Immigrants Who Go Back

1

AS THE road turned and began to climb the hillside, we could look (jack down toward Olympia. There in the valley, where the fallen columns speckled with gray the green of the meadows, was the ancient site of the Hellenic games. There, for a thousand years, the Greeks had gathered from every end of the Mediterranean world to renew in sacred rites the ties that bound them in kinship and in devotion to the ancestral gods. Jolting upward along the dirt road, we soon lost sight of the smooth-flowing Alpheios and of the whole universe of settled men. Only now and then, the flocks grazing on the stony slopes gave a hint of human habitat ion.

Our destination was a mountain village. On the map, we had located its name, Tropaia, dangling as it were in empty space a little north of the road wo followed, a small place and inconsequential. This was the seat of the George Washington GrcekAmeriean Association. Here the emigrants who had once turned their backs upon their native soil had returned: like their remote ancestors they had been drawn back to the place of their birth. Yet the proud letterhead of their association let us know that they had returned to their village not merely as Greeks but as Americans also. And we wondered whether we might not find in their experience some clue as to the nature of the loyalties involved in the shifts of masses of men by migration.

From the start, the currents of transatlantic migration had flowed in both directions. The larger movement had been toward the New World’s opportunities, but a lesser drift had also borne hack to Europe those men who had tried American life and then returned to their former homes. The number mounted steadily as the time, the danger, and the cost of the Atlantic crossing all decreased. Of the sixteen million immigrants who came to the United States from Europe in the three decades after 1900, almost four million went back in the same years. In the easy times of a twenty-dollar ocean crossing, some may well have drifted back and forth again and again, drawn to America by prosperity and high wages in some years, pushed back to their old homes by depressions and unemployment in others.

The First World War and then the end of immigration reduced the volume of this transatlantic traffic. The cost of passage rose, and men everywhere were more fixed in their places. Hut the hard times of the Depression revived the movement. More than one hundred thousand left the United States in the harsh months of 1932 alone, and in the whole decade of the 1930s about a half million returned to their homelands. Since then, the tide has declined. Now, some twelve thousand aliens and as many more American citizens annually return to Europe.

How many of these people now live in Europe is difficult to estimate. It seems likely that there are scattered across the length and breadth of the continent about three million Americans— that is, men of all conditions who have had some experience of life in the United States. In Poland and Norway, in Ireland, England, Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia, these little islands of the twice-displaced radiate the influences of the New World into the surrounding society of the Old.

So much for history.

Only, the history is not quite over. Even now the tourist draws to a slop before the gasoline pump in a remote village and is greeted by a voice rich in the intonations of Brooklyn or Chicago or South Milwaukee. As the car pulls a way from the huddled cluster of little houses, the driver may wonder in passing how such familiar phrases came to be heard in such strange settings. What brought back the neat little elderly figure to sit for hours in the hard sunlight of the café terrace? After forty years in the fruit store on Halsted Street, how do the aging legs find the pace proper to the rutted Janes of the Old World? And what does the village make of these lost sons? Are they as disruptive in their return as in their departure?

2

THOSE who have come back are a various lot, reflecting in their condition and in their motives all their differing experiences. Some are men who have never come to rest and are always in transit. On the bus riding into Athens from the airport we fell into conversation with a toolmaker from Lansing. We had seen him first standing bewildered in the monumental confusion of the customs shed and had noticed later his halting efforts to answer the inspector’s questions in Greek. Now he stared eagerly through the window as the bus sped by the dark suburban streets, straining for a token of recognition. It was all strange to him.

No, he had never actually seen Athens before. When he had left his Macedonian birthplace more than forty years earlier, he had gone by way of Trieste, he thought, although he was not sure. Athens was more like Lansing t ban he had expected; and he wondered what Salonika was like, where he would visit his sister. No members of his family were left in the native village.

