Informationen zum Autor Christos Chomenidis was born in Athens, Greece. In addition to writing novels, Chomenidis has hosted his own nationally broadcast radio show, written scripts for cinema and television, and writes a column for Greece's largest newspaper, Ta Nea . His novel ?iki won the 2021 European Book Prize, and his works have been translated into numerous languages. Patricia Felisa Barbeito is Professor of American Literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design and a translator of modern Greek fiction and poetry. Her translations include Elias Maglinis's The Interrogation , which was awarded the 2013 Modern Greek Studies Association's Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, M. Karagatsis's The Great Chimera , and Amanda Michalopoulou's God's Wife , which was short-listed for the 2020 National Translation Award. Her shorter translations have appeared in PEN/America, Asymptote Blog , Words Without Borders , Catapult , InTranslation , and Exchanges . Klappentext Originally published in 2014 by Patakis Publishers, Athens. Leseprobe I I WAS BORN in February 1938, during a period in my parents' lives utterly inhospitable to bringing a child into the world. They had come into it in more peaceful times. My mother was the eldest daughter of a man born to poverty who had become a wealthy landowner through marriage. I'm not implying that he married for money. On the contrary, my grandfather Giorgos Milonas had fallen madly in love with my grandmother Elpida Petmezas, all social and financial calculations be damned. They came from neighboring villages on the plains of Messenia, and I imagine they met at one of the village festivals where Giorgos played syrtos and kalamatianos on the bouzouki, and Elpida, like other young women of the time, danced demurely with close relatives. They claimed that it was love at first sight, and in terms of appearance at least, they were well matched: Elpida, a fair-skinned brunette, as pleasing to the eye as the tall, strapping, flaxen-haired Giorgos with his handlebar mustache. His was the first generation to wear European clothing; his father still favored the fustanella. Late nineteenth century in the Peloponnese . . . Giorgos had no hope of winning Elpida's hand; even trying to woo her was out of the question. A gaping chasm stood between the thirty-year-old jack-of-all-trades and master of oneoccasional hunter, horseman, and itinerant musicianand the Petmezases, who had forty peasants (sharecroppers, to be precise) at their beck and call. I doubt, then, that what followed gave him much pause. One day, when Elpida set off to see the dentist in Kalamataback then, a bona fide journey from her village with two mares leading the way, another two bringing up the rear, and in the middle a donkey with the young woman perched on its saddleGiorgos and his mates lay in wait behind a bend in the road. When the cavalcade approached, he leapt out and cut them off, rifle in hand. Will you give her to me for my wife? he demanded in a thundering voice. You must be dreaming, man! Come to your senses! the young woman's keepers shot back. The gunfire that followed left one dead and three wounded, and provided Giorgos with the cover to carry the young Elpida away to a cave for the night. At dawn he surrendered to the police and was tried and sentencedsome say for five years, others sevento hard labor at Bourtzi. But it was no skin off his back: He had made her his wife and she could not be married to anyone else. Almost as soon as he was released and the marriage solemnized, the children began to arrive. First, Achilleas and Kyriakos; then Anna, my mother; followed by Katerina (who died in infancy), Alcmene (ancient Greek names were all the rage), and finally Theone, all within the fifteen-year period from 1905 to 1920. Were the boys esp...

Autorentext
Christos Chomenidis was born in Athens, Greece. In addition to writing novels, Chomenidis has hosted his own nationally broadcast radio show, written scripts for cinema and television, and writes a column for Greece’s largest newspaper, Ta Nea. His novel Νiki won the 2021 European Book Prize, and his works have been translated into numerous languages.
 
Patricia Felisa Barbeito is Professor of American Literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design and a translator of modern Greek fiction and poetry. Her translations include Elias Maglinis’s The Interrogation, which was awarded the 2013 Modern Greek Studies Association’s Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, M. Karagatsis’s The Great Chimera, and Amanda Michalopoulou’s God’s Wife, which was short-listed for the 2020 National Translation Award. Her shorter translations have appeared in PEN/America, Asymptote Blog, Words Without Borders, Catapult, InTranslation, and Exchanges.

Zusammenfassung
A resilient Greek woman recounts her and her family’s remarkable story at the end of her life, marked by the great historical events of the twentieth century.

Born in 1938, Niki, the daughter of the deputy secretary general of the Greek Communist Party, is swept up in turmoil before her first birthday: her parents are arrested, and she joins her mother in exile on an island near Santorini. Growing up, she experiences the Italian and German invasion, the Nazi occupation, and the civil war that came after, often caught between her socialist values and those of the right-wing establishment, to which half her relatives belong.
         Through her memories and the stories of her family, with roots on both coasts of the Aegean Sea, Niki also tells the history of Greece and Asia Minor from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Her extraordinary tales, full of humor and verve in spite of hardship, are populated by working-class heroes, privileged elites, daring revolutionaries, and free-spirited bohemians.

Leseprobe
I   
 
I WAS BORN in February 1938, during a period in my parents’ lives utterly inhospitable to bringing a child into the world. They had come into it in more peaceful times.
My mother was the eldest daughter of a man born to poverty who had become a wealthy landowner through marriage. I’m not implying that he married for money. On the contrary, my grandfather Giorgos Milonas had fallen madly in love with my grandmother Elpida Petmezas, all social and financial calculations be damned. They came from neighboring villages on the plains of Messenia, and I imagine they met at one of the village festivals where Giorgos played syrtos and kalamatianos on the bouzouki, and Elpida, like other young women of the time, danced demurely with close relatives. They claimed that it was love at first sight, and in terms of appearance at least, they were well matched: Elpida, a fair-skinned brunette, as pleasing to the eye as the tall, strapping, flaxen-haired Giorgos with his handlebar mustache. His was the first generation to wear European clothing; his father still favored the fustanella. Late nineteenth century in the Peloponnese . . . Giorgos had no hope of winning Elpida’s hand; even trying to woo her was out of the question. A gaping chasm stood between the thirty-year-old jack-of-all-trades and master of one—occasional hunter, horseman, and itinerant musician—and the Petmezases, who had forty peasants (sharecroppers, to be precise) at their beck and call. I doubt, then, that what followed gave him much pause. One day, when Elpida set off to see the dentist in Kalamata—back then, a bona fide journey from her village with two mares leading the way, another two bringing up the rear, and in the middle a donkey with the young woman perched on its saddle—Giorgos and his mates lay in wait behind a bend in the road. When the cavalcade approached, he leapt out and cut them off, r…