The translator for the Italian occupation
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Kiriakou's maternal grandmother is the figure through whom he explains the Greek half of his upbringing, and the household disagreement that came with it. Asked whether the family's view, that the installation of a dictatorship in Greece had somehow been for democracy, was uniform, he answers that it was not: "there was even some disagreement in the home. My grandmother was very conservative. And although she was a Democrat, she became a Democrat when she became a citizen, she was a lifelong royalist when it came to Greek politics."

Why she was educated

She was working class, and her schooling was the consequence of a bereavement. "Her mother died at a young age, and her father believed that his three daughters should have a trade, have an education. My grandmother was the only one of her sisters that went to school and became a teacher, and then a translator for the Italian occupation government. She taught Italian soldiers to speak Greek." Of her sisters, one was a dressmaker and "her youngest sister ended up owning a gas station and a butcher shop." Kiriakou reads the whole arrangement as a single instruction from his great-grandfather: "there was always this drive to succeed, even though they were women."

The two Greek Americas

Her husband's politics ran through organisations rather than a monarchy. He was "a voracious consumer of news, which was hard to do in the early 1940s," keeping copies of Life and Time that mentioned Greece, some of which Kiriakou says he still has, and letters to and from relatives there. He belonged to both of the rival Greek-American societies at once: AHEPA, "more pan-political, but encouraged newly arrived Greeks to assimilate and to become Americans and to speak English in the home," and GAPA, "really a liberal group, but it supported using Greek, the Greek language, in the home."

The civil war, as the family told it

Kiriakou reports his grandparents' account without endorsing the politics it served. Asked whether the family narrative was that dictatorship had been good for Greece, he answers "it depended on the dictatorship" and gives their reason: "my grandparents were really worried about communism in Greece in the 1940s because the communists were killing a lot of innocent people. They would go into villages to recruit men, and any man that didn't want to go back up into the mountains to fight for the Greeks was killed. And oftentimes the wives and children were killed as well."

Told by his interviewer that Greek communists who fought the Nazis tell a very different story, he neither defends nor concedes: "Sure. Oh, of course you do. And still, these three generations later, you're still going to get arguments on both sides."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- The Greek community of Warren, Ohio
