THE ANATOLIAN

In his powerful new novel, Elia Kazan takes up the life of the young Greek from Anatolia whose early years he chronicled in his first and highly acclaimed novel, America America, giving us the story of a man caught between two worlds and fighting to make a place for himself within them.

We enter the story of 1909. Stavros Topouzoglou—Joe Arness to his American friends—is meeting the freighter that has brought his family to America. This day marks the culmination of a lifetime of responsibility. Steeled by his harsh life, proud and resourceful, he has nonetheless been governed by the age-old rules of filial duty: putting aside his own needs and desires, he obediently took on the fulfillment of his father’s dream of safety and salvation for their family. For a decade he has worked to bring his family to America—an America that has hypnotized and motivated him with its promise of money and power and privilege. But as the family disembarks there is one person missing: his father is dead. Suddenly, Stavros is caught between two powerful and opposing influences. On one side is his family: seven brothers and sisters and his mother look to him for guidance, strength, and support, drawing him back into the ways and tenets of the “old” country. On the other side, the bright-seeming, golden possibilities of the “new” world of America, possibilities that Stavros has only glimpsed from afar, but that he has determined to attain.

In the story of Stavros, Elia Kazan not only gives us a vividly wrought picture of one man’s struggle to understand his dreams, but he reveals, as well, what it has meant for the immigrant to confront America, and, more importantly, what it has meant for him to confront himself in this seductive, yet often inimical, culture.