In the year 1915, at the age of 17, my maternal grandfather Christos Papanikolaou left his mother Magioritsa, his father Georgios, his sisters Eleni and Foteini and his little brother Stylianos on the Island of Marmara and sailed to Istanbul, where he and five friends would board a ship to New York. When they set out, they bought a bottle of whiskey together, and made a pact: whoever of them outlived the rest would drink to all of them. Years later, in 1980, it was my grandfather who would have that privilege, undoubtedly much sadder than any of them had thought it would be when they made their agreement. Being the last – whether it is of a group of friends, of your siblings, of your fellow villagers, the last to speak your language, is never a pleasant experience. Several years ago Kostas Sakellariou wrote a book, “The Last Greeks of Istanbul,” and undoubtedly there will come a time when there will be a last Greek of Istanbul, or at least the last with any direct connection to the days when Istanbul’s Greeks had their own special culture; the last to speak Greek with the distinct Istanbul flavor. I do not envy that person.

In those days, a new immigrant could join the U.S. Army and upon discharge, he would be granted instant citizenship. My grandfather and his buddies chose that route, and upon their discharge decided to take a road trip down the Atlantic coast to see a little more of their new homeland.

Eventually they arrived in Charlotte, N.C., where they stayed in “teacherage.” This is obviously an institution that no longer exists (Microsoft Word’s spell checker has definitely never heard of it), but in the 1920s, and especially in the South, it was unthinkably scandalous for an unmarried female teacher to live on her own because it was assumed of course that she would fall prey to the temptations of handsome men. So they lived in supervised households. During the summer, when the women went home, the teacherage operated as a bed-and-breakfast. The owners’ daughter, one Augusta Winona Williams (aka Gussie) was evidently quite taken with Christos’ charming accent and good looks, and it was not long before there was a marriage proposal in the air. Gussie’s southern Scotch-Irish parents were appalled that her daughter would even consider marrying him (an immigrant!) and their blessing was out of the question. So they eloped to New York. An aside – my mother had always wondered why my grandmother never talked about her wedding, only saying “We were married in the Little Church Around the Corner!” A look at my uncle’s driver’s license made it clear that he was likely born around 5 months after their wedding – no big deal today but a very big deal in 1920s North Carolina. In her late old age, my grandmother suffered some senile dementia and in one particularly boisterous rant, told my mother, “And we fooled you! You always thought we were married in New York! But we weren’t, we were married in Williamsburg!” This would put my uncle’s birth much closer to or even slightly after their wedding. A spunky lass, my grandmother, but she enforced the rules of southern ladyhood until her last lucid day.

And thus my grandmother was pulled into a completely new world. To be fair, she was pulled in gently, as most of my grandfather’s relatives were still in Greece. His brother Stelios was the first to come, followed by his cousins Foula and Marianthi.

Like most good Greeks at the time, my grandfather was a restaurateur. He had started out as a busboy in New York, then graduated to waiter, then manager, worked the kitchen and learned the business. By the time the Roaring Twenties were at their peak, he owned a restaurant to match – a splendid establishment with a glassed-over atrium with live palm trees and a waterfall. And then came the 1930s, and the Great Depression, and almost overnight it was all gone.

As my grandfather needed to rebuild, it was determined that my grandmother, my uncle and mother (aged 10 and 5 at the time) would travel to Greece to stay with the relatives there for an undetermined time. Along with others from their island, they had been resettled on the island of Euboea with some living in the capital, Chalkida, and others farther north in the village of Limni. Some of them had already headed north to found another “Neos” village – “Neos Marmaras” or “New Marmara.”

