved in starting the satirical magazine Spy. One of my bosses—not sure what happened to him, I heard he was doing some kind of newsletter or something—had trouble (or pretended to) reconciling my prose style with the polysyllabic ethnic byline that appeared above it. The two, he insisted, didn’t jibe. Inspired by the playboy shipping heir Taki Theodoracopulos, who published as “Taki,” he suggested I change my name professionally to “Kaki.” Shorter, easier, a little less … you know. The idea amused him no end; fortunately, he didn’t belabor the gag, and after a year or two hardly ever mentioned it at all.
There’s a formula that goes “George + x = Greek Male Name,” where x always equals Stephanopoulos.
As a child, I was regularly nudged in the direction of my Greek provenance—which I enjoyed, even though at times I didn’t so much want to embrace my roots as give them a little wave and keep moving. Hellenic, schmellenic! I was a New Yorker. “Yankees fan,” specifically, is how I identified growing up on East 161st Street in the Bronx, an eight-minute walk to the old ballpark’s bleachers gate. The Greek ingredient was part of my mix, but I yearned to treat it as mere seasoning (oregano, preferably). Shouldn’t I have some say in who and what I was?
That wasn’t going to be easy. The morning I arrived at the Bronx YM-YWHA for my very first day of school, I spoke only Greek.
My parents worked, so I was mostly looked after by my maternal grandparents, who’d emigrated from the Brigadoon-like village of Makrinítsa, in northern Greece, to the Southern European ghetto of the East Bronx, and whose apartment was down the hall from ours.
There were also regular childhood visits to my paternal grandfather, a Greek who had left Alátsata, Turkey, and eventually settled in Astoria, Queens. All of them immigrants out of central casting. I loved my grandparents, honored them for their struggles and the indignities they endured. But although they gave me many things, an appreciation of Charlotte’s Web, Edward Gorey, or even The Cat in the Hat was never going to be among them.
As for my American-born parents, they identified as Greek big-time—the way Pepé Le Pew registered as “Gallic.” When Kay and Mike, who’d met at a church dance in the Bronx, returned from five years in Lausanne (my dad was in medical school) to start a family, they were determined to raise my younger brother, Alexi, and me as proper European children. So they set about creating a multi-lingual, Grand-Concourse-sur-la-Seine vibe.
Alexi and I were dressed like pint-size extras from the classic French children’s film The Red Balloon. On the hi-fi were 78s and LPs from the Old Country, but also from Spain, France, and Italy, and I grew up as conversant with the Trio Bel Canto and Édith Piaf as I was with the Zombies and the Shangri-Las.
Our apartment, like my parents’ conversation, was strewn with international flourishes, such as the wrought-iron decorative grill they’d had shipped back from Majorca. The imposing, curlicued black metal structure stood bolted to the ceiling and a wall, heralding the beginning of the living room—¡Bienvenidos!—and valiantly trying to imbue what was essentially a tenement flat with a suggestion of hacienda.
And we traveled. Greece was in heavy rotation for summer vacations by the time I could walk, and this further clinched my Greek identity. But that wasn’t enough. What was required (it was decided) was a special kind of education. One that involved blazers, itchy gray pants, and clip-on ties.
Hellenic, schmellenic!
Churches were essential to early-immigrant Greek communities, safe havens for the F.O.B.’s (Fresh Off the Boat). I attended two parochial schools—first the antediluvian, quasi-military Greek American Institute in the East Bronx (since relocated and undoubtedly improved), then St. Spyridon, an orange-brick Byzantine Revival building just north of Harlem. Forty kids per room, most of them first-generation. All the Greek grammar, geography, and history that could be shoehorned into the week, two national anthems to sing at assembly, plus indoctrination in the tenets of Greek Orthodoxy.
Not much in the way of literature: actually reading the ancient Greek playwrights and poets wasn’t as important as revering them. Nationalistic 19th-century verse and prose were more our speed, and I knew the stories of the heroes and heroines of Greece’s 1821 war of independence against the Ottoman Empire—Kolokotronis, Bouboulina, Karaiskakis, and the rest—better than I did Washington’s and Jefferson’s. In our basement auditorium, we re-enacted the insurgent Greeks’ brave escapades in school playlets before our beaming parents, the dying-breath flights of noble, perfectly scanned poesy and pasha-defying sound bites declaimed in squeaky voices through bad fake whiskers.
