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The Materialities of “Adop‑thing”: Material and Other “Witnesses” of Child Adoption from Greece to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s

Les matérialités de l’“adop‑thing” : matériels et autres « témoins » de l’adoption d’enfants de Grèce aux États‑Unis dans les années 1950 et 1960
Gonda Van Steen
p. 217-242

Résumés

Depuis 2013, j’étudie les adoptions « historiques » d’enfants nés en Grèce mais envoyés en adoption aux États‑Unis. Ces adoptions ont concerné quelque 4 000 enfants nés en Grèce et ont eu lieu entre 1950 et 1975, une époque où les mineurs ne laissaient pratiquement aucune source derrière eux. Je soutiens que ces adoptions se sont révélées tout sauf « historiques » pour les personnes qui les ont vécues. L’un des aspects les plus oubliés de l’histoire de l’adoption oubliée a été la matérialité de la migration forcée des adoptions à l’étranger depuis la Grèce. Cet article se concentre sur cette matérialité, avec de nombreuses références à l’analyse historique menée sur les adoptions grecques‑américaines depuis 2013. Il présente les différentes couches ambiguës des matérialités de l’“adop‑thing”, de la marchandisation des adoptés, de leurs voyages, et leurs images. Il met en lumière une catégorie de personnes déplacées qui n’a reçu que récemment une attention particulière, alors que le débat sur l’adoption internationale a gagné en popularité à l’échelle mondiale.

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I thank the many Greek‑born adoptees who, over the course of a dozen years now, have engaged in meaningful dialogues with me. I appreciate that they let me use their names, initials, data and pictures, as per their personal preferences. I have kept confidential what they have indicated is not (yet) for publication. I have also secured ethical clearance from my home university to use the protocols on which this research is based. I am further obliged to Rahul Markovits and the anonymous reviewers who made incisive comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article.

Slim pickings: Scant and “raw” Sources, mixed methods

Joanne arrived in the United States with the baby blanket that accompanied her through the months spent at the Municipal Orphanage of Athens. Did a birth parent leave it with her when he or she left her on a bench near the orphanage building, when she was nine years old? Joanne has contacted the orphanage and the company that manufactured the blanket but has yet to hear back…

  • 1 Tobias Hübinette, for instance, embodies the Korean adoptee experience and has also devoted his sch (...)

1The child adoptions from Greece form perhaps the most unknown chapter of a post‑Second World War history of refugees and exilees who sought greener pastures in the United States – except that the decision to migrate was not a decision that the children made for themselves. Their fates in this one‑way adoption movement were decided upon, often in arbitrary ways. Postwar adoption movements constitute (underrecognised) forms of migration movements in which children left poorer countries behind to join wealthier countries and communities abroad, in what was typically a unilateral direction. The field of critical adoption studies has, for the past two and a half decades, denounced these inequitable, even neocolonial flows of minors, and several of the pioneering scholars and critics have been intercountry adoptees themselves.1 This article follows the material objects that the children adopted from Greece took with them to their new destinations; it discusses the gifts that they received before, during and after their transatlantic trip; and it ponders to what extent the adoptees themselves and/or their adoptions were presented as “gifts” in an adoption movement that became increasingly commercialised.

  • 2 M.W., testimony of 29 September 2024.
  • 3 I revisit the topic of using mixed empirical methods below, in the context of the play production o (...)

2I argue that the Greek children’s adopted life is comprised not only of affect and narrative or analysis, but also of a fine‑grained, yet unrecognised materiality. Material objects become potent conduits to the past and to memory. Some become the locus of a memory pact between the adoptees and their past: A (secret) bond based on memory makes the adoptees hold on to the past while new living conditions compel them to forget. M.W. remembers having to invest much in merely surviving in the present: “I had my stuffed black lamb, handmade and given to me by my Uncle George in Patras who told me to never forget who I am. Georgie the black lamb sits on my shelf reminding me that I was loved and that I am Greek.”2 Memories, objects and new lives are not necessarily negatively charged, but the uphill battle of adapting, searching and not finding —and not being assisted in this quest—most certainly is. Also, materialities do not tell the full story, and neither do the empirically collected testimonials, interviews and newspaper features presented in this article. Some people have yet to discover that they were adopted (because their adoptive families have kept this information from them), but many have reached out as part of their relentless quest for documentation and connection. They constitute, inevitably, a self‑selective group whose experiences are varied: Given how many variables nuance children’s upbringing (socio‑economic status, education, religion, location, family cohesion and so on), their experiences are, admittedly, far from universal but are still worth exploring.3

3Material objects trace the adoptees’ arrival in the United States, and they grant researchers the opportunity to understand how unilateral relations and dependencies transported and transformed children, as they built new lives in different social and political contexts. They constitute the materialities of family friction, of the break of relinquishment, of orphanage or institutional life, of overseas adoption, of reconstructing the history of one’s early childhood from the scant sources. Sources may be scarce for various reasons: Many adoption files were destroyed; many others are, to this day, heavily protected by personal data protection rules and are kept even from the data subjects—which is an overzealous interpretation of such rules. The varied materialities of the post-Second World War “humanitarian” transfer of “orphans” from poor countries to “rich America” cover a wide range of items and connotations and, when memories or research paths fail, they connect the emotional dots that have long marked the lopsided power dynamics.

