Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid Pro Quo? by Gonda Van Steen (review)

Reviewed by: Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid Pro Quo? by Gonda Van Steen Kelly Condit-Shrestha (bio) Rev. of Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid Pro Quo? GONDA VAN STEEN U of Michigan P, 2019. 350 pp. 18 illustrations, 1 table. $94.95 (cloth) $39.95 (paper) ISBN: 9780472131587 In this rigorous historical undertaking, Gonda Van Steen endeavors to insert, elevate, and center postwar US-Greek international adoption history into the now robust field of American adoption studies. This framing rests on the book's assertion that the overseas migration of more than three thousand Greek children into American families during the early Cold War period "provided the blueprint for the first large-scale international adoptions, well before these became a mass phenomenon typically associated with Asian children" (book cover). In line with the author's bold claim, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece is ambitiously structured to serve as an intervention in transnational adoption history, expand the optic of what is Greek national history, and elevate family narratives and adoptee perspectives within these larger frameworks. Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece is theoretically and methodologically sophisticated. Drawing from Greek and English language sources, Van Steen's history, written from a Greek national perspective, takes shape through multidisciplinary, historically grounded readings across an extensive spread of archival and lived experiences, including personal interviews and communications; institutional, family, and legal records; newspaper, alternate media, and artistic representations—in the aftermath of World War II, subsequent Greek Civil War, and as expressed through contemporary legacy. Interweaving the aforementioned source material, the monograph is organized across three parts. In Part 1, "The Past That Has Not Passed: Memories from Another Greece," Van Steen utilizes the tragic story of the Argyriadis family to grapple with the politics of Greek nationalist postmemory, the violence of the state's legal deployments to create family separations, and the active institutional participation of Metera and PIKPA (Patriotic Institution for Social Welfare and Awareness) to induce adoption trauma. Part 2, [End Page 129] "Nation of Orphans, Orphaned Nation," expands the book's narrative beyond Greece's early "political" adoptions (2) to illuminate how Cold War "pull factors" and transnational stakeholders—American prospective adoptive parents, private lawyers, and the competing interests of such institutions as Ahepa (Order of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association) and the ISS (International Social Service)—transformed the practice beyond the scope of PIKPA and Metera. Part 3, "Insights from Greek Adoption Cases: There Is Power in Knowing Your Story," explicitly elevates the personal stories, testimonies, and experiences of Greek-born adoptees, themselves—which in turn elevates fraud and dishonesty as central bases through which US-Greek adoption functioned. In reading the monograph, as Van Steen notes, "All three parts of this book can be read in sequence but also separately" (10). She offers the reader guidance and direction: advising, for example, "[Those] with knowledge of twentieth-century Greek history and adoptees themselves may want to postpone reading part 1 and proceed immediately to part 2" (10). The author's map of content speaks to the book's ambition. As an historian, I cannot help but be impressed by the work, depth, and research that Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece encapsulates. These author notes to the reader, however, also speak to the book's challenges. The narratives and contributions of the monograph are not naturally interwoven, and the denseness of prose at different moments in the book can make these narratives difficult to find or follow. Thus, there are incredible gems to be found in Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece, such as Van Steen's illumination of Greece as having "unequivocally, the highest annual per capita adoption ratio from 1948 through 1962" (81), the important role of family chain migration in the country's early adoption period, and the danger of closed-records adoption processes, but these contributions are too often buried within the organizational scheme of the book. In addition, while the study's focus on Greece is long overdue (86), I could not help but reflect on missed opportunities that a more intersectional approach would have provided. For example, rather than historicizing Greece solely as "the clear exception to...