Growing up bilingual.

Growing up bilingual meant growing up with two cultures, two opposing identities. The Greek language was, in the first case, the language of politics, meaning the speeches of my father and grandfather. "Greece to the Greeks," my father cried out in the mid-1960s while, in my grandfather's more apophthegmatic or, in today's parlance, sound-bite Greek, "The King reigns but the people rule."

Greek then was their language and they had a famously firm hold on it. Theirs was the language of the humble men who gathered inside our kitchen during campaigns, of modern Athenians with razor-thin ...