  • 4 Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra (eds), Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displace (...)
  • 5 Vera Hajtó, Milk Sauce and Paprika: Migration, Childhood and Memories of the Interwar Belgian‑Hunga (...)
  • 6 Vera Hajtó, “‘The Past Must Be Given a Place’: Migration, Intergenerational Transfer, and Cultural (...)
  • 7 Mary Cardaras (ed.), Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War Internationa (...)

4As Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra have shown, a shift towards the material aspects of conflict and displacement can shed light on different degrees of politicisation and unmask the connections between politics and material culture.4 Vera Hajtó has embedded interactions between memory and material culture in her research on Hungarian child migrants of the 1920s. Her work, too, urges the reader to study material traces when archival sources are scarce.5 Hajtó further discovered the power of play production in the charged context of geographies of childhood migration and materiality.6 The most recent source of life‑writing by Greek‑born adoptees, from which I have drawn, has been the collective volume edited by Mary Cardaras (herself a Greek‑born adoptee), Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption.7 I return below to the potential of theatre play and life‑writing projects as platforms for generating primary source materials by way of empirical mixed methods. In the absence of Greek records or access thereto, the current life‑writing done by the adoptees themselves may become a more inclusive material archive of the Greek adoption history, an open archive that no longer shuts out their voices and emotions. When writing and analysis outgrow the usual vessels, material objects and direct personal reflections can still tell the story.

5The Greek adoptees’ material objects come with the layered meanings of fragile and even ambiguous possessions, signifying the sense of displacement, the disruption of the locatedness of one’s body and memories. An affective reinvestment in the material possessions to which they barely managed to hold on is a common trait among adoptees. Such objects have offered physical or symbolic companionship for years and now provide their own kind of authoritative witness testimony. The Greek Cold War child placements may lack satisfactory material archives, but the adoptees themselves may reclaim the immaterial archive of their emotions, on which they have bestowed materiality over time. Any perceived silence of the material archive, in cases in which not even basic adoption paperwork exists, does not have to entail the silencing of the depository or the archive of feelings. Such materialities of adoption refuse to remain voiceless or unaware.

6The various kinds of materiality and their links to emotionally charged memories are analytically significant if we want to add further nuance to the experiences of children adopted across borders. Also, approaching materialities through the lens of the adopted life inevitably raises the question of sources and methods. How can historians best retrace the material life of individuals and groups in motion, and especially of youngsters, given that their transnational trajectories left only scant traces? What can the study of objects bring to the history and understanding of the displaced, of the child‑migrants who are adoptees? Children do not usually leave conventional written sources behind. But the objects they cared for and saved become sources in their own right: These tend to be of a material nature or visual nature and to convey mnemonic and/or psychological meanings. Therefore, we have every reason to include these objects and to acknowledge them as significant sources, even if that process of inclusion does not follow linear or scripted trajectories and if many mentions of objects were only made casually.

  • 8 See Gonda Van Steen, “Of Foundlings and ‘Lostlings’: When the Scopas Scandal Rocked the Unstable Fo (...)
  • 9 For a detailed analysis of these rapid developments, with appropriate comparative data, see Gonda V (...)

7With its focus on Greek‑born adoptees, this article shifts the attention away from the well‑studied Northern European, Central and South American and Southeast Asian regions. International adoption took on different forms and meanings in different geographical contexts, despite large areas of overlap, especially when commercialisation and commodification reared their head. Many postwar adoption movements have indeed been tainted by the exchange of large sums of money. The price of a Greek adoption in 1955 was, on average, about $500, but this fee shot up to $3,000 by the end of the decade, with profits going to the intermediaries, mostly lawyers.8 Greece was among the first countries to dispatch children overseas, with a mass movement that started in 1950 but that included youngsters who were born in the early 1940s and some even in the late 1930s. The Greek adoptees, who approach or have surpassed the age of seventy, still struggle with many questions and emotions, which outsiders might find hard to grasp. That fraught —and, for many, unresolved—past makes Greece’s intercountry adoption history the oldest and perhaps the most complicated or opaque history, even though it was not numerically the largest movement. What are the links between the Greek adoption history and concurrent or subsequent histories? A few years prior to the mass arrivals of Korean adoptees (1953 and on), Greece helped the United States conceive of adoption as the newest American import —even as the newest postwar fashion. Greek intermediaries devised the blueprint of a postwar phenomenon, transnational adoption, which was meant to be temporary but is still with us today. Not surprisingly, new market mechanisms were put in place, new resources were developed, deep pockets were identified. Once older children and true orphans had found families in the United States, the States used its political clout and capitalist market power to obtain younger and younger children for adoption—and Greek children were “white”. The shift from children in need of a family to families in need of children was rapid and unexpected.9

  • 10 Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, New York, B (...)
  • 11 Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child…, op. cit., p. 204‑205. She speaks of the “sentimen (...)
  • 12 See Rachel R. Winslow, The Best Possible Immigrants: International Adoption and the American Family(...)

