1 - Adoption’s Unfinished Business

Summary

At dinner a man got drunk, and over the wine charged me with not being my father’s child.

I was riled, and for that day

scarcely controlled myself; and on the next I went to my mother and my father and questioned them; and they made the man who had let slip the word pay dearly for the insult.

So far as concerned them I was comforted, but still this continued to vex me, since it constantly recurred to me.

—Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 779–786, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones

It has become impossible to ignore the organized mass adoptions of Greek children to the USA during the two decades that followed the end of the Greek Civil War of 1946–1949. This movement must be characterized less as a byproduct of the Greek Civil War and more as a Cold War phenomenon, when Greek agency, let alone children’s agency, was at a historic low—and U.S. demands marked a new postwar high. This mass adoption phenomenon, which involved some 4,000 children, has been contested, denied, or grossly exaggerated. Recently, however, this controversial subject has also been studied and documented.

We have now arrived at that critical junction where the debate can and must broaden and draw in many more interlocutors. The debate must be led by the Greek-born adopted persons themselves, who are finding each other via social media and communicate more frequently and more productively than ever before.

That is why the collection that you have picked up is so important: it is the first anthology of Greek adoption stories written by Greek international adoptees and compiled by the scholar and journalist Mary Cardaras, herself a Greek-to-American adoptee. This book is nothing short of a path-breaking initiative, given that no previous collection of such Greek adoptee stories, written by the people themselves, exists anywhere, whether in Greece or in the English-speaking world. These stories then strike home the experience of international adoption, whose impact is lifelong but is not properly measured, let alone acknowledged.

Remarkably, more than half a century after the voyage of no return, the voices of the adoptees who “lived it,” as the Greeks would say, have yet to be heard. But times have changed dramatically since 1949, and the voices of international adoptees from anywhere living just about everywhere have only grown louder.