Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? - Softcover

Gonda Van Steen (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472038818 ISBN 13: 9780472038817

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2021

Synopsis

This book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek children in the United States, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the global Cold War. Greek-to-American adoptions and, regrettably, also their transactions and transgressions, provided the blueprint for the first large-scale international adoptions, well before these became a mass phenomenon typically associated with Asian children. The story of these Greek postwar and Cold War adoptions, whose procedures ranged from legal to highly irregular, has never been told or analyzed before. Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece answers the important questions: How did these adoptions from Greece happen? Was there any money involved? Humanitarian rescue or kid pro quo? Or both? With sympathy and perseverance, Gonda Van Steen has filled a decades-long gap in our understanding, and provided essential information to the hundreds of adoptees and their descendants whose lives are still affected today.

About this title

About the Author

Gonda Van Steen is Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, and Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472038818
• ISBN 13: 9780472038817
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 350