He was probably older than he looked; there were only a few flecks of gray in his hair. Still, he must have been no more than a lad in his teens when he set out for America, alone, to join friends. A good worker, he had not had too hard a time of it; and for some reason he had never married — which made it easier to get by. He knew Lansing well and had often been in Detroit. But he was the eternal lodger, nowhere really at home. And as we rolled into the lights of Constitution Square, he was the first to be out of his seat, and stood impatiently at the door when it swung open.

We encountered others like him. These men have never overcome the shock of emigration. They had stayed in the United States two years, or twenty, or more, and with greater or lesser facility had mastered the concrete details of American life. They had earned a living and kept out of trouble, watched the movies and paid taxes. But they could not regain what they had lost by coming away — the sense of belonging, of participation in a community. Passive in their attitudes, some numbing apathy kept them from joining in the activities that made other immigrants feel at home. Instead they looked backward and, in their longing, fancied they might fill, back there, all the lacks of their empty lives.

Sometimes they put their dreams to the test of actuality and retraced their steps. More often than not, they found that they had brought back the emptiness with them. The villages had changed and they themselves had changed; and everywhere they seemed to carry with them their own particular bleakness. As they leaned shyly at the bar, listening to the other men’s jocularity, it might be one world or the other outside the curtained windows; it was all the same to them.

We had lunch in Tropaia’s only restaurant. The hot afternoon sun pouring into the dreary room as we entered emphasized the monotony of the line of bare tables down its center. Bustling forward in a show of enterprise, the proprietor led us to our places. I sat down and the wobbly chair collapsed beneath me. The man stood by in helpless indecision, his eyes shifting nervously from the symbol of his futility on the floor to his indignant wife glaring from behind t he counter.

He too was an American, although English now came slowly to him. In Seattle he had been a long time in the restaurant business. But it had not gone very well, and in 1930 there had been hard times. He thought he might as well come back where a man could at least live off the soil. Only, the bit of inherited land was not so good, and he was out of practice in the farming business. And so he thought he would try a restaurant again. Times were not too good here either, although he managed. Of course, he had a son over in the States who helped him out once in a while. He lingered as the woman set the plates before us; but his conversation ebbed away, and his thoughts wandered off to some inner concern of his own.

The official in Naples told us of a harder case still. Naturally, the names were confidential. But there was this Italian who had lived a long time in a big city, say like Cleveland. He had worked hard and raised a family — three daughters and a son, all married now and with families of their own. After a while his wife died and the old man got so that he could not hold a job any more; by then he was nearing seventy. It was a problem. The children were considerate, but they were not wealthy and they had to think of their own children. Besides, the old man would not be happy staying with any of them; he had his own ways and was always criticizing and just did not fit in. Anyone could understand that.

Then again, there was all this talk about the Old Country. He was always telling them how nice it was, how kind the people were, how they always stuck together. When the idea first came to them, it seemed so simple they could not understand why it had not come sooner. Let the old man go back to live happily ever after with his sister who had kept up the family place. They would help out, of course, and would miss him. But surely he would be better off. At the jovial farewell before they drove him to the airport they made a little ceremony of handing him the ticket — one way.

Now he was a case. To the sister in Italy he had become a nuisance; he was not at all her picture of an American as he wandered aimlessly about watching other men at work and with hardly a lira in his pocket. He himself was no longer sure that he wanted to stay. But neither could he determine to go back to the children who had no room for him.

At last there was a falling-out with the sister — some petty quarrel that left him quivering with rage — and he resolved to leave. Penniless and with no place to go, he was at his wit’s end when he turned to the consulate for advice. Months later when we left he was still a case.

Among these emigrants to America, there were some who never managed to win control. They had left in the first place because home ceased to have room for them. They had not been able, in resettling, to fix roots firmly in the new soil. On either side of the ocean they were doomed to remain uprooted.

3

MORE numerous were men of quite another type, for whom the return was the culminating reward of their success in the United States.

