Not Even My Name: A True Story by Thea Halo tells the all too common tale of dislocation, genocide, and upheaval in the twentieth century. Halo’s mother was a Pontic Greek – an ethnic Greek person living in Turkey in a village along the Black Sea. These communities probably existed in remote antiquity as Greek trading communities. The form of Greek spoken there had more in common with certain ancient dialects of Greek than modern varieties.
Halo’s mother and her family were caught in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Turkish nationalism, and its narrow definition of who is a Turk. Like the Armenians and other ethnic Christian groups, the Pontic Greeks were ethnically cleansed, murdered, and deported. Halo's mother spends a lifetime rebuilding a new home through extraordinary courage and love.
In the end, mother and daughter find the old Greek village and her mother's homestead, and of course, it is heartbreaking. A people make a land – and what is left when they are gone seems unreal. Something is missing – the soul of the land and a people who will never return.
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