Publisher Description

In "North of Ithaka," Eleni Gage returns to the remote Greek village of Lia, where her father was born and her grandmother murdered, to rebuild the ruins of her namesake's home and come to terms with her family's tragic history. In doing so, she leaves behind a sparkling social life and successful career to continue the tale of a family and a place which her father, Nicholas Gage, made famous over twenty years ago with his international bestseller, "Eleni." Along the way she survives humorous misadventures, absorbs fascinating folklore, and comes to understand that memories of the dead can bring new life to the present. Part travel memoir and part family saga, "North of Ithaka" is, above all, a journey home.

Back Cover

In North of Ithaka , Eleni Gage returns to the remote Greek village of Lia, where her father was born and her grandmother murdered, to rebuild the ruins of her namesake's home and come to terms with her family's tragic history. In doing so, she leaves behind a sparkling social life and successful career to continue the tale of a family and a place which her father, Nicholas Gage, made famous over twenty years ago with his international bestseller, Eleni . Along the way she survives humorous misadventures, absorbs fascinating folklore, and comes to understand that memories of the dead can bring new life to the present. Part travel memoir and part family saga, North of Ithaka is, above all, a journey home. "A tale of homecoming and reconciliation, 'North of Ithaka' proves the regenerative powers of home." -- The New York Sun "Gage's vivid personal account captures the seasonal rhythms and everyday dramas of Greek life beyond the familiar resort islands, revealing a place that is, in the most traditional sense, old-world." -- Travel & Leisure "Imbued with forgiveness, with the rebuilding of lives and houses, and moving on from tragedy...In coming full circle [Gage] has helped soothe the pain of a traumatized family." - The Times Literary Supplement "Ms. Gage's house project is partly an effort to move beyond the pain of memory. . . honest. . . amusing. . .she treats tradition with respect and history with realism." -- Wall Street Journal

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In North of Ithaka , Eleni Gage returns to the remote Greek village of Lia, where her father was born and her grandmother murdered, to rebuild the ruins of her namesake's home and come to terms with her family's tragic history. In doing so, she leaves behind a sparkling social life and successful career to continue the tale of a family and a place which her father, Nicholas Gage, made famous over twenty years ago with his international bestseller, Eleni . Along the way she survives humorous misadventures, absorbs fascinating folklore, and comes to understand that memories of the dead can bring new life to the present. Part travel memoir and part family saga, North of Ithaka is, above all, a journey home.

Author Biography

ELENI N. GAGE is a freelance writer and the beauty editor of People magazine. Her articles have appeared in InStyle, Elle, The New York Times, Parade, American Scholar, and many other publications. She lives in New York City and Lia, Greece.

Review

"A tale of homecoming and reconciliation, 'North of Ithaka' proves the regenerative powers of home." --The New York Sun "Gage's vivid personal account captures the seasonal rhythms and everyday dramas of Greek life beyond the familiar resort islands, revealing a place that is, in the most traditional sense, old-world." --Travel & Leisure "Imbued with forgiveness, with the rebuilding of lives and houses, and moving on from tragedy...In coming full circle [Gage] has helped soothe the pain of a traumatized family." --The Times Literary Supplement "Ms. Gage's house project is partly an effort to move beyond the pain of memory. . . honest. . . amusing. . .she treats tradition with respect and history with realism." --Wall Street Journal

Review Quote

Ms. Gage's house project is partly an effort to move beyond the pain of memory. . . honest. . . amusing. . .she treats tradition with respect and history with realism.

