The Greek Dream
Sunday, January 21, 2007
3:00 PM

Brenda Marder will read from her new book, The Greek Dream. An historical introduction to the novel by Everett Marder will precede the reading. A discussion and reception will follow, and signed copies of the book will be available for purchase.

About The Greek Dream
The novel deals with certain historical subjects: the desperate fate of Greek communists who sought refuge in the Eastern Block countries after the Greek civil war in 1949, the general atmosphere during the Cold War in Greece and Bulgaria, the murderous activities of the terrorist organization November 17 operating in Greece until 2002, which managed to kill the CIA station chief in Athens. This story, although purely fiction, inspired by these realities, depicts how tension and moral considerations emerge as the CIA joins with Greek officials to track down the terrorists. The principal characters are Barbara Baldwin, an American Embassy wife, who, as a result of a ski trip to Bulgaria with her children, gets emotionally involved with the fate of a Bulgarian officer of Greek origin, assigned as attaché to the Bulgarian Embassy in Athens. He longs for repatriation to Greece or defection to the United States. Through his acts of desperation he is targeted by November 17 terrorists. Each of the characters is in danger of compromising the other by dint of national concerns and personal ambition.

About the Author
Brenda L. Marder has lived and worked in Greece periodically for forty years as lecturer in modern European history, university administrator, and magazine editor in Athens. She has also published poetry and subjects relating to the history of modern Greece. In 2004, her book, Stewards of the Land: The American Farm School and Greece in the Twentieth Century (Mercer University Press) was published in the United States and translated and published in Greece (Metaixmio Press). She is the wife of an American diplomat who was accredited to Greece for over a decade. New England-born, she lives with her husband in Hanover, New Hampshire, but makes an odyssey to Greece at least three times a year.

Excerpts from The Greek Dream
     Two local gallants emerged from the crowd, folding back their sleeves, conspicuously exhibiting their muscles. They linked hands, formed a seat to lower the bride from the cart, staggering clown-like under the heft. Another band of musicians, this one with modern instruments, struck up the popular Pao yia ipno, Katerina, while the bride threw kisses at the crowd. The ox cart lurched forward without her; she tottered after it, hurling crude curses at the oxen, words that, normally, only the men would dare pronounce.

     “So let me advance my elegant theory. Your dear friend Stavros, I believe, in an effort to ingratiate himself with November 17 and any politicians who might support the terrorists, somehow reported to them that the Bulgarian officer had been snooping on the organization. Whether he actually knew this for a fact or dreamed it up, I don't know yet. You know, it might have been just a fantasy, but Stavros used it to perform a perfect act of opportunism. Now, Stavros is a decent figure in his own world, of course; is scrupulous about whom he betrays. Dimitrov was exquisitely dispensable. Why not betray him? I can assure you it's not easy for Stavros to find sacrificial lambs; but discovering a despicable Bulgarian to pitch into the cauldron is a gift from Zeus and Hera.”

     The waiter brought a tray with a bottle of lukewarm wine, only three glasses, one of them cracked, and a charred heap of melted cheese and ham on toast.

     Franklin said through a mouthful of the burnt offering, “He might need a favor from those November 17 guys some day. Who knows? After all, Stavros played ball with the junta and when it fell in 1974, he then inserted himself seamlessly into the new democratic government. He did it by pleasing all sides; in fact, you could say he's master of that art, and like Machiavelli, he could write the standard text about it.”

     She had not turned back to face Franklin. She couldn't face him, any of them. His theory was amazingly correct, and she held the pieces of information to fill in the missing parts of his argument.

     Robert was handing around the wine. In the street some men and women dancing the hassapiko were weaving through the crowd.

     By telling Stavros all about Ivan in the hope of enlisting his help, she had unwittingly become an accessory in Ivan’s murder. She'd tried to save him. Whatever she'd done, she'd done because of an inner imperative born of gratitude that later became concern for a human being, and she knew that faced again with a similar situation, she'd act. Robert's way was not her way, and Franklin's way was not her way. And neither was Stavros' way. Franklin, the most guilty, could easily have saved him by granting him defection. And now he was dead.

     She left the balcony, groped her way downstairs, rushed out into the street. She swayed in the pressing crowd. A group of dancers hollering “opa ” leapt alongside and yanked her into their circle. People on each side snatched her hands and held them aloft. The music coming from some place, as if oozing from the atmosphere, no, from a dozen places all at once, from the clusters of musicians up and down the street, each playing different songs, revving up to a frenzied pace—she felt the music, only the music, and those hands soaked with sweat, holding hers, as she took off, her feet leaving the ground. And wishing she could dance forever, she danced her despair. Once she stumbled, came to her knees, but the hands lifted her. Her chest was heaving as she tried to catch her breath. Sweat ran off her brow into her eyes and blurred her vision. She glanced up at the balcony and saw Robert in a mist, his eyes glued to the binoculars, peering at her. She wanted to call to him, to have him join her in the dance. But he couldn't hear; for the moment they were too far apart.

*

     Flanked by the same heavily armed guards who had escorted her into the prison two weeks earlier, she walked out of the courtroom down the corridor to the exit, where she was met by a throng of reporters and television people clustered under the sizzling Athenian sun. They shouted at her in Greek and English, a boisterous interrogation.

     “Kyria Baldwin, how much did your government support the junta?”

     “Madame, did your government help install the military dictatorship in 1967?”

     “Mrs., do you believe members of your government like Henry Kissinger should be tried as war criminals?”

     “Why did your government not stop the Turks when they invaded Cyprus?”

     “Do you agree your country suffers from a bad case of alazonia, arrogance, hubris, whatever you want to call it?”

     “Tell us the truth about why your president really wanted to march on Iraq?”

     She made a half gesture of lifting her hands to cover her ears but lowered them quickly. Obviously, the news people had taken into account that over many years she had been accredited to the American Embassy in Greece. It passed quickly through her mind that they assumed because she had been outspoken at the trial--some might even condemn her for being disloyal to friends and country--she might now offer titillating tidbits to the aroused public. She took a deep breath, straightened her back against the onslaught. She felt humiliated.

     She had expected to face shame, but in private spaces, at the CIA, at State, among friends and others when she got home. And worst of all waiting for her was Robert, of course, Robert. But for some reason she hadn’t reckoned with the vehemence of public reaction on the streets here in Greece. Greece, where since ancient times, avoiding shame was a basic commandment. She was remembering Homer. “She has brought shame both on herself and on all women who will come after her,” repeating the line to drown out the shouting. But she had come to Greece to make sure that the story of Ivan’s death was told, and to insure that Stavros’ role in his murder was a matter of record. At least, she had been able to grant to Ivan a kind of funeral service; it was, for her, a kind of solution. If necessary then, let this rude chorus call it out, “Anathema, Anathema.”