Some

By R.Z. Sheppard

A PLACE FOR US

by Nicholas Gage

Houghton Mifflin; 419 pages; $19.95

The gods continue to smile on Nicholas Gage, a writer who knows how to tell a good story and, even better, has a good story to tell. His 1983 memoir, Eleni, pulled the reader into the pitiless Greek civil war of the late 1940s, when Communists fought to destroy the royalist government. Gage told how the Reds came to his mountain village to round up children for indoctrination in Albania. His mother resisted and smuggled him and three of his sisters to safety. For her defiance, Eleni was tortured, shot, and her body thrown into a ravine.

Gage, a former investigative reporter for the New York Times, spent years researching events that led to his mother's murder. The investigator was indistinguishable from the avenger. He eventually tracked down Eleni's inquisitor and interviewed him at gunpoint. But Gage did not pull the trigger. "There are times when I wake up at night and want to get back on a plane and kill the son of a bitch," Gage said. A Place for Us overlaps that past and goes on to embrace less heroic lifetimes, mainly the author's and that of his father. Yet each life is gallant for its own reasons. Christos Gatzoyiannis passed through Ellis Island first in 1910, and again in 1938. He headed for Worcester, Mass., where he built a steady vegetable-delivery business while his wife remained in the northwestern Greek town of Lia. It was not uncommon for married immigrant men to settle in America before sending for their families, although Gatzoyiannis took much longer than most. He returned periodically to Greece, where he played the rich American and sired four daughters and the author, born Nikola. During one of the visits, the delivery business was sold by an untrustworthy partner. Gatzoyiannis lost his assets and momentum and became a restaurant cook.

In Lia, however, the myth of the New World plutocrat persisted. This was still the impression that Gatzoyiannis gave when he met the boat that carried his motherless children from Piraeus to New York City in 1949. Gage, then nine, recalls his father's "gleaming black oxfords, gray overcoat, and broad fedora -- an island of style in a sea of weeping and embracing refugees." The reunited family boarded a new blue DeSoto for the ride to Worcester. The car turned out to be rented, the old mill town no Athens, and Christos Gatzoyiannis no big shot.

To Nikola, his father's biggest failing was not getting his family to the U.S. in time to save Eleni. The resentment colors Gage's transformation from a greenhorn with an unpronounceable name to an American success story bylined Nicholas Gage. Only when the author has his own family does he come to understand the difference between a mother's love and a father's.

A Place for Us completes an emotional symmetry that began with Eleni. It also offers a look at Greek-American life as textured as any the general reader is likely to encounter. Gage writes with little separation between his intellect and his senses. There is no straining for effect; moments reveal their natural poetry. How, for example, does one know the time to pack up a family picnic and head for home? "When it was too dark to tell red wine from white." When Gage describes the bread tax that early immigrants levied to support their new churches, one can taste the crust. His father's humiliations are palpable. So is his pride when his son receives an award from John F. Kennedy at the White House.

Gage relives his father's American Dream more passionately than his own. The author's exploits are subordinated to the old man's: his struggles to sustain his clan and make sure that his daughters find suitable (meaning Greek) husbands. Gatzoyiannis' death at age 90 provides a classic resolution. Surrounded by his children and grandchildren, he drifts off on old memories. It is a scene that evokes Chekhov and his observation that "any idiot can face a crisis. It is this day-to-day living that wears you out."