Excerpt from Book

North of Ithaka ONE RESTORATION > "EVERY BEGINNING IS DIFFICULT." My aunts said I''d be killed by Albanians and eaten by wolves. Of course, that only made me more determined to go. Determined, but a little wary. Maybe more than a little. It all started the weekend after Thanksgiving 2001. "Lenitsa, you put on weight?" Thitsa Lilia asked as she cut into another sticky piece of pecan pie, untroubled by the fact that she currently weighed at least twice what I did. She was perfectly at ease with her appearance, if not mine, as she sat gossiping with her sisters. Three of my four aunts were clustered around the kitchen table of my parents'' house in Worcester, Massachusetts, scrutinizing me as they ate the leftovers of Thanksgiving''s desserts. "I don''t think so." I shrug. "It might be the sweater." "Of course it''s the sweater. You got a beautiful figure, just like your aunt," said Thitsa Kanta, referring to herself. She was the slimmest of the sisters, partly thanks to a lifetime of stomach trouble and partly because she worked to maintain her image of herself as the polyester-clad femme fatale who returned to Greece to visit after the war looking "like a movie star," she said, with short, permed hair instead of long braids. Today all the thitsas had carefully maintained bouffants that were almost as high as their self-esteem. But right now anxiety cast a cloud over Thitsa Kanta''s perfect world. She sighed. "I don''t know why you not married yet, twenty-seven years old and single." "Maybe you join the church group when you go back to NewYork," Thitsa Olga suggested. The eldest and shortest, she had a medium-size build and a chestnut-colored bouffant, as opposed to her sisters'' blond. "They got lots of Greek boys there." "Maybe," I answered. There was no point in telling my thitsas I hadn''t asked for their dating advice. Most people use the term Greek chorus figuratively. Well, I have the real thing, live and in person, a supporting cast made up of my four aunts: Thitsa Olga, Thitsa Kanta, Thitsa Lilia, and Thitsa Tina. I never used the proper Greek word for aunt, thia, in talking to them; it just seemed too grand. Our relationship was a mini-society that called for the use of the diminutive ending "itsa," a habit which made sense physically as well as psychologically. None of them is over five feet tall--in fact, they resemble Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather, the fairy godmothers in Sleeping Beauty, more than any chorus in a Greek tragedy. But they fulfill the same function: commenting on any action taking place in my life, interpreting oracles, explaining the past, and making predictions for the future. As I started boiling my Greek coffee in a copper briki, my father burst through the kitchen door. "Look at this," he bragged, brandishing a black-and-white photo. In it, my father is thirty-eight years younger and twenty pounds slimmer, standing in front of his parents'' house, which has not yet fallen into ruin. Every year on my summer trip to Greece, I made a pilgrimage to Lia, faithfully visiting the shell of this house, which I thought of as the Gatzoyiannis house, after our original last name. I loved seeing the people in our village, who showered me with hugs, kisses, and stuffed squash blossoms. But my family never stayed more than a day or two, and I was always a little glad when we left Lia to head to an island where the vacation could really get started. Our visits to the lost home made me anxious, because when the wind blew over the toppled stones, rustling the branches of my grandmother''s prized mulberry tree, I wasn''t sure if the house wanted me there. I knew that people had been tortured and killed in the house and buried in the yard. But it wasn''t just the knowledge of this fact that made the grounds seem ominous. It was the appearance of the fallen house itself. The ruins were forbidding, especiallywhen seen through the arched frame of the exoporta, the outer door to the courtyard in front of the house. The wood of the door had rotted away, so I could step through the stone frame and onto a path to nothing, where the house once stood. All that remained was a collection of grim piles of gray stones swallowed by moss, and a rusted metal window frame smothered in swells of ivy. But in my father''s old photo, the house still looked like a home. Rain had already damaged the roof in some places, but the outer door was still sturdy, and he leaned against it, smiling, wearing an open-collared shirt and excessive sideburns. "Wow," I said, looking up from that tanned young man to my father''s face, now covered in a bushy gray beard. "You look girly. You''re so skinny! And that shirt!" "Not girly ," he insisted. "Byronic--that''s the word