The Greek teachers labored to draw a through line connecting classical Athens to mid-20th-century Washington Heights, and therefore to us, the direct descendants of Aristotle, Praxiteles, and Homer, fidgeting at our modular desks on Wadsworth Avenue. The ancients were a tough act to follow, but their achievements only made us even prouder of our heritage. We were all Greeks.
That inalienable fact we celebrated each spring with the Greek Independence Day Parade, a mile-long amble past modest crowds, the younger kids dressed in embroidered traditional outfits that had been fussed over for weeks by parents and grandparents. But there was no getting around it: I was marching up the middle of Fifth Avenue in broad daylight wearing a pleated skirt, white tights with tasseled knee garters, a red fez, and, in a sad approximation of the tsarouchia footwear, black Florsheim loafers topped with glued-on pom-poms. The sheathed plastic dagger lashed fearsomely to my hip did little to mitigate the overall impression. Adorable at 6, maybe, but for an 11-year-old not a good look.
The ancients were a tough act to follow, but their achievements only made us even prouder of our heritage.
After Greek school, assimilation. I spent the next dozen years navigating a clueless adolescence, feckless young adulthood, and futile attempts to jump-start a career that refused to kick over. By the early 80s, I’d earned a graduate degree in journalism and a total of $6 in my chosen field: three one-liners peddled to a fortune-cookie company at $2 a pop. At least I’d turned pro. True, my work was being published exclusively inside small baked-dough confections … and yet. In the months after this windfall, I left a trail of feverishly cracked-open cookies wherever and whenever I ate Chinese. I needed the clips! However tiny.
But things were about to change.
The Ethnikos Kyrix (National Herald) was the one major newspaper left serving the Greek diaspora in the United States. (It still thrives, the only game in town.) And it had just introduced an English-language monthly magazine called, it pains me to report, Greek Accent. I was hired as the number-two editor.
Greek world again. The project felt limiting, just the sort of place someone like me would be expected to work. But it was a job, and it was in journalism.
I learned a lot there, although my attempts to introduce irreverence to Greek Accent’s pages never went over as well as youvarlákia recipes or what was shaking, Hellenically speaking, down in Tarpon Springs (plenty). We were truffle dogs when it came to sniffing out Greek connections. If your mother had a third cousin whose great-step-grand-uncle was from Náfpaktos, and you’d done something we deemed newsworthy, it didn’t matter if the other 99 percent of your family were Auchinclosses: you were One of Us, we were coming for you, and you would have your profile in our pages and like it.
A year after I’d started, my boss left, and I was named editor. Here was a surprise: at 27, I was going to be running a magazine. At last things were falling into place.
My work was being published exclusively inside small baked-dough confections.
Thomas Hobbes, I’m fairly certain, had life itself and not my tenure as editor of Greek Accent in mind when, in 1651, he wrote about it being “nasty, brutish, and short.” On the Friday after I started, the magazine’s owner, citing certain cash-flow challenges, abruptly announced that we were suspending publication. I’d been editor for 48 heady hours.
But all that is—appropriately—ancient history. I’ve long since made my peace with the whole Greek thing: the unique character, kindness, generosity, bluster, humor, hospitality, chronic lateness, passion, warmth, flair for bureaucracy … I do love it. Most days.
A high point for me at Greek Accent had been interviewing George Lois, the brilliant art director famous for his provocative advertising work and Esquire covers in the 60s and 70s. Lois, who had grown up one neighborhood over from mine in the Bronx, was a rabid, vociferous Hellene. We hit it off, though we didn’t stay in touch.
Many years later, after I’d finally achieved enough career liftoff to put features like “The Greeks of Sault Ste. Marie” comfortably in the rear-view mirror, another publication sent me to interview Lois. I showed up at his Midtown ad agency at the appointed time, assuming he’d never remember me. But he came bounding out of his office—in a black sweat suit and sneakers, always ready for some pickup basketball—and hugged me, yelling, “Yiorgo! Jesus Christ, I’m so fuckin’ prouda ya! Every time I see your byline, I think, Holy shit!”
“Sing, O Muse”? This was poetry. And I sure was relieved the byline he’d been seeing wasn’t “Kaki.”
George Kalogerakis, a Writer at Large at Air Mail, has completed a memoir, from which this is adapted. He worked at Spy, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times, and is a co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and a co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War