VOICES HEARD

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Since his retirement decades ago my father had been working on his memoirs. He had an epic life as I described in my valedictory to him in our previous issue and his memoirs would have been thrilling reading, as well as ainvaluable historic record.

But he got tired and discouraged that nobody would read it—it would be buried with all his other papers after his death and be forgotten forever. And since my father was also a very social man, he preferred to tell his stories and get the reaction of his audience, rather than put them down formally on cold paper and get no reaction at all. Telling them was his special gift, he would dub all the voices, he would describe the action indetail, he was a master and he held whole tables of friends and family spellbound for hours. I remember once on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago how the guests at a dinner party, educated and sophisticated people, sat rapt all night and listened to my father tell stories about his life, from his start in the village in Chios, to his wartime service, to his venture to the new world. At the end of the evening a woman said to me, “Your father is a remarkable man.”

And he was, and so were others. We feature a story in this issue that Ellen Frisina wrote about her yiayia, another epic person who led an epic life, and who her granddaughter still remembers with such wonder.

We lost my father’s voice with his death, but his writings are with us still and his voice is recorded there. I have the skeleton and draft of his memoirs, I have his PhD thesis, I have his notes and articles on a variety of subjects, I have his last jottings. They are the record of their thoughts and feelings, they are still his living voice.

To give these voices a new hearing, and in some cases a first hearing, we are starting a new project that we hope we can expand to other cities after a trial run in New York. A group of us, from several generations, both mine and my children’s, will take the writings, the notes, the letters of our parents and grandparents, and we will spend a night reading them in a narrative of their lives and feelings on their life’s journey and voyage to their brave new world in America. We will stand at lecterns, we will use slides and photos, we will have the photo of the person we are reading from beside us as we read, to show the person we are only speaking for. Stay tuned and we’ll let you know where the first one will be in New York. We hope to do it in a number of venues here, expand it, enlist others to do the same with their families, and hopefully take it to cities throughout the United States and abroad.These voices are athanatesand deserve to be heard.

To find out more about this project and be included you can contact us here through our e-mail address.

All the best for a wonderful summer. Don’t forget to visit Greece. It’s still the most glorious place on earth.

Dimitri C. Michalakis

©2012 NEOCORP MEDIA



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