you''re looking for." "Lenitsa, bring that here so your old thitsa can see," Thitsa Olga demanded. Staring at the photo, I felt as if a spotlight had been directed onto a dark corner of my mind, revealing the outline of an idea that had been hovering there, indistinctly, for years. Maybe it was time to extend those stopovers in Lia long enough for me to develop a new relationship with the village, one that was as rooted in the present as in the past. Whenever I toyed with the idea of staying long enough in Lia to resolve my conflicted feelings about the place, I fell back on the same excuse not to go--what would I do there? The image of the home in the photo was the answer to my question; I could move to Greece and rebuild the crumbled house, transforming the ruins into a home again so that if my grandparents'' ghosts ever wandered back, they would recognize it as their own. It would be a constructive use of time, with a tangible result. And along the way, perhaps living in the village where my grandmother had spent her whole life would help me feel as if I knew this woman I had never met. I carried her name, but I''d never known her. Living among my grandmother''s neighbors might help me understand my namesake, my father, my aunts, and even the Greek side of myself better. After all, there was nothing to keep me here. As my aunts pointed out, I wasn''t married. And I was growing increasingly bored with my little job, my even tinier apartment, and the slow parade of would-be soul mates who marched proudly into my view to the fanfare of trumpets but turned out to be sweaty and silly when I saw them up close. Lost in my thoughts, I made my way to the table slowly--too slowly for Thitsa Kanta, who grabbed the photo by one of its serrated edges before I sat down. "Look at NickGage''s hair!" crowed Thitsa Kanta, differentiating her brother from her other significant Nick, her son, NickStratis. "He looks like a drug dealer. But so handsome!" She sighed. "Lenitsa, we all old now. Your father, your thitsas ." "You can see part of the house behind him," I said, pointing to a small room sticking out to the right of the front door, a little L-shaped addition to the square frame of the gray stone house. "What''s that?" "That was the plistario ," Thitsa Olga said. "Where we wash ourselves. We fill a water barrel and it had a pipe and a thing at the end where water comes out." "A spigot?" "Yeah, that," she continued. "And there was a fourno where we cook, roast lamb at Easter. One side of that room was open, with a tin wall for the rain." I tried to imagine a teenage Thitsa Olga loading a pan into the beehive oven, her long braids swinging. "And next to that room?" "That was the mageirio, where we cook in winter," Thitsa Lilia answered. "It had a fireplace, where our mother make the corn bread in the gastra, that covered tin pot you put coals on top. We had pallets next to the fireplace, to sleep on in spring and fall. We sleep outside in summer, in the Good Room in winter." I knew the house had only four rooms, not counting the basement where the goats and sheep were kept, but my aunts had managed to turn it into a whole country that they journeyed around seasonally, just like their flocks that had spent summers up on the mountainside and winters down in the valleys. The thitsas had nevertold me about this pseudo-nomadic aspect of their childhood. And I had never asked, because their youth held so much sorrow that it seemed to lurk under the surface of even the most pleasant memory, making the past volatile, shaky ground on which to wander. Even the happiest occasions weren''t safe. When a friend of mine got engaged, I urged the thitsas to sing the traditional wedding songs of our village, which they did, smiling as their shrill voices rose in unexpected harmony. Then I felt horrified and guilty when Thitsa Olga burst into tears, sobbing that her own mother hadn''t been there to sing at her wedding. But that Thanksgiving weekend I felt brave enough to venture forth. "And next to the mageirior? " I prodded. "Oh that was the palia kamera, the Old Room," Thitsa Kanta explained. "That was the first room, built when my grandparents get married long time ago--a hundred and fifty years. It was small, just a cabinet and a door to the hallway." "So the hallway ran all the way from the front door to the back door?" I asked. "Oh, yes," Thitsa Lilia replied. "Outside the back door was a tree that made so many apricots. Farther on we had the chicken coop, past that the outhouse. On one trip from America, Patera brought a toilet seat up the mountain." "But we wouldn''t sit on it!" Thitsa Kanta giggled. "We weren''t used to it, so we just stand on the seat." "When visitors

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