The voyage from New York took well over a month, and as it was a Greek ship full of Greek kids, my mother and uncle had already learned enough Greek to get around by the time they arrived. Not so my grandmother who, with her slow southern belle accent, was severely challenged by the short equal-length pure vowels and rapid clipped pace of Greek. No attempt to transcribe her Greek speech would do it justice, so I won’t even attempt it here, but accent aside, she was adventurous and learned to speak quite passable Greek. Some of our favorite family stories have to do with here more amusing mistakes – wanting sikotakia (calf’s liver) at the butcher and asking for skatakia (little turds), and telling a woman in the park that her little girl was 5 years old and her cucumber was 10 (agori – boy, angouri – cucumber). Her best one was when she went into a café to meet some friends. They had yet to arrive and the waiter came to take her order. Carefully and grammatically, she explained to him that she was waiting for her friends to come down. With a puzzled expression, he looked at her, then up into the trees, then back, and said “okay.” A bit later, another waiter approached and tentatively asked, “would you like to order something?” Once again my grandmother said “No, I just told the other waiter that I’m waiting for my friends to come down.” He smiled politely, went back to their station, and gave his friends the “totally loony” gesture. Finally her friends arrived and everything became clear – what she meant to say was that she was waiting for “i fili mou” (my friends); what she’d said was “ta fila mou” (my leaves). And autumn wasn’t even close. I can’t laugh too much though, my own Greek host family’s favorite story is when, before the wedding of their cousin in Thessaloniki, what time they were getting married. Wedding is gamos. So “marry” must be gamo. It was actually, till about 500 years ago. It now means “fuck.” No biggie, she understood, laughed and said “oh, it won’t be long now!”

Their stories about their time in Greece, supplemented later by the stories about them from those who still lived there, had been repeated so many times that I thought I knew them all. But the last time I visited my mother, she told me a new one, adding “now this is important!” In 1935, Hitler had come onto the scene in Germany and the Italians were expanding into North Africa. Back in Charlotte my grandfather, who had gotten back on his feet and managed to avoid losing the house, decided it was time to get his wife and kids back to the US before things got really bad. He bought their tickets and sent them a letter informing them of the date. The letter was lost in the mail, only to be delivered exactly one day before their ship was to sail from Piraeus. Today, the trip from Chalkis to Athens takes about an hour on the good roads, but not in 1935. My grandmother immediately grabbed the kids, packed what they needed for the trip and set out for Athens. The ship sailed early the next morning; they got into Athens at 9:00 at night, and their passport/visa procedures had yet to be done. In a way that would be impossible today, they got in a taxi and drove all over the city, visiting each official at his home to get the necessary paperwork done, and were allowed to board in the morning. They later learned that their ship was the last to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar before it was shut to seal off the Mediterranean.

It was a good thing they escaped; the following year marked the beginning of the Metaxas dictatorship in Greece, and within five years, Greece would undergo starvation and the near-complete extermination of its Jewish population, followed by a civil war that was every bit as brutal as anything they had experienced under the Nazis.

Now seven, my mother had almost completely forgotten English, and as it was a time when speaking a foreign language was seen by English-speaking Americans as a mark of inferiority rather than an asset, she and her brother felt the need to get their English back quickly. But they continued to use Greek as their secret language. That came to an end one day on the bus, when they had fun talking about a particularly odd-looking gentleman on the bus, laughing and reveling in the power of their incomprehensible language. As they got off the bus, the man stood up and said “Yiá sas pediá, sto kaló!”

After watching many people learn that lesson over and over again, I’m continually grateful that I learned it vicariously. I used to think it would be fun to be in the gentleman’s position - to let them go on satisfied that I understood nothing, then play my surprise card. I speak three languages in addition to English plus smatterings of several others, and God know's I've had more than enough opportunities. But I've never been good at clever quick-on-the-draw insults, always thinking of the perfect line an hour or so after the fact. Theoretically it should be fun to trounce an asshole, but for some reason, even when I see person getting a comeuppance they fully deserved, I can only identify with the embarassment and discomfort that's so clear on his or her face, and want it to be over with. I'm also no good at angry conversation, especially in a second language. This is perhaps one of the things I'm actually most grateful for having learned while living in a new country: My need to quiet things down and put the conversation on a calm level before I try and participate. So people think I'm the peacemaker and maybe I am but much of it is strictly self-preservation!