Mother's Love, Son's Revenge

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

ELENI by Nicholas Gage; Random House; 470 pages; $15.95

As the Communist attempt to take over Greece became an increasingly bloody failure in 1948, the desperate leftist guerrillas, driven back to a few mountain coverts, adopted a cruel strategy: a pedomasoma, a "gathering up of children." The young were taken from occupied villages and sent as hostages to Albania and other nearby Iron Curtain countries. Publicly the guerrillas said the children were being protected from the hazards of war. In fact, the plan was meant to terrorize their parents into subservience to the guerrillas and to indoctrinate the children as a new generation of revolutionaries.

Peasants of the steep Mourgana region, the northwest roof of Greece, were horrified by the pedomasoma, but they were battered and half-starved by a decade of war, and few had the strength or cunning to resist. One who did was Eleni Gatzoyiannis of the little farm hamlet Lia. Though she had spent her life deferring to her father, a prosperous miller, and to her husband, a cook at a diner in far-off America who returned periodically to visit, Eleni was transformed by crisis into a leader: she organized the escape of 20 people of Lia, most of them women and children, down the mountains and through the line of battle. The group made it. Eleni did not. On the eve of the flight, she was ordered to harvest wheat under guerrilla supervision in fields miles away. When the escape was discovered, she was tortured, "tried" for treason, and denounced by neighbors who had envied her few pitiful "riches" from America. Then she was shot. Her last words were the cry "My children!"

One of those children was eight-year-old Nikola. Transported to the U.S. to join a father he had never met, the boy discovered the cathartic power of words when he wrote a school essay about his mother's death. He took the name Nicholas Gage and grew up to become an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for the New York Times. Gradually, the grief of his childhood returned as an obsession. In 1979 Gage quit the newspaper to learn how and why his mother had been killed. He planned a crime of vengeance. He failed at that, but he has achieved instead, in Eleni, a kind of resurrection.

His book, part thriller, part history, part romantic epic, is a remarkable feat of technique, and of soul. Gage deftly shifts among hundreds of characters, dozens of locales, and a welter of big-scale narratives--World War II, the Greek civil war, the exodus of Mourgana refugees in every direction--that in lesser hands would overwhelm the story of one woman's family. He manages to be fair to people he has every reason to despise: he evokes the grievances of the guerrillas as fully as their treachery, the gullibility of the villagers as well as their jealousy and spite. Painfully, he recalls the mother whom he revered with the absolute awe and devotion of a child. Yet as he tells the story of her utter heroism, he views her with a journalist's balance and detachment.

Eleni was beautiful and eventually outspoken, but she was not a feminist, not even a matriarch. She was a country woman, brought up to a life of ceaseless, selfless duty to men and her elders. Wedding ceremonies in Lia traditionally included a moment when the groom stamped on the bride's toes to establish his dominance; on wedding nights, brides in Lia customarily slept with their mothers-in-law rather than their husbands, as a symbolic lesson in obedience to the new clan. Eleni scarcely thought of leaving her rigid culture until it began to shatter violently around her. She dreamed of joining her husband in America, but she did not try to learn his Western ways. Though he had bought her a big brass bed, she slept on rugs on the floor except when he was home. When he sent her a feather duster, she put it in a vase and displayed it in the best of her house's four rooms.

War transformed Eleni's simple life, and bought out in her family a crafty brutality needed for survival. When the guerrillas wanted to take her eldest daughter Olga as a soldier, Eleni seared the girl's foot with boiling water and a glowing poker so that she could not go. A male cousin of Eleni's escaped being drafted by lacerating his neck with nettles and painting his throat every morning with diluted hydrochloric acid.

Gage tells these stories vividly, unsparingly. He is equally candid about the catastrophic effects of his grandfather's hardheartedness, his uncle's greed, his father's preference for being a family man in Greece but a bachelor in America. During passages in which he debates inconclusively the nature of justice, Gage admits his own base impulses: he smuggled a gun into Greece in order to murder the now aged "judge" who had condemned his mother. At the last moment, having spat in the man's face, Gage renounced the crime because it would put his gratification ahead of his duty to his children, his living family. In a final sentence that is prefigured from the book's beginning, as in a classical Greek tragedy, Gage explains: "Summoning the hate necessary to kill Katis would destroy the part of me that is most like Eleni." --By William A. Henry III This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.