My Father Was Born in Florina

My father was born in Florina, Greece, just after the Second World War and during the Civil War. My grandfather fought on the Albanian front and I heard something about one of his brothers killed in the fighting that came after. In 1950, my grandparents, my father and his older brother left Northern Greece for the safety of a country that hasn’t fought a war on its shores since 1812. Young enough that he didn’t attend school in Greece, my father never learned to read and write in Greek – let alone the second language his father’s family spoke – Macedonian. After the First World War and the events of the Mεγάλη καταστροφή (the ‘Great Catastrophe’ – the population exchange following the Greco-Turkish War), my mother’s grandmother travelled with her sister from a village near Tripoli, in the Peloponnese, through Ellis Island to New York. When her sister died, she went west to Denver, then back east to Chicago, where she married my great-grandfather (also from a village near Tripoli). They left Chicago then moved to Montreal – my grandfather was born there – went back to Chicago, and finally settled in Toronto, where they had two more sons. My mother was raised by her grandmother and learned Greek in the kitchen of a small house on Berkeley Street through which every relative from the Tripoli area seemed to pass. Though the nearby church offered Greek lessons, my mother never learned to read and write in Greek.

There are contradictory stories about my language learning. The first is that my ...