Mary Cardaras, editor, Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption. London and New York: Anthem Press. 2023. Pp. xi + 192. 30 illustrations. Paper $35.00.
It is rarely acknowledged that the practice of transnational adoption of children started as a British practice of outplacement of UK-born children to British commonwealth nations (Selman, 16) beginning as early as 1618 (Hoksbergen, 87). Though adoption may have been socially configured very differently during that time, adopted individuals then and those adopted in the more widely recognized contemporary period of transnational adoption practice beginning at the end of World War II have the common experience of being administratively erased and forgotten in the national annals of history within both sending and receiving countries. Early postwar transnational adoption practice in the United States was marked by the involvement of faith and other charitable organizations attempting to expand their missions while taking advantage of lax or nonexistent international adoption policy (Herman, 217). This mission-led work under the banner of American benevolence began to build an American international adoption industry that focused more on supposed child saving than child welfare, creating systems which prioritized child removal and swift adoptive placement over retention of familial or cultural identity for adoptees. It is into this complicated historical, social and cultural landscape that Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption enters.
Author, book editor, journalist, Communications professor and Greek American transnational adoptee, Mary Cardaras, addresses the general lack of information about adoption within her adoptee community of over 4,000 Greek American transnational adoptees by turning to Greek adoptees themselves to record this important history. In addition to editing the volume, Cardaras contributes an introduction, a conclusion, and an autobiographical chapter of her own. She also includes an introductory chapter by a non-adoptee, Greek history and adoption scholar Gonda Van Steen.
The fifteen autobiographical accounts in Voices include adoptees born in Greece and adopted to the United States in the 1950s to the early 1960s. Cardaras has organized a group of authors that represent a diversity of Greek adoption experiences: men, women, gay, straight, adopted into ethnically Greek families or not, those with close and estranged relationships to adoptive parents, those who had searched for birth family and not, those who had found birth family and not. The fifteen adoptee authors write with clarity and honesty in telling sometimes very moving stories of their experiences and feelings about their lives as well as their memories of their American and Greek families. Many write about the profound but often unacknowledged loss they experienced, including family, language, culture, and their own identities and memories of pre-adoption. Some recount experiences of abuse within adoptive families, which are especially difficult for adoptees to square with the dominant narrative that adoptees should be grateful for their adoptions.
Most also write about their search and reunion with their Greek birth family. The majority of these adoptees were able to locate members of their biological families, though it is not clear to me if this is typical of the greater Greek American adoptee population, or if this might be one of the key factors that brings these adoptees into adoptee-centered communities, as is the case in the Korean American adoptee community. Though the life experiences in this volume are specific to these individual adoptee authors and to conditions of their adoptions from postwar Greece, thematic similarities between these authors and transnational adoptees adopted from other countries during later periods in history are striking. I immediately recognized these storytellers’ experiences of erasure, loss, invisibility, and secrecy as well as the tools they have used to recover their histories and connections to Greece, including community building with other adoptees, networking on and offline, DNA testing, and self-education, as universal to the transnational adoptee experience.