Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? by Gonda Van Steen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? by Gonda Van Steen Jack Neubauer Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? By Gonda Van Steen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. xx + 330 pp. Cloth $85.00, paper $39.95. Since the conclusion of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Asian children have been adopted by families in the United States and across the Global North. This story is well known. Successive waves of international adoptions from Korea, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere were celebrated in the media and popular culture at the time, and more recently they have been the subject of a growing body of critical scholarship by Catherine Ceniza Choy, Arissa Oh, Leslie Wang, and others. In contrast, the story of the approximately 3,200 Greek children adopted by American families during the Cold War remains largely unknown. As a result, readers of Gonda Van Steen's meticulously researched book, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece, may be surprised to learn that during the "early Cold War period" (1948–1962), adoptions of Greek children to the United States far outpaced even those of Korean children on a per capita basis. An accomplished scholar of ancient Greek theater, Van Steen was inspired to research the history of Cold War Greek adoptions when she received an email from a young man named Mike, whose mother and aunt were adopted by a Greek American family after their father, Greek Communist Elias Argyriadis, [End Page 158] was executed by the Greek state in 1952. The intergenerational story of the Argyriadis family provides a narrative anchor for Van Steen's analysis of Greek-to-American adoptions, which she argues were shaped by the interconnected histories of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), the global Cold War, and the broader international adoption movement. Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece is divided into three parts. Part I analyzes the combustible mixture of "push factors" driving the initial wave of Greek-to-American adoptions in the early 1950s. These include the dire social conditions of post–Civil War Greece (as of 1950, an estimated one in eight Greek children had lost one or both parents), violent persecution of left-wing families, and the Greek state's efforts, led by Queen Frederica, to cultivate American sympathy for "orphan Greece" while alleviating its social welfare burdens. In Part II, Van Steen demonstrates how early efforts to "find families" for Greek orphans transformed into a movement that was driven primarily by "the pull factor of the American demand for available white children" (125). The American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), the largest Greek American voluntary association, helped meet this demand for Greek children through "proxy" adoptions in which a third-party agent matched prospective parents and Greek children with little screening or oversight. The result, Van Steen argues, was "a full-blown black market for babies" that enriched greedy Greek and American middlemen, who resorted to bribery and coercion to reclassify the stigmatized children of Greek single mothers as "adoptable orphans" (124). Based on extensive interviews, Part III presents a montage of individual adoption stories that illuminate the diversity of adoptees' attitudes and experiences. First, Van Steen introduces us to Dionysios Dionou, who refers to himself as a "stolen child" and calls his adopters "purchasers" rather than parents (185–87). A few pages later, we meet Dean, whose adoptive family lovingly joke that the $500 in fees they paid to adopt him was "the deal of a lifetime." Dean even framed the check his American parents used to pay for his adoption as symbol of their special family history (189–90). If the many individual stories in this section eventually start to bleed together in the reader's mind, it only underscores Van Steen's argument that they are constitutive of an emerging "collective subjectivity among Greek adoptees" (239). Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece is intended for both academic specialists and Greek adoptees interested in understanding the complex history behind their own personal journeys. For readers interested in the broader histories of childhood and adoption, Van Steen's in-depth analysis of Cold War Greece provides a fascinating case study for...