My baba was born in Greece and raised by farmers. Few background stories are humbler than this, but how a story begins by no means limits how it can end; I’m sure every immigrant to America has realized this. Years of schooling in Greece, including four years of studying economics at the University of Pireaus offered my baba with the opportunity to cross the Atlantic and continue his studies at Queens College. Something near a dream come true, he took this opportunity with the intentions of getting his masters in economics from Queens College and returning to Greece afterwards.
In January of 1983, my baba moved into an apartment in Astoria with one of his friends from Greece. He came with some knowledge of English, one luggage, and six hundred dollars (which quickly became one hundred dollars after paying for the semester). Like almost every poor American immigrant, he picked up a job as a bus boy and ended up working long nights, every night. In fact, he worked from 6pm to 3am and went to school from 9am to 2pm. Having worked mostly on a farm, the chaos and dirtiness of a restaurant’s kitchen was a bit overwhelming, especially the monstrous pile of oily dishes. On the first day at work, my baba would wash a dish, then go wash his hands because of how disgusting he felt. An Old Italian guy working next to him turned his head and said “First day? You’ll get used to it!” Sure enough, he dropped this habit after the second day. At the time, my father wasn’t a citizen and didn’t have working papers, so his employer put a box near the window in the kitchen as an escape route in case immigration came. This is the immigrants’ untold portion of the “American dream;” it’s not as glorious as most would like to believe
The schedule left little room for socializing, but on occasions he would take a trip to the local café, Lefkos Pirkos (White Castle) and talk to some older Greek men who immigrated long before my baba did. The Greeks he found there were much different than the Greeks he knew back home because communication between Greece and America was limited to letters and expensive phone calls. The Greeks at the coffee shop instead resembled Greeks from the 1950’s (the time when they left Greece). He called them the “Greeks from the movies” because, well, they were like the Greeks from the old movies! It took a few years, but, through personal experience, he eventually realized what had happened to them. My dad arrived with a few music tapes that he listened to often, but when he returned to Greece his friends made fun of him for listening to outdated music. He lost contact with Greece and didn’t evolve as its culture did; he became a “Greek from the movies”. Out of all the interesting moments my baba shared with the old men at Lefkos Pirkos, one conversation in particular found a deep niche in his memory; my father told the old man that he planned on moving back to Greece after two years to which a man responded “Everyone comes for two years, but in the end, they all get buried in the cemetery down by the water.”
Queens College wasn’t really appealing to my baba, so he transferred to Stony Brook University after receiving a strong scholarship there. He received his masters in economics from Stony Brook, and was advised by many professors to apply for a doctorate in Economics. Just like old man from Lefkos Pirkos predicted, my dad enrolled in a program at the University of Connecticut. From there, the story seems obvious; he finished his schooling, was offered a job in the city, and took it, meeting my mom, starting a family with three kids, and buying a house on Long Island along the way.
I recently asked my baba if he regrets his decision. I wondered, was coming to America worth it? He said without a doubt that it absolutely was. The journey gave him opportunities he never could have encountered in Greece and allowed himself to grow from a shoeless farm boy to a suit-wearing New York City businessman- “The U.S. is my home, I don’t even think of packing my bags and leaving what I have here!” While these words still rang in my head, his eyes looked away as he then said, “…but, you know, a Greek poet once wrote something along the lines of, ‘Misery comes to those whose heart belongs to two countries.’ I always connected well with Greek poetry.”
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