Eurydice Street: A Place In Athens

by Sofka Zinovieff

Overview

Sofka Zinovieff had fallen in love with Greece as a student, but little suspected that years later she would return for good with an expatriate Greek husband and two young daughters. This book is a wonderfully fresh, funny and inquiring account of her first year as an Athenian. The whole family have to get to grips with their new life and identities: the children start school and tackle a new language, and Sofka's husband, Vassilis, comes home after half a lifetime away. Meanwhile, Sofka resolves to get to know her new city and become a Greek citizen, which turns out to be a process of Byzantine complexity. As the months go by, Sofka's discovers how memories of Athens' past haunt its present in its music, poetry and history. She also learns about the difficult art of catching a taxi, the importance of smoking, the unimportance of time-keeping, and how to get your Christmas piglet cooked at the baker's.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781862077508
Publisher:	Granta Books
Publication date:	05/01/2005
Pages:	276
Sales rank:	864,479
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.74(h) x 0.77(d)

About the Author

Sofka Zinovieff trained as an anthropologist and has worked as a journalist. She lives in Athens. This is her first book.

Editorial Reviews

In telling her story, she provides insights for anyone who might want to travel to the ancient city.
— The New York Times

Neil Genzlinger

A wife and mother chronicles her move from England to Greece. The author, whose Russian father met her mother on holiday in Greece, grew up in England and married a Greek man. They spent most of their marriage in the U.K. and Russia, but in the summer of 2001 moved with their two daughters to a suburb of Athens. In her debut memoir, which recalls Patricia Storace's Dinner with Persephone (1996), Zinovieff recounts her family's first year in Greece. An anthropologist by training, she brings a keen eye for detail to her lovely prose, e.g., a new highway in Athens was "like a soft, steaming slick of black treacle." The most poignant theme here is the parenting of bilingual, bicultural kids. Zinovieff realized her family was really becoming Greek when, on her birthday, her girls serenaded her with the Greek equivalent of Happy Birthday ("May you live, little Mum, and grow old, with white hair"). She suspected that as her daughters acclimated to their new country, they would sometimes be embarrassed by her decidedly English customs. The difference between her English and Greek selves was captured by a change of name: In English she was known as Sofka Zinovieff; her Greek neighbors transformed Sofka into Sophia, and schoolchildren called her by her husband's last name, Papadimitriou. By November, Zinovieff had started to feel rather comfortable in her new environs. She decided to apply for Greek citizenship, even though that promised a long tangle with the bureaucracy. Some aspects of Greek culture-chronic tardiness, for example-grated on her. But she appreciated Athens, a city where even the most urban, modern pockets could still rightly be called "neighborhoods." She enjoyed getting to knowher Greek in-laws and celebrating holidays like Easter in Greece; indeed, she enjoyed both the literal and metaphorical significance of having a new name. More than travel writing, this is a story of finding home.

Kirkus Reviews