We came out into the afternoon brilliance of Easter Sunday and remarked the two-toned Chevrolet with Virginia license plates parked before the hotel in Tripolis. When we drew to a stop at ihc little park on the outskirts of town we saw the same car. The youth in the uniform of the Greek Army who sat idly at its wheel proved to be the nephew. His two American uncles had just come back for a visit, and with them his aunts and an American cousin his own age.

The Americans were eager to have us linger; they welcomed our presence as a momentary relief from the excessive intimacy of relationships which had been long suspended and then were suddenly renewed. Perhaps also it was reassuring to speak English again and thus to establish a contact with home. On the other hand, they were anxious that we should think well of Greece, of the town, and of their relatives. If we would come with them, they would show us something really worth seeing.

We strolled ahead with the elder of the uncles, a slender little man well into his sixties. His smallbusinessman’s neat dark suit and sober tie with matching socks and handkerchief decisively set him apart from the motley holiday crowds we passed in the narrow streets. This, he repeated, would he worth seeing; they had planned their whole trip to be here on Easier Sunday. In fact, lie confided in us, during all those years in the Slates, his most poignant memories were of this occasion. IIis brother and he had done well with the laundry— they had a big plant now with forty employees — but, to tell the truth, every time the month of April went by, they really felt they were missing some! hing.

At the head of the street, we halted at the threshold of a small building. It seemed by its structure a garage; but this day it served another function. The gay crowd within overflowed into the street and we were at once made a part of it. We found ourselves sipping litt le glasses of resinated wine; and although the babble of many voices was incomprehensible, the laughter and good feeling were not. From the hack there was singing, a kind of measured chant vaguely Oriental in its quality. We edged inward to see.

Over the floor were spread the glowing embers of a fire; and across it, dressed on sturdy wooden poles, were spitted four whole sheep. The animals revolved slowly among the thin wisps of smoke, turned lovingly by eager helpers on either side. We looked for the uncle who had guided us. He was already surrounded by a circle of well-wishers. Jovial, without self-consciousness, he had dropped back into an experience deep in meaning for him. It was the goal of his coming hack to be able to recapture a memory. Eor, in doing so, he gave a wholeness to his life, so that his satisfactions as an old man were made one wit h his aspirations as JI boy.

The same longing for wholeness brings some emigrants permanently back to the place of their birth. In a small town on the way south from Florence, hardly a fair day passes but finds a vigorous old man fishing dreamily by the lakeside. In his youth, to sit thus was the prerogative of the gentry; and he had often thought how fine it would be to lounge there grandly without a care in the world. He had gone away and moved from place to place, become the maitre d’hôtel of a well-known dining room in the United States and observed all manner of important people. All the while, he still thought how fine it would be to take one’s ease with a rod by the lake. And it was fine, now that his work was behind him and he had his competence, to make a placid familiar figure in the hard bright sunlight at the water’s edge.

Such fortunate ones among ihe returned emigrants themselves put it simply. There are friends or relatives they wish once more to live with: they long to see again the cherished sights, to repeat again the precious acts of their earlier days. Or else, they explain, their dollars go a longer way in the Old Country. Through all the variations of the particular explanations runs a general theme. The ability to come back for a visit or to stay is a precious reward for making good in the United States.

There are difficulties of course. “What a country,” said the little man in the Piazza di Spagna. “I order coffee. Comes a little cup of tar. 1 want soap. Never heard of it. I buy some; they want to cat it. A bath? Sure! They take me outside, stand me over a hole in the ground, and pour water on me from a wine barrel. Some people!”

Minor but nagging annoyances heighten the unexpected nostalgia of the returned emigrants for the American persons and places they left behind. Relatives known for years only at a distance prove at closer acquaintance deceitful or avaricious. Again, almost all who return nowadays are elderly and have imperceptibly become accustomed to American standards of comfort, sanitation, and medicine; they are distressed by the deficiencies of the Old Country. Occasionally advance calculations turn out to be overoptimistic; the cost of living is higher than expected for those who insist upon their usual brand of American cigarettes. A few returned emigrants worry about their citizenship; if they are less than sixty or did not live twenty-five years in the United States, they may lose their passports after a three-year absence. Yet even these genuine problems rarely diminish the satisfactions of having returned.

