The Missing Man of Mataroa   

From that silence begins a journey that lasted four years, born in quarantine: an attempt to bring back to life two young people long gone, and with them the generations who lived in their shadow—our parents, our grandparents, the unrecognizable faces in faded family photographs, those we never thought to question when there was still time.

Who was this elusive artist, absent from Greek archives, who left no trace of his name at home, who sailed away on the Mataroa but was remembered posthumously in the New York Times? And what became of the nineteen-year-old girl left behind in a village in southern France—did she survive, create, find him again? Can a student of the interwar years be rediscovered in the twenty-first century?

Lives weave together through these pages: strolling beneath the pepper trees of interwar Athens, dancing in Parisian halls on the brink of war, crossing paths with partisans and collaborationist ministers, posing for photographs with Moralis, conversing with Sikelianos, creating murals at Pfizer’s headquarters decades before vaccines released us from confinement. Athens between the wars, Paris of ’39 and ’45, the Occupation, the Albanian front, San Francisco in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s—coincidences, unexpected meetings, borrowed memories, and always the effort to hold on to time, which slips away.