Eleni Gage’s ”North of Ithaka”

New York.- People say “like father like son”. But in the case of Eleni Gage, it’s more proper to say “like father like daughter”, for her following the steps of her father, the acclaimed Greek American author Nicholas Gage. Her book “NORTH OF ITHAKA: A Journey Home through a Family’s Extraordinary Past (St. Martin’s Press, May 2005, ISBN 0-312-34028-1, $23.95 hardcover) is Eleni Gage’s memoir about self-discovery in her father’s native Greece.

At 27 years of age, Eleni Gage came across a photo of her father, on his first visit to his native Greece over 30 years ago, leaning on her grandparents’ home, which Eleni only knew as a pile of ruins. She knew her father had drawn plans to rebuild the house years ago, but couldn’t bring himself to recreate the place where his mother and other villagers were kept prisoner, tortured, and murdered during the Greek Civil War. But the house was a place where Eleni’s grandmother, aunts, and father had once lived as a happy family before the Civil War tore the village of Lia apart.

Looking at the photo of the house intact, Eleni became troubled by the fact that this symbol of her family’s past was left in ruins. Seeing this as a chance to learn more about her family’s past, herself, and the grandmother she had never known, Eleni left a successful career and her Manhattan apartment to move to Lia, Greece, and rebuild her grandmother’s house.

North of Ithaka is Eleni Gage’s story. While overseeing the reconstruction of her family’s abandoned home, Eleni became an unusual but important part of the tiny mountain village her family left behind. At home in Lia, a village with more sheep than inhabitants, she befriended shepherds, gypsies, and Albanian refugees, who helped her plant a garden, celebrate feast days, and create a home and a future out of the ruins of the past. Told with an expert’s attention to detail and all the wit and bewilderment of a young urbanite dropped into a strange, old world setting, North of Ithaka is part travel memoir, part family saga, and part story of self-discovery. But, above all, it is a journey home.

Today, Ms. Gage is the beauty editor at People magazine and is a frequent contributor to Instyle and Travel+Leisure. Her work has appeared in Allure, Elle, Parade, Glamour, The American Scholar, Odyssey, The New York Times, Self, More, and Men’s Journal. Eleni divides her time between New York and Lia.

On May 22, 2005, USA TODAY published the following short interview with the author:

- Your dad, Nicholas, wrote the 1983 best seller “Eleni,” documenting the loss of his mother. Why did you decide to go back?

I still feared the village. It seemed like a scary place, so I felt I needed to go back and build a relationship with the real place. If not, I felt it would be lost to future generations of our family.

- What did you learn from people there?

How close happiness is to sadness. People would say, “I remember going to your father’s baptism,” but the next person would say, “I remember playing with a girl who stepped on a mine.” That’s the way life is; in real life, these emotions are very close to the surface.

- Is it true you didn’t read “Eleni” until you began restoring your grandmother’s house?

I was only 9 when the book came out, so there was no question of me reading it at that point. As I got older, I knew it was a family tragedy that made my aunts cry every time I asked about it, so I stopped asking.

- How did you feel when you finally read it?

I felt relieved. I actually found it comforting to know all the details of what happened and to have experienced that time in my family’s history myself, in a way, by reading about it. I had a deeper understanding of our past.