4

THE lingering attachment that draws back the emigrants, the successes and the failures, abruptly and permanently disturbs the villages to which they return. In widening circles, the influence of the Americans ripples outward until it touches upon every aspect of the old way of life.

Part of that process wc were able to observe in Tropaia. In the square before the church, the little group of loungers regarded us with suspicion. But we had no difficulty in locating the Americans. The small hoy sent scurrying off was soon back, and following him, at a dignified pace, was the President of the George Washington Association, a sturdy man who bore his seventy years with confidence.

For a while we chatted idly and commented on the difficult road over which we had come. He smiled and pointed with his stick. It was over that same way that he had gone almost fifty years before, a youngster really although already married. There wort’ many others like him who had nothing todo at home, and he had wandered over to Pyrgos on the coast in search of something with a future, lie had not found that promise running errands for a local shopkeeper, and before long he made the longer move to America. He had tried his hand at selling fruit and groceries in a number of Middle Western cities and finally settled down, a dealer in fish on Cape Cod. (Come to think of it, we in Cambridge had practically been his neighbors.) He had lived in the same town the largest part of his life and had done well, if he said so himself; someday, if we wished, we could see his name still carved over the entrance to the business block near the railroad station. But now he liked it hack here in his own house, He had thirteen grandchildren in the States and flew across to visit them every few years. Still, he had lhe feeling he would like to spend most of the days left him here.

Of course, they had had terrible times in Tropaia. You could see the land was not much good, and the young people still had nothing to do. While the new hydroelectric plant was being built over on the Ladhon River, some of the men had found work and a cash income there. But the plant was now finished, sitting silent in the wilderness with only a few engineers to tend it. There was much talk of emigration, and some villagers had left for Australia and the Cniled Stales. But the laws were not, encouraging, and this course promised no immediate relief to the economic problem. The people were pitifully poor and they had not much faith in the government. What could you expect?

That was one of the reasons the AmericanGrecks had started the Association. It was curious, over in the States he kept being reminded he was a Greek; here he could not forget, that he was an American. The village had many needs and it made him mad snmetimes to see how folks accepted tlungs as they were, how they listened to false ideas and were misled. It was necessary to do something.

The Secretary had now joined us and took up the discussion. In a little village, everyone has to help out anyway. When a neighbor has trouble or the church needs a new window, nobody says anything; but they look 1o the Americans. Who else has anything left over to spare? Right here, around Tropaia in the district of Cortynia, there were almost fifty Americans and they would sec each other once in a while, elderly men all of them, from Beloit and Milwaukee and Canton. Then they thought it would be a good idea to form a society through which they could organize and work for improvements. They had in mind not only improvements that would make the towns more decent but also such as would give the townspeople better ideas.

They were rather vague as to what they meant by the latter point. They had not mixed much in politics hack in the State’s; and if you asked them about Republicans and Democrats they only knew what they read in the papers. Anyway, most of them were American citizens and they had no desire to get into trouble with t he government here. Still, there was surely no harm trying to straighten out the other villagers or in showing them something about American methods. The old-timers who wanted everything to stay the way it was were against them, as were some of the younger hotheads, who perhaps were Communists and suspicious of the United States. But the Association was doing some good, the President hoped.

A boy of ten hurried by, balancing on his head a tray with the family dinner hot from the communal oven. “Look,”the President said, “we are teaching them English.” The lad stopped, ready to display his abilities, and the President beamed in pride.

Tropaia is not alone in feeling the effects of the return. On the island of Khios a retired beautyshop operator of seventy comes back from Pittsburgh and wants to do something. Soon he has the school remodeled and a new road built. Elsewhere it is a church or a waterworks; a new mill or an olive press; or, as in Tripolis, a splendid modern hospital constructed out of the voluntary contributions of Greek-Americans. The Americans, moved by the contrast between their homes on one side of t he ocean and on the other, are a continual irritant that will not let the village rest.