8The confounding of material and psychological needs as dominant motivators of postwar intercountry adoption, and the pitfalls thereof, merits further reflection. In her seminal 1985 book, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, Viviana Zelizer has shown up the shifting social identities —and economic values—associated with young children over recent centuries.10 She has drawn crucial attention to the fact that children own a social or communal identity beyond political and legal identities, which shows signs of intensifying, not abating, during and after an intercountry adoption process. Significantly, Zelizer remarked on the long‑standing efforts (by 1985) to define the exchange of money as a symbolic and elective gift rather than as a fee or price for obtaining a child; nonetheless, prospective parents, who are typically described as “desperate” to have a baby, pay such fees and offer donations.11 This money‑oriented focus bears on the second part of this article, in which I interrogate the materialities and commodifying dimensions of intercountry adoption and question how adoptees’ lived experiences may be framed in terms of commodification (for example, channelled through the themes of gift‑giving, gift‑receiving, and expected gratitude, but also through the perception of children as “export goods”). Building on Zelizer’s insightful analysis, new and additional attention needs to be paid to the agency of children themselves—now ageing adults—as they seek to constitute their social identities, ponder the material sides of their adoption process, and hold on to the very objects that make that scrutiny possible. Also, the field of critical adoption studies has more work to do on the socio‑economic dynamics and the materialities of sending countries, not just those of the consumerist receiving countries. Rachel R. Winslow places intercountry adoptions in the context of the rising postwar consumer culture of the West, complete with its high expectations and trappings (such as options to pay adoption fees in instalments). She also notes the semi‑professionalisation of adoption services, which presented adoption as a “service” to prospective adoptive parents as “consumers”.12 The first generations of intercountry adoption agents and social workers most certainly bought into the idea of providing adoption‑related “service” to financially secure, white Western couples.

  • 13 Gonda Van Steen, Adoptions Reckonings: For Three Refrigerators and a Washing Machine, London/New Yo (...)

9My own work has taken deliberate steps in the direction of work on the ground in Greece and, with the constant input of Greek‑born adoptees, may be called more practice‑based research. The revelations on‑site are not positive, for far too many low‑bar adoptions took place that leave their subjects to make sense of them all. This burden weighs on adoptees even if they realise all too well that material and educational conditions have been better in the country of destination. My ongoing research has revealed easy compliance as well as resistance on the American as well as on the Greek side. Laws were tested, circumvented and ultimately proved porous over the course of the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s. My 2019 book has rendered the origins and trajectories of Greek adoption visible and has placed them within the realities of the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) and the Cold War, both marked by fierce anticommunism that did little to protect vulnerable young mothers and children. The majority of the children sent from Greece to the United States were not war orphans but “illegitimate” children of struggling young women in a country in which economic benefits (mostly derived from American aid) were still unevenly spread and social taboos rested heavily on unwed motherhood. My 2024 play, in the form of collective “testimony theatre”, has probed the long‑term repercussions of adoption for those who lived it. Titled For Three Refrigerators and a Washing Machine, the play voiced a call to action as well. It featured various forms or genres of life‑writing that are all modes of writing, or otherwise capturing, Greek adoptee life, and they include the materiality of official documents, objects and images while also pondering the extent of the postwar consumerist culture (starting with the provocative title and continuing with tokens of abandonment made visible on stage).13 My aim was to find these forms, foreground them, solicit interpretations of them and analyse them, not only for their truth value, but also as modes of expression that speak searchingly to the embellished picture of the adoption flow from “poor” Greece to “prosperous” and “generous” America.

10Working with the adoptees on the collective playscript prepared me for further reflection on the materiality that underpins international adoption. We compiled the collective script from “raw material” that I slightly edited for theatrical expression. I strongly felt that, as raw material in the act of raw writing, the composition would do greater justice to the adoptees’ still raw emotions, about which, it turns out, female adoptees were more ready to speak or write. In terms of raw writing with raw material, the play, without being overtaken or overwritten by the editorial voice, presented many a “text” in its unadorned and unmediated form, as if it were the unedited historic footage that serves as the ideal starting point to the documentary filmmaker seeking authenticity. The adoptees’ writing incorporated the edgy and fragmented pieces of their identity and the nonlinear paths of their roots searches. It reflected (and inflected) the process of their identity construction by way of raw materials: texts, objects, memories. This script’s composition, too, integrated raw emotional threads, interweaving pain, frustration, anguish and the sense of grief and loss caused by being transplanted abroad.

  • 14 Grace Newton, “The Trauma and Healing of Consciousness,” Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 130‑(2‑Explori (...)
  • 15 “[D]reigt er, evenals er een wereldgrondstoffen- en arbeidsmarkt bestaat, een wereldwijde kindermar (...)

