Immigrant Song
For the past three summers, Lou Ureneck has stepped out of time, taking up residence in the rural village of Loukadika, on the southernmost peninsula of the Peloponnese, his ancestral homeland. His dwelling there is just steps from the stone house where his grandmother was born, and which she left for a new life in America in 1915.
Lou Ureneck
“There are people there who are over a hundred years old and still remember her,” says Ureneck, professor and chair of the journalism department, who is writing what he calls “a reported memoir” about a Greek family’s immigration and assimilation into American life. It happens to be his family he’s writing about, but the story represents thousands of others—universal journeys of struggle, of metamorphosis, and of finally arriving at something that feels like home.
His research has unfolded both in Greece and in Newark, New Jersey, where his family ultimately settled. Working with a scholar of the Greek diaspora at Panteion University in Athens, Ureneck learned that in the 1880s one in every four Greeks immigrated, mostly to the United States, to escape poverty. “In the Peloponnese,” in particular, he says, “there had been a huge economy based around the black currant. That crashed in the late 19th century, and it led to foreclosures and civil unrest. That’s largely what drove the emigration.”
Aglaia Kallas—Journalism Professor Lou Ureneck’s grandmother and the subject of his current book project—with her children (l–r), Helen, Constantine, John, and Thomas, in Newark, New Jersey, circa 1930.
Photo courtesy of Lou Ureneck
Ureneck’s grandmother came to America by ship at the age of seven or eight, by herself, and joined relatives who had settled in Maine and found work in the textile mills there. At 15, she was entered into an arranged marriage to a Greek man, and the couple moved to Colorado, where there was a large Greek and Balkan community that worked in the mines. “My mother was born in a mining tent in Delagua, Colorado,” Ureneck says.
The family moved east in the 1920s, and his grandfather opened a restaurant, “as so many immigrant families did,” says Ureneck, who has been poring through archival materials in the Newark library and visiting various places that were important gathering points for the Greek community.
His is a story of how families adapt in a new culture, he says, but it centers on “the stories of women inside those families. The stereotypical immigration story is one of men, bootstrapping their way to success. But there is a high price to be paid as a family negotiates a new culture, and very often that price is paid by women.”
“Village life in Greece had benefits and drawbacks for women,” Ureneck continues. “They were most definitely subordinated, in a patriarchal society, but at the same time they had certain guarantees of stability, including economic stability. In America, they gained standing, but they lost certain protections and guarantees. It’s that balance that I’m interested in.”
Focusing on his mother, who came of age in the 1930s, Ureneck wants to explore the point of transition, common to all immigrant families, where old cultural mores are dropped and new ones adopted.
“My mother lived a small life,” he says. “She was not an important person, in a historical sense. But her experience was a common experience for immigrant and first-generation women, and I wanted to tell that story. It’s a story that needs to be told.”