In the poorer countries of Europe—and few countries on the continent are not poor — their presence is of incalculable importance. In Greece, one in three families is officially registered by the government as poverty-stricken. A succession of earthquakes while we were in the Peloponnesus showed how uncertain was this society’s bulwark against disaster. Almost no one had the resources to survive unaided. It could scarcely be otherwise. After all, one eighth of the population is employed less than one hundred days a year and family incomes are correspondingly low. In Italy the percentage of poor may be somewhat smaller, but not enough to reassure those who fear that the unrelieved burdens of misery may overwhelm the bewildered people with despair from which only the Communists would profit. Everywhere, the most bewildered and the most depressed are the peasants, the very group from which the bulk of the emigrants were once drawn.

The returned emigrants demonstrate that there is an alternative to the despair in which Communism breeds. In that sense they are partners with the American government in an effort that has already expended billions of dollars in Europe. But it is not simply the money they bring and the material changes they help effect that give importance to the role of the returned emigrants. They supply also the stimulus of a more significant kind of help. Their own way of life is continuing proof that there is an alternative to despair. They repair the old cottage or build a new one which they fill with mechanical devices. They have a kind of nostalgia for the old customs, but when it comes to practical matters they are altogether intolerant of tradition and are everlastingly suggesting improvements. They are loyal to the old faith but impatient with popular beliefs, at which they sneer as superstit ious. They seem ready to change the whole order of the universe with their ceaseless talk of how things are done in the United States. After all, who can deny the force of the argument from the experience of America?

The returned emigrant stands, in his own person, the most effective argument of all. He may be elderly now, with long years of hard work behind him. But he wears the respectable suit, the white shirt and tie, of the middle class and he expects as his right a comfortable home. Who can persuade him there is no hope!

He will not even hear through the evasive complaint, “Well, in America it may be possible, but here ...” He knows that there was no magic to migration. America itself solved no problems; it only offered men the opportunity for creating solutions through their own striving for improvement. That, in the last analysis, is the doctrine he sets endlessly before his old compatriots— that change for the better is attainable through their own efforts.

Put in concrete terms they can understand, the villagers often find the argument enticing. If only it were true! When we were invited to dinner in Tropaia our driver, as was his custom, prepared unobtrusively to disappear. The President noticed and read him a lecture. In America we do it differently. Why should you not be good enough to dine with us?

Such questions raised repeatedly rock the ancient assumptions and habits of the village. The activities of the returned emigrants in their American Legion posts and in a host of other voluntary societies show the men around them undreamed-of means of social action. Even those who never saw the United States become members of branches of such American associations and begin themselves to explore the potentialities of democracy.

That is why the returned emigrant is often resented by those who resist change and prefer the settled order — by the gentry who profit from it, by the radicals resentful of any but the revolutionary change, and by the peasants bound to the status quo through inertia. To the gentry he is a nuisance who has moved out of his class without acquiring the values of their class. He may have wealth, they say, but he has no standards and remains a peasant without the peasant’s virtue of submissiveness. To the Communists and their allies he is the advance agent of Yankee imperialism cov ering over the corruptions of capitalism and impeding the cause of the revolution. Meanwhile, the mass of peasants remain suspicious of his rise in station and not altogether certain that his wild schemes can be trusted.

Generally, he is not himself aware of this opposition. In his eagerness to be liked, in his longing for identification with a community, he assumes that all will think like him. It comes as a surprise to see sullen faces, to overhear snatches of malicious gossip. He can hardly conceive the mistrust aroused when he furthers what seem to him self-evident propositions.

That surprise is a product of his situation. He is a man not altogether like the other villagers, nor yet like the other Americans, but one who has lived in two worlds. He is not always capable of adjusting to the strains of that effort. But often enough he does succeed and thus draws together in his own experience and thinking the qualities of both worlds. That is his most useful role.