The Future
"To be Greek means to feel and react in a certain way, nothing else. Whether one is young, old, born here or there, with meaning ethnic or universal, is another question entirely", Odysseas Elytis
Our Language, our Languish
My surname ends with an "s" proceeded by a vowel. My grandparents came from Rhodes and Lemnos. I eat lamp on every major holiday. I can pronounce augolemono without sounding like a guy from Wichita. A set of worry beads hangs from a thumbtack on my office wall. But all is not as it seems. I don’t speak Greek.
There are to be sure other cultures in which the language is tied up with one’s sense of identity. France, for example, goes as far as to have a formalized organization that oversees the purity of its language. The founding of Israel and the revival of Hebrew are philosophically intertwined.
My parents tried to teach me, but they were already a generation away from Greece, and besides, we lived in a mostly de-ethnicized suburb of New York. The only Greek school available to us was a long commute away. Much later, someone told me about the pattern common not only to Greeks but to virtually every family that comes to America: The first generation here doesn’t think much of its ethnic traditions and habits and tries to shed them to become American. The next generation is ambivalent, and the third goes screaming back to the church, to the food and to the language, just in time to find that the family members that had all the knowledge to pass on have died.
Nevertheless, when I was about six my mother, whose Greek is not bad, took a shot at teaching me. We bought a set of books that taught vocabulary letter by letter. You would open the first volume and see a big "delta". Then smaller words next to pictures: dendro (with a picture of a tree), and a couple of others. Turn to the "kappa" page and you would see a picture of a chicken (kota). As the book progressed there were letter-by-letter exercises: for example kokkini kota (red chicken). Mom’s lessons faded away after a few months, and I am not even sure that we made it to the end of the alphabet. I do not think that it was lack of interest-more like a lack of outlet. Outside our house, in the neighborhood that I functioned my Greek would have been a dead language since we were pretty far from anyone Hellenic and our churchgoing had always been sporadic. In addition, my family before coming to America was barely educated and any literary tendencies that we have are most definitely grounded in English.
Now that I am old and wise I wish I had learned then. The prospect of learning anything as big as a second language re-quires a level of motivation I would only be able to summon up if I had a really good reason. But just because it would make me a better person and put me in touch with my heritage ….. well, that should be enough. But in the course of an everyday urban life, it does not seem to be.
The one thing that might do it would be having children. Here is why: I heard Greek now and then as a kid, and even though I cannot speak it, I know how it is supposed to sound. As I give voice to words I barely understand, I feel some kind of link to the old country, and my heart falls at the thought that my children won’t even have that. I would be the last one in my family with anything passed on by the first immigrant generation. Their language still exists in my head, if only as a diminished little wisp that disperses through the room as I pronounce efharisto.
What I got in those lessons all those years ago continues to astonish me with its staying power. Those tiny scraps of voca-bulary stayed with me, and pop up when they most definitely are least expected. It is 20 years later and I am in a Greek restaurant in Astoria, trying to make sense out of the specials-menu. I am with a non-Greek crowd, so I am their only hope. At glacier speed, I sound out a few fragments of some of the dishes (octapodi is one of them) when I see a couple of lines that begin with the word Kota. Okay! Chicken! We know this! (as far as I could tell the kota was plain old beige not kokkini). But there is a long, unfamiliar word next to kota, and I doggedly grope my way through it letter by letter: FRI.. CA.. SE.., OH.
Excerpts from an article by Christopher Bonanos, that appeared in Odyssey