Nicholas Gage (1939 ~)

by Winiori

Nicholas Gatzoyiannis, known Nicholas Gage was born in 1939 in a small Greek Village. After the sad lost of his mother during the Greek war, he moved to New York with his sisters to live with his father. He was only 9 years old. He learned to speak English and try to adapt to his new life. He really worked hard and won a scholarship to Boston University. In 1963 he received the Hearst Award from J. F. Kennedy for the best college journalist. In 1964 he earned a master degree from Columbia University.

He worked for associated Press, The Wall Street, and New York Times. He won so many awards including Newspaper Guild’s Page one award and the Sigma Delta Chi prize, the best biography by the National Book Critics Circle, Heinemann Prize for best book in 1984.

In 1948, as civil war ravaged Greece, children were abducted and sent to communist "camps" inside the Iron Curtain. Eleni Gatzoyiannis, forty-one, defied the traditions of her small village and the terror of the communist insurgents (= rebels) to arrange for the escape of her three daughters and her son, Nicola. For that act, she was imprisoned, tortured, and executed in cold blood.

The Greek Miracle, Nicholas Gage, answered Womenist’s questions about his fascinating career and own life.

Q1: It should‘ve been very hard for you to write about your mother assassination. Why you choose this topic for your first novel?

• My book, Eleni, about my mother's life and death is not a novel but a true story. Every name, every date, every incident in it is real. I used literary techniques to describe how my mother suffered and from whom so that the story of her sacrifice to save her children would have a powerful impact, but everything in the book happened in real life, nothing was made up.

• The critics recognized the book for its literary value and its honesty. As The New York Review of Books wrote: "Eleni is one of the rare books in which the power of art recreates the full historical truth."

Q2: As an investigative journalist you wrote first in Wall Street about the relation between Frank Sinatra and Mafia the later at NY times about Joe Colombo. Why specifically you choose the Mafia subjects?• When I was a young investigative reporter, the

Mafia was a powerful force in American life and used illegal and violent mean to achieve its aims. I thought it threatened the democratic fabric of American life and believed the best way to attack it was to expose its crimes and its supporters. So I took it on when others were reluctant but my stories caused such conflict within the New York Mafia families that open warfare erupted among them and everyone could see in the mayhem that followed that the Mafia not only existed but also how evil it was.

Qualities of an investigative reporter http://www.investigative-journalism-africa.info/?page_id=155

• Passion• Curiosity• Courage• Initiative• Logical thinking, organization and self-

discipline• Flexibility• Teamwork and communication skills

Qualities of an investigative reporter http://www.investigative-journalism-africa.info/?page_id=155

• Well-developed reporting skills• Broad general knowledge and good research

skills• Determination and patience• Fairness and strong ethics• Discretion

Q3: A place for us is about your own adjusting story to America as an immigrant. How hard was it for you and for your sisters to come and live with your father that you never seen and try to adjust to a new country?• The odyssey (漫長探索 ) of my family in

America was a difficult one, as it was for all immigrants, that involved many hardships and misadventures but ultimately allowed my four sisters and me to build new lives in our new found land. I was the youngest and was able to take the most advantage of America's fabled opportunities.

I went to the U.S. at nine speaking not a word of English and 14 years later I received an award from President John F. Kennedy at the White House for the best published writing by a college student. Where else could such a thing happen?

That moved the U.S. government to make a direct effort to dismantle the Mafia and to give law enforcement better legal tools with which to do it. My stories helped trigger that response, and while publishing them posed risks for me, I didn't let those dangers stop me because fighting for a more just society always involves risks.

small private questions to know Gage betterQ1: Who was your favorite childhood author and

character? Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn.Q2: What’s your favorite novel by a different author? War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.

Q3: What you are proud of?

My family: my wife, Joan, with whom I've been married for 40 years; my son, Christos, a screenwriter; my daughter Eleni, who got married in October on Corfu and is publishing her first novel next year, and my daughter Marina, a designer living in Los Angeles.

Q4: What’s your secret to your success?

Putting extra effort in everything I do so I perform not only above what others expect of me but also above what I expect of myself.

Q5: What are your hobbies?My hobbies are films, reading, cooking and blackjack.

Q6: Do you have a nickname? Who call you with that name and why is that?My Greek friends call me Niko, my American

friends call me Nick and my wife calls me Nicky when she's feeling especially affectionate.

More Translation Practice

• 她咆哮 (roar)的說：「這裡如果有人想打混的，我建議他或她現在就去加入對面的合唱團 (glee club)，因為在這兒你們將要苦幹實幹！」我很快就被Miss Hurd的魅力深深吸引。她反覆訓練 (drill sb in)我們的文法，指定故事讓我們閱讀和討論，最後教我們如何出版報紙。

• If there’s anybody in this room who doesn’t like to work, I suggest he or she go to the glee club now, because you’re going to work your tails off here!” she roared. I was soon under Miss Hurd’s spell. She drilled us in grammar, assigned stories for us to read and discuss, and eventually taught us how to put out a newspaper.

