This year my New Year’s resolution is to help my father complete his memoirs and my nephew Costa do a video portrait of both my parents and their memories. They are both in their eighties; my father is 89-years-old and in frail health (but mentally sharp as always) and he began his memoirs shortly after he retired after nearly fifty years of service in education. (He started as a teacher in the mountains of Macedonia in Greece and went on to get a PhD from Columbia and serve as a principal of Greek parochial schools in Montreal, Chicago and New York.)

But his life is more than a service to education: it is the modern odyssey of a whole generation of immigrants who saw their world upended and who suddenly found themselves in the brave new world of America, which they transformed with their work ethic and resilience, and which transformed them in turn.

My father was the first in his family to get more than an elementary school education. He went on to become a teacher in Greece (to poor boys in the mountain villages of Chios and Macedonia), got stranded during the start of World War II and briefly interned in a camp, took a kaiki back home and nearly drowned on the journey, was drafted into the Greek army as an officer on the nationalist side and fought five years on the front in the mountains, returned to a war-shattered Greece and could not see himself going back to the mountains to teach farm boys and instead applied for a scholarship of foreign study. He chose New York and Columbia University because he had family here, and he wrote his doctoral thesis with a Greek-English dictionary by his side (probably the sainted Divry) on a borrowed table with a gimpy leg in a flat in Brooklyn (while my mother worked at a nearby sweatshop to support the family) and on a portable typewriter with sticky keys he had to unstick by hand every few words.

But he went on to graduate Columbia with honors, to lead and establish Greek parochial schools in Canada and the U.S., and to be an example to his family. And my mother was an equal exemplar: she stood beside him through all the vicissitudes of his career, had a sharp practical mind (inherited from the Neamonites side of the family—her father was the richest merchant in northern Chios during Katohi) and was a fierce protector and defender of her family. Thia Popi has been a staunch aunt to all her numerous nephews and nieces throughout our extended family and a bedrock to her children and grandchildren.

My New Year’s resolution is something old: to honor the life and service of people like my parents, who were storm-tossed by the revolutionary changes in their world, but who never lost their basic decency and sense of honor and their firm belief in their faith and family, and who will forever be an example of pioneer courage and fortitude to all the subsequent generations of their family.

Dimitri C. Michalakis