The Present Day Club, of Princeton, New Jersey, moved a lunch talk that was cancelled because of the coronavirus to Zoom and opened it to the public. The Zoom lunch, celebrating the paperback publication of “Greek to Me,”  was well attended, but everyone was muted, so there was no audience reaction. Now I know how Stephen Colbert feels.

I thought of this as the first Ruth B. Mandel Zoom Lecture. Ruth Mandel was the director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. Her field was women in politics. She died, in Princeton, of ovarian cancer, on April 11th. Ruth’s obituary ran in the New York Times. Her story is amazing and moving. I knew her—but not her whole story—through her ex-husband, Barrett Mandel, who was my first college English professor. Her husband, Jeffrey Lucker, teaches history at Princeton High School. Ruth and Barrett’s daughter, Maud Mandel, grew up in Princeton and is now the president of Williams College.

I talked mostly about belong to the genre of the intrepid woman traveler in Greece. These include:

“A Three-Legged Tour in Greece,” by Ethel Smyth, D.B.E., Mus. Doc. (1927, Heinemann)

“Greece by Prejudice,” by Daphne Athas (1962, Lippincott)

“Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece,” by Patricia Storace (1996, Pantheon)

“By One and One,” by Doreen Canaday Spitzer (1984, Phoenix)

I also mentioned two movie stars and how their names appeared in Greek newspapers, according to Daphne Athas: ΡΟΜΠΕΡΤ ΤΕ-Ι-ΛΟΡ and ΙΝΓΡΙΝΤ ΜΠΕΡΓΜΑΝ.*

Thank you to Fern Slom and the Present Day Club for this opportunity to reflect on a genre dear to my heart. Sales of “Greek to Me” will be handled by Princeton’s wonderful independent bookstore, Labyrinth. and though there was no book signing following this virtual event, I would be happy to provide an actual signed bookplate to anyone who asks.

 

*Robert Taylor and Ingrid Bergman