• Miss Hurd 在 62歲時退休，那時她教了總共41年的書。就算是退休以後，她還是繼續給某些不受教但她發現有潛力的學生「計畫」。這類學生大都來自於問題家庭，然而她會用其獨特 (special brand of)而嚴厲的愛，恩威並濟地對他們循循善誘，直到他們的潛力被激發出來。

• Miss Hurd retired at the age of 62. By then, she had taught for a total of 41years. Even after her retirement, though, she continually made a “project” of some stubborn students in whom she had spied a spark of potential. The students were mainly from the most troubled homes, yet she alternately bullied and charmed them with her own special brand of tough love, until their spark caught fire.

The Teacher Who Changed My Life by Nicholas Gage

The person who set the course of my life in the new land entered as a young war refugee – who, in fact, nearly dragged me on to the path that would bring all the blessings I’ve received in America – was a salty-tongued, no-nonsense schoolteacher named Marjorie Hurd. When I entered her classroom in 1953, I had been to six schools in five years, starting in the Greek village where I was born in 1939.

• The portly, bald, well-dressed man who met me and my sisters seemed a foreign, authoritarian figure. I secretly resented him for not getting the whole family out of Greece early enough to save my mother. Ultimately, I would grow to love him and appreciate how he dealt with becoming a single parent at the age of 56, but at first our relationship was prickly, full of hostility.

• …… I clutched my Greek notebooks from the refugee camp, hoping that my few years of schooling would impress my teachers in this cold, crowded country. They didn’t. When my father led me and my 11-year-old sister to Greendale Elementary School, the grim-faced Yankee principal put the two of us in a class for the mentally retarded. There was no facility in those days for non-English-speaking children.

I was soon under Miss Hurd’s spell. She did indeed teach us to put out a newspaper, skills I honed during my next 25 years as a journalist. Soon I asked the principal to transfer me to her English class as well. There, she drilled us on grammar until I finally began to understand the logic and structure of the English language.

She assigned stories for us to read and discuss; not tales of heroes, like the Greek myths I knew, but stories of underdogs – poor people, even immigrants, who seemed ordinary until a crisis drove them to do something extraordinary. She also introduced us to the literary wealth of Greece – giving me a new perspective on my war-ravaged, impoverished homeland. I began to be proud of my origins.

Fixing me with a stern look, she added, “Nick, I want you to write about what happened to your family in Greece.” I had been trying to put those painful memories behind me and left the assignment until the last moment. Then, on a warm spring afternoon, I sat in my room with a yellow pad and pencil and stared out the window at the buds on the trees. I wrote that the coming of spring always reminded me of the last time I said goodbye to my mother on a green and gold day in 1948.

• I kept writing, one line after another, telling how the Communist guerrillas occupied our village, took our home and food, how my mother started planning our escape when she learned the children were to be sent to reeducation camps behind the Iron Curtain and how, at the last moment, she couldn’t escape with us because the guerrillas sent her with a group of women to thresh wheat in a distant village.

• She promised she would try to get away on her own, she told me to be brave and hung a silver cross around my neck, and then she kissed me. I watched the line of women being led down into the ravine and up the other side, until they disappeared around the bend – my mother a tiny brown figure at the end who stopped for an instant to raise her hand in one last farewell.

• I wrote about our nighttime escape down the mountain, across the minefields and into the lines of the Nationalist soldiers, who sent us to a refugee camp. It was there that we learned of our mother’s execution. I felt very lucky to have come to America, I concluded, but every year, the coming of spring made me feel sad because it reminded me of the last time I saw my mother.

• This is truly the land of opportunity, and I would have enjoyed its bounty even if I hadn’t walked into Miss Hurd’s classroom in 1953. But she was the one who directed my grief and pain into writing, and if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have become an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent, recorded the story of my mother’s life and death in Eleni and now my father’s story in A Place for Us, which is also a testament to the country that took us in.

She was the catalyst that sent me into journalism and indirectly caused all the good things that came after. But Miss Hurd would probably deny this emphatically.

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty

• The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) is a 1987 agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union. Signed in Washington, D.C. by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev on December 8, 1987, it was ratified by the United States Senate on May 27, 1988 and came into force on June 1 of that year. The treaty is formally titled The Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles.

• Gorbachev, who contributed a lot to the end of the Cold War, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

• 2 Lady Gaga, whose talents have been widely praised, always wears odd but creative clothes.

• 3 Basketball, which is very popular among teenagers, was invented by James Naismith in 1891.

• 4 Socrates, who is called the “father of Western philosophy,” was executed at the age of 70.

• 5 Mount Everest, which is about 8,850 meters high, is a mountain that many climbers want to/intend to conquer.

Unit Test 45 ~ 4745. Our English teacher _______________ (patience/patient 擇一 ) with us, so we are soon u her s . 46. __________ (Fix) us ______ a _______ look, she often says, ____________________________________________________47. U her teaching, we have learned to ____________ our thoughts and feelings ________________________.

45. Our English teacher has great patience/be very patient (patience/patient 擇一 ) with us, so we are soon under her spell. 46. Fixing (Fix) us _with_ a _gentle/tender_ look, she often says, “Everyone of you/Each of you can learn English well.” 47. Under her teaching, we have learned to convey/express our thoughts and feelings through/via/by the English written word.