11In light of the theme of commodification that underpins the second part of this article, the undiluted writing that the playscript deliberately preserves has to remind readers and viewers of adoptee management as if it were the management of the raw material resources of the country of origin. It strikes home the adoptee pool’s state of becoming the nation’s raw material for export, against the backdrop of asymmetrical postwar power relations. The raw Greek material then becomes repurposed into American manufactured products, embodying an extractive relationship of a (neo)colonial kind. As adoptable “goods”, children were moved to a supposedly superior receiving country or community, but the colonising —and dehumanising—nature of these transfers has not yet been fully acknowledged.14 The crude materiality of these exports is all the more striking as they have been discussed in the watered‑down terms of (supposedly harmless) fluidity: Adoptees and other exilees come in “flows”, “waves”, “outpourings”. “Are we about to see a worldwide children’s market develop, much like a world market in raw materials and labour forces”, asked a 1984 Dutch police report with some alarm, but with little sense of how widespread the phenomenon had already become and how big it had yet to grow.15 Faced with a rapidly globalising stork market that has been trading in children as commodities, not even trained investigators or experts otherwise realised just how precarious the futures were—the futures of the child adoptees. During the past many years of researching the Greek adoption history, I have come to view the Greek phenomenon through the eyes of people who still live this history every single day. With them, I consider the materiality of displacement to be critically important. It is my reason to revisit the seemingly trivial and rare “artifacts” and “archaeology” of Greek adop‑thing.

Holding on for dear life: Clinging to the inanimate to survive

  • 16 Petros, email communication, 1 December 2021.

12One expects historic family photographs to carry a lot of weight for the adopted persons, as they do, but pictures from Greece in the 1950s are surprisingly rare. Material objects and associated bonds reach further, and they carry their own, less obvious truths. Petros Koutoulas clings to the beat‑up shoes in which he travelled from the Patras Orphanage to the West Coast of the United States. “I’ve always wondered how old those shoes were before I got them. How many little boys had those shoes on their little feet before my feet went inside of them? You were right when you said those shoes represent pain and potential.”16 Another treasure from the first difficult years is the monkey doll, Dimitris, who became Petros’ best friend and was “the only one who understood Greek”. The monkey has the features of a darker‑skinned baby and shows the signs of heavy wear and tear. For Petros, no fancy toys or electronic gadgets have ever taken its place. After all, the lifeless monkey alludes to the very life that once animated its material existence. Dimitris was and remains a coping mechanism, at times of a reversed experience, when Petros thought he drew strength from Dimitris and not yet from his inner self. Petros’ shoes and monkey bear heavy bodily traces and even heavier memories. For the young boy and even for today’s seventy year old, they hold special meaning as affective as well as material loci that embody relationships, with others who have shown sympathy as well as with the evolving self. They render Petros less impersonal, less untethered, less interchangeable; they assert the material agency of his belonging. For being his belongings that share his past, they re‑humanise him.

Figure 1: Maria’s shoes from the Patras Orphanage

Figure 1: Maria’s shoes from the Patras Orphanage

Photo credit: Maria Heckinger. Used with permission.

  • 17 Maria Heckinger, Beyond the Third Door: Based on a True Story, Vancouver, [Pennsauken], [BookBaby], (...)

13What have the other Greek adoptees kept? Maria still has the sandals in which she came over (fig. 1). The clothes that the adoptees wore when they embarked on their transatlantic journeys were, for the first time ever, their very own. Many adoptive parents kept them, and some adoptees continue to preserve them. New clothes and new shoes would, however, soon add to the child’s rapid introduction to American postwar consumer culture. Brand new shoes have been especially important to Greek‑born adoptees. They open a web of associations that has been overlooked: Many adjustment reports or letters speak of the child’s ecstatic joy at receiving a new pair of shoes, or boots, or even cowboy boots. The shoe fetish of some adoptees —which is indeed what they would call it—seems to transport them back to a time of deeply felt emotions over having to assert identity, for having to struggle to call a pair of shoes their own. Maria tells the story of screaming and yelling and refusing to go to sleep unless the various pairs of new shoes that she had received on arrival in California would remain visible in her bedroom—outside, not inside the closet! Her American parents soon learned the Greek word for “shoe”, by necessity.17 Sheer materiality has long been at work in the adoptees’ role in the steady construction, in the careful manufacturing of the new family. The new shoes had to lead the way.

14Another Greek girl has kept all the trinkets that were handed to her on the airplane—a small consolation given the gruelling ride that created mental as well as geographical distance. These trinkets belong to the materiality of travelling and displacement, signalling once more that the experience of adoption is embedded in material and distancing processes. The material “worthlessness” and yet long‑held “preciousness” of such trinkets is striking. The tiny objects link, emotionally and otherwise, to the pre‑adoption past, but they are also the kind of objects that remind the adoptees that their past and present were once not severed, but closely connected. They also signal that those objects are essential to the forensics, the archaeological or archival digging, to which the adoptees commit in their searches. They signal that the roots search, the journey in reverse, is another material process.

  • 18 Andrew Mossin, A Son from the Mountains: A Memoir, New York, Spuyten Duyvil, 2021.

15Andrew Mossin worked with the handwriting of his first mother, Angeliki, and his Greek travel passport to create a palimpsest look for the book cover of his personal memoir, titled A Son from the Mountains.18 The cover image (fig. 2) brilliantly captures the book’s layered memory work and the materiality of the letters and documents that underpin it: Official language overrides personal language; administratese reifies objectification. Memory and materiality reinforce each other: Memory is, after all, located, produced and reproduced in the material as well as the immaterial sphere of the adopted life.

Figure 2: The cover of Andrew Mossin’s book

Figure 2: The cover of Andrew Mossin’s book

Photo credit: Spuyten Duyvil. Used with permission.

16Some materialities live on in the adoptees’ remembrances of the Greek orphanage where they spent time. The memory of the building and its immediate surroundings may be intensified by the recall of the key encounter that took the child away from there. Diana shared in an email of 10 August 2016:

I had not seen your email with the picture of the orphanage before last night and I almost fainted. I was there. I remember I was all dressed up. I was outside. I had a stick which I was running along the rungs of the wrought iron fence. A black car pulled up. The gates opened and my [adoptive] father got out of the car. I went up to him and, in professorial Greek, I asked him if he was my daddy. He said yes. I responded very firmly, “where have you been? I have been waiting for you for a very long time.” My father started to cry.

  • 19 Antonia, testimony of 22 April 2020.

17Antonia recalls joy when playing with the flat stones right by the sea. She has an image of a blond man dropping her off at the orphanage—her birth father. She has a memory of an older brother and of a pink sweater, too. Antonia has been Jewish since the age of three, but she recalls how once she could say her Greek Orthodox prayers in Greek. She remembers how she used to fold her orphanage clothes and put her shoes by the end of her bed every night. Antonia also remembers a short man in a green uniform, bloodshed, and an open coffin, which left her with an aversion for funeral rituals to this day. She was not even three at the time and, in her search up until 2020, nearly all of these components have proved to be authentic and true.19 She was not the only Greek adoptee who was forced to live life as a test subject of the accuracy of early childhood memories, who was compelled to let go of her pre‑adoption life as a belonging. Her tenacity and that of others is cogent proof that the adoptees’ present and future cannot be extricated from their past.

18Adoptees tend to study and dissect the materialities of their life in Greece, the logistics of their mobility, and their new “start” in the United States: the data on the first overseas flights, their names on the passenger lists and among the US naturalisation records, the petitions made by their adoptive parents to secure US citizenship for them. They also invoke the hypothetical materialities that must reconstruct the birth family, the home in Greece, life in a sunny country. They resort to these to make the unknown tangible, palpable, once they found themselves in new physical contexts in which they had little to hold on to. R. was abandoned in more than one way, by the Greek welfare system, by the Texas state system, by her second as well as by her first family. Always hopeful, she muses:

  • 20 R., email communication, 16 January 2019.

If I ever meet my mom, I hope that it will be in a very quiet setting […] I’m sending you this picture that I bought in Texas, at the Dollar Store. I thought you might like to see it. The two people in the background made me think of my parents in Greece and how you can’t see their faces clearly, so you don’t know who they are. I have always wondered if my mother likes to sweep, so the broom leaning on the door reminds me of that. The reason I wonder if she likes to sweep is because I have loved to sweep since I was a little girl. And there is the mystery empty chair, perhaps waiting for me…20

19Material objects, remembered or newly imagined, may well be the adoptees’ best friends. In a public Facebook post of 30 November 2018, Marie Witte, a Greek adoptee turned portrait and landscape painter, reflects on one of her works:

I don’t remember the title I gave this painting. I painted it in the mid to late 70s. I believe it was sold through Swanson Gallery in Sausalito. I chose my composition in a way mysterious to me. At that time I had only a few memories of my childhood in the orphanage in Patras, Greece. These memories lived on the tip of the iceberg encasing a volcanic core of repressed knowledge. From old photographs that lit a spark of alignment I pieced together my past, still hidden from my conscious mind. The subject is obvious, a little girl about to eat, in a dim interior. The content is a message from my subconscious. The child who could be me looks at us with a question. When will the world see the reality of the evil inflicted by selfish people upon the most innocent of humanity? So many children abandoned and starving, crying in the volcano deep in my gut. I felt the pathos of the scene as I painted it, but I didn’t know the why of it until recently.

20Witte’s painting became the (subconscious) vehicle of the affect that she carried with her from the Patras Orphanage. In her art, Patras has become “real” and material as a time and a place, as the connecting site that links specific people to their early years, intertwining them in a web of past practices and associations. However, most materialities that characterised the adoptees’ Greek childhood or the overseas transfer met different, almost “surreal” sets of materialities that the children, newly arriving in the States, had yet to absorb. Sheer American material abundance was then contrasted with the presumed lack of basic goods in “poor” Greece, as in this excerpt from the Salina Journal (Kansas) of 24 December 1957:

The new problem [of a Greek boy wanting “no part of his new parents when they raced to meet him”] was completely solved when the youth entered the […] car. He joyfully bounced on its seats, pushed all the buttons he could find and made himself at home.

[His] favorite pastime is eating. He shovels food in with both hands, like any youngster who has been kicked around orphanages […] most of his life.

21An unidentified anonymous newspaper clipping from early December 1958, titled “Little Girl Happy in ‘New World’”, reports, taking pleasure in a child’s unfamiliarity with a world of perceived abundance: “Simple things like faucets with hot and cold running water, refrigerators, baths inside the house and a personal face cloth and towel make up the new world for six‑year‑old [name] of Flushing.” Contemporary accounts hasten to read the adopted child’s acceptance of material goods as a sign of rapid and unproblematic assimilation. Similarly, they interpret the youngster’s new food choices and preferences as markers of a growing individuality. Few notice that this exposure is about comfort goods and comfort foods, which, if anything, flatten individual tastes.

  • 21 SunAh M. Laybourn, Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants, New York, New York Univers (...)
  • 22 Dorothy Tilden Spoerl, ‘“It Isn’t My Real Name,’” National Parent‑Teacher, vol. 42, no. 9, May 1948 (...)

22The foreign adoptees made their first acquaintance with the American material world and with the “choices” that it promised. In the postwar consumerist society, these material advantages engendered the expectation of gratitude on the part of the “lucky” child, for being the “happily chosen one” from among many. Only this “special” child, so the cliché went, was worthy of being granted one of the prized visas for admission to the United States and was allowed to partake in American culture and prosperity. But in the mindset of value‑for‑money and “adoptee shopping”, “chosen” and “selected” might also come to mean “not chosen”, “deselected”, or “replaced”—“desirable yet discardable”, in the potent expression of SunAh M. Laybourn.21 Or it might mean being asked to be the “replacement” child and, therefore, become the “second choice” to the adopters’ own, real or imaginary offspring. And does the fiction of being “chosen” not —painfully—reinforce that the birth parents chose not to keep the child, that “chosen” in one family implies being “unwanted” in another? In fact, “the chosen” is the label that adoptive parents, subconsciously perhaps, have been applying to themselves: They consider themselves to be the chosen ones; they feel selected from among their domestic peers and also from among the child’s original environment to raise the child that has been entered into their care. Historically, some adoptions have not at all been about a child’s security but about the adoptive parents’ insecurity. “As soon as he was old enough to listen to stories we read him The Chosen Baby,” brags child psychologist Dorothy Tilden Spoerl in the National Parent-Teacher Magazine of May 1948.22 Her article, meant to guide prospective American parents on the path to adoption, goes on to say:

  • 23 D.T. Spoerl’s article in typescript, with reference to its source, was shared with the adoptive par (...)

It was honest to say, too, that she [the birth mother] didn’t have a home she could bring him up in. But at what age shall I bring in the whole truth of desertion, or inadequacy, or, as is most often the case, illegitimacy? […] I want to be positive, when I tell him, that I have no censure for the mistakes that someone else made.23

23Nefariously aligned with the mindset of choice and of moral and cultural superiority are the rhetorical and enduring questions posed to the adoptee of “would you rather …?” And, “Where would you be if you hadn’t been adopted?” Such lines disregard the adoptees’ sense of loss and the gamut of their personal emotions. But worst of all are the “gutter” comments, familiar to those adoptees who have had their behaviour scolded by irate “saviours”: “You could have been living on the streets.” Maria Heckinger shares:

  • 24 Maria Heckinger, Beyond the Third Door…, op. cit., p. 101.

As a young adult, Dad’s cruel comments hurt me more than any beating. One month before my 20th birthday, we had a terrible argument. I don’t remember what we fought about, but the conversation ended when Dad yelled, “You’d be in some gutter if we hadn’t adopted you.” I could take it no more. I turned around, walked away, and moved into an apartment the next week. I knew Dad felt terrible about his hurtful comment to me, but there are some things you never say to an adopted child. […] he never apologized. Yes, his comment cut me to the bone, but I also knew it did not define his whole being.
Time passed, and we reconciled. […] Still, the hurt exceeded my capacity to forgive him completely. It tainted my thoughts about adopting a child because I feared even thinking the words he had said to me.24

24The materiality of international adoption functions as a probing search mechanism all its own, especially when archival sources remain scarce. Against the backdrop of changing and novel forms, the memories adduced have rediscovered materialities, the matter behind emotions as well as documents, the remnants of orphanage buildings and of being‑orphaned‑again, whether by Greek bureaucracy or by cultural stereotypes. The materiality of adoption is, after all, one of the few sources of the tangible within intangibility. This materiality includes the decades‑long afterlife of things, even of trinkets, especially of trinkets, which has by now produced family and social memories across generations. Materiality is, paradoxically, not only about static things but also about processes, embodied and mediated alike.

Commodifying the adopted child: Gift, souvenir and doll

25The patronising act of giving “gifts” to the “special” child is, to this day, a genteel version of the commodifying attitude that underpins transnational adoption. The word “gift” connotes ownership, property transfer, even entitlement. Cross‑border adoption reveals other fundamental misinterpretations of gift‑giving as well. It is not unusual for prospective parents to try to give money to the birth mother, even though today’s laws forbid it. Yet historically, adopters have accepted steep service and other fees that were rebranded as “gifts” or “donations”, whether to the birth parents, the intermediaries, or the local care facilities. Large amounts of money have historically been transacted in intercountry adoption —under whichever label these may have been exchanged. This fact prompts some adopters and third parties to expect the adoptee to behave “like a gift” or a “gift in exchange”, thereby resignifying the transaction that made the adoption possible in the first place. International adoption has often been read as the “gift of a better life”, as a sacrifice made by the “self‑effacing” birth family to the adoptive parents; then, in a second step, as the “gift of parental love” bestowed on the “gift child” by the altruistic adoptive parents. Some sources at least acknowledge a void on either end: a perceived material void for the adoptees from “destitute” countries, but also an emotional void on the part of the “desperate” adoptive parents. Adoption as contrived gift‑giving leaves the agents or brokers with the attribute of being charitable, too. All the tropes surrounding “the most noble act” thrive in the adoption industry to this day —and solidify vested business interests. The notion of “gift” still disguises the fact that international adoption involves hard cash transactions, even though there is seldom any candour about money exchanges. Adoption becomes what the well‑to‑do adopters can give out and what is left for the adopted persons to merely receive, as if the state of being adopted is no longer theirs. Ironically, this chance at American‑style upward mobility is presented to the adoptee as a chance at self‑invention —in essence, through annihilation of the former self.

  • 25 Anon., New York Mirror, 6 December 1958.

26The rhetoric of dematerialisation and decommercialisation that resorts to the clichés of “saving children” and gift‑giving only thinly veils that the “commissioning” and “delivery” of the foreign child involves hard‑core monetary transactions. The trope of disavowal gains special meaning when the adoptee arrives as a “Christmas present” or other seasonal gift or prize. Materiality is then back in full force. “Christmas Arrives Early for a McPherson Couple,” claims the anonymous reporter for the Salina Journal on 24 December 1957, on the occasion of a Greek boy’s arrival to small‑town Kansas. “Best Christmas Present We Ever Had,” the newly minted father of C.M. is quoted as saying to the New York Mirror.25 H.B. was delivered in a Christmas stocking to her Jewish parents, as she divulged in a 1 May 2018 public post on Facebook. After her arrival in the United States in the fall of 1954, six‑year‑old Dimitra quickly took to the hype about Santa Claus. She unwittingly helped to deliver the perfect Christmas feel‑good story, ready for mass public consumption:

  • 26 Moss, Chicago Tribune, 20 December 1954.

For Dimitra Mallires, a 6 year old Greek girl who arrived here five weeks ago, her new homeland is full of such marvelous mysteries as television, telephones, and Santa Claus. […] Santa Claus heads the list. […] “Is that the real Santa Claus you have told me about?” […] “May I wait up for him?”26

  • 27 Unidentified newspaper clipping from early October 1955.
  • 28 Karl L. Peterson, The Kansas City Star, 5 April 1959.
  • 29 Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child…, op. cit., p. 192.
  • 30 Stella P. Nahatis, Taxi to America: A Greek Orphan’s Adoption Journey, Manchester‑by‑the‑Sea, 2022, (...)

27Choice, gift‑giving, and 1950s overseas travel show the hallmarks of the materiality of adoption: “Gary Couple Tour Greece, Bring Home Baby as ‘Souvenir,’” reads a jubilant article in a local Indiana newspaper.27 “Trip Has Happy Bonus,” claims a Kansas paper, completely attuned to the new trend of “adoption tourism”: “[Names] and their wives flew to Europe on vacation last month and when they came home yesterday afternoon they were seven. […] A boy for you and a girl for me.”28 This combined focus on consumer materiality proves to be important in the analysis of intercountry adoption. It presupposes that the child adoptee will invest American goods and mobility with positive meaning. Some adoptees have understood the association with the latest American goods and toys all too well, realising that their own status was that of the latest fad,29 or, for girls, of the latest doll. Adoptee memoirist Stella Nahatis recalls, in a most understated manner: “[t]he same year I arrived in America was also the year Mattel’s Barbie doll arrived in toy stores. Barbie never made it into my doll collection, but I find the idea that we both debuted in the US at the same time a childhood point of interest.”30 The child’s approval of Western consumer items and of all the gifts and bonuses of holiday cheer (and/or of decked‑out doll status) was to be the ultimate legitimation of past decision‑making and the present state. But that validation did not necessarily follow.

  • 31 Kimberly D. McKee, Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United Stat (...)
  • 32 Ludivine Broch, describing her ongoing project titled “The Gratitude Train,” at <https://www.westmi (...)

28Kimberly McKee situates the “logics of gratitude” in the context of the objectified Korean “adoptee as gift”, as the “recipient of the gift of adoption” within the “consumerist construction of choice”.31 Consumer choice and customer service define ways of further commodifying the product for sale, in this case the foreign child, whose very state is materialised or made subject to the transactional nature of international adoption. Ludivine Broch speaks of the “materialisation of gratitude”, as she describes her project studying the many gifts that liberated France sent to the United States. She explains, in terms that bear relevance on the topic under discussion: “The study of these objects takes us away from the usual post‑war images of smoke‑filled rooms and male politicians, and brings us to a post‑war everyday reality centred around womens’ crafts, childrens’ [sic] toys, artisanship and aesthetics.”32 Thus Broch draws attention to the unique insights that the scholar can draw from examining personal material traces that are often obscured in more formal sources and archives.

  • 33 Unidentified local newspaper clipping, likely from Portland, Oregon, and dating back to mid‑July 19 (...)

29However, what the waiting parents and the media see as a precious gift or blessing, the gift of and to the adoptee, may quickly become fraught. The expectation of the recipient’s gratitude may permanently shift from the new parents to the typically older child. As less likely candidates for adoption, the five‑year‑old to teenage adoptees were especially vulnerable to objectification for the purposes of a holiday feel‑good story, simple and comforting: “Thanks to Pasadena Couple Orphan Goes from Rags to Riches,” declares the Pasadena Independent (California) of 4 July 1959, referring to a Greek boy approaching the age of nine. “Both are […] completely reoutfitted in the latest American clothes styles,” boasts an unidentified Oregon newspaper clipping about two Greek children, fresh off the plane in July of 1956. Also, the children’s new lawn is “strewn with toys”, as is their new home, which the adopters “purchased especially for them”.33 “Your adoption cost about the price of a mink coat,” one six‑year‑old was told repeatedly. Some grown adoptees found the invoices and receipts before they discovered the truth.

30The emphasis on material goods and assets, the enmeshment of adoption in a materialist frame of mind, must remind the reader that, at the onset of the Cold War, the creation of a consumer society was still seen as an effective way to fight communism. The rationale for preferring capitalism over communism was plain and simple: Consumer goods guarantee the instant gratification of individuals and communities, and satisfied people do not seek a radical overhaul of political and societal structures. Relying on “informed guesses”, the anonymous reporter for the Carroll Daily Times Herald (Iowa) purports:

  • 34 Anon., Carroll Daily Times Herald (Carroll, IA), 25 October 1956, p. 1.

the whereabouts of the [children’s] father were unknown. Informed guesses were that he was victimized by the partisan strife that periodically engulfs Greece. […]
Both of the children have been renamed and are rapidly becoming Americanized. […]
But perhaps the most striking thing of all in this brand new world of make believe come true for a pair of wide‑eyed little tykes from Greece is the television set. The electronic marvel of animated pictures is almost too much for the comprehension of two small children who lived in a place where electric lights were the only modern convenience.34

  • 35 Respectively: Anon., Battle Creek Enquirer (Battle Creek, MI), 18 June 1952, p. 4; Anon., Star Trib (...)

31Contemporary newspapers also registered the initial disappointment of American adoptive parents who expected instant payback: from “Orphan Being Treated to Buying Spree” to “‘Ohi’ [‘No’] Was All Greek Girl, 5, Could Say,” and also “Airborne Baby Proves Hard on Mama’s Nerves”.35 The latter article opens: “Babies brought by airplane are harder on the nerves than those born naturally. At least that’s the opinion of a San Antonio woman who last week met in New York a tiny Greek orphan.” Such titles, tropes and notes of disenchantment affirm certain cultural and consumerist expectations. They conjure up images and identity types that are required of the ideal adoptees, whose transfer to new, American parents should be nothing short of a transformation. Also at stake is the transformation of consumer parents, who, by giving in to their children, would gain the desirable status of “normal” parents. Regardless of the mismatched expectations, the “liability” to ensure that the adoption “works out” comes to resort with the adoptee. The blame for the less‑than‑ideal adoption, too, falls back upon the child. Not infrequently, the blame game becomes disconnected from parental attitudes and authority.

  • 36 Anon., email communication, 27 January 2021.
  • 37 Antoinette De Boer, De vondeling van Kreta [The Foundling from Crete], Overveen, the Netherlands, n (...)
  • 38 Anon., Salina Journal (Salina, KS), 24 December 1957, p. 11.
  • 39 Maria Heckinger, Beyond the Third Door, op. cit., p. 59‑60.

32Some adult adoptees go as far as to articulate mitigating circumstances to clear their parents from their share of the responsibility: “Unfortunately, my mother was not the best mother while I was growing up. […] I learned a lot about my adoptive mother after she passed away and now see her as someone who did not know how to be a mother to a strong‑willed adopted girl,” writes one Greek adoptee who wishes to remain anonymous.36 The typical attenuating statement issued by the disadvantaged to abused adoptee still says: “Deep down they loved me, they just did not know how to parent or how to express their love.” “Niets is loyaler dan een mishandeld kind” (“Nothing is more loyal than an abused child”), writes Greek‑to‑Dutch adoptee Antoinette de Boer. In her memoir, she makes this statement about her Greek‑born adopted cousin, but it cannot but reflect back on herself, without her wanting to acknowledge it.37 The adoptee’s gratefulness and swift adjustment are culturally imposed mandates of the tallest order. The same mandates do not seem to weigh down the adoptive parents. “Anon., unidentified newspaper clipping […] from the personal archive of a Greek adoptee,” my footnote 35 says. Why does my writing still silence what and whom it describes? Why does it still appear burdened, like the adoptee herself, with a sense of the “primordial sin” of what went wrong on arrival? The baby was ten months old! “Bill, 7 years old, wanted no part of his new parents. […] He […] shrank away from the strangers.”38 “Maria took one look