Sofka Zinovieff's Eurydice Street: Analysis

Sofka Zinovieff, whose Russian father met her seventeen-year-old mother on holiday in Greece, grew up in England, and later meets a Greek man in Russia, who she then marries. Spending most of their marriage in Russia and England, in 2001 Zinovieff and her husband moved with their two daughters to a suburb in Athens. In Eurydice Street. A Place in Athens, Zinovieff narrates her family’s first year in Greece. As an anthropologist by trade, Zinovieff has a sharp eye for detail, and writes with humor and disarming clarity as she gives a vivid description of her adopted city. Through the many downfalls of Greek culture, such as the all-pervasive bureaucracy in which she struggles to gain Greek citizenship, she still manages to want nothing …show more content…
In Greece, immigrants’ nationalities are blamed for their inclination to criminality and inability to integrate. Immigrants are de-individualized and ultimately seen as a threat to the Greek way of life. Immigrant acceptance is practically impossible due to the Greek conception of ethnicity, based on common ancestry, cultural traditions, and language. Zinovieff describes this as, “a homogenized, faith-based version of what it meant to be Greek that a Greek Jew or a Greek Catholic (let alone a Greek Muslim) was seen as somehow ‘less Greek’”. Another difficult reality Zinovieff had to face was the corrupt bureaucracy, another theme in the …show more content…
In the book, Zinovieff and her husband go to see a friend Yerasimos, who worked as the right-hand man to the Minister. Yerasimos openly did favors, and believed that when done correctly was “an act of philanthropy and not a matter of corruption”. Zinovieff continued to reinforce the idea of Greece as unreliable and fraudulent, concluding that, “rather than political favoritism and patronage being removed, they were institutionalized. These days you were either ‘one of ours’ or no one at all”. It was then that Zinovieff went from European to Greek. As Zinovieff worked to become a Greek citizen she faced the same difficulties all citizen seekers faced, and that was the public workers. As discussed xenophobia is a huge problem in Greece, and is most present in public offices argued by Zinovieff. In the text she says, “Some of the worst culprits of xenophobia towards both foreign and Greek strangers tend to be the employees in public offices, who put up a barrage of hostility to the interloper who dares interrupt their peace”. Zinovieff soon realizes that the only way to get things done in Greece is to act Greek, which is when she asks Yerasimos to help her get her papers faster. This is a well -written observation of Athenian life, but much more than that, Eurydice Street is more than just a book, but it is a story about finding your home. Although Zinovieff had her difficulties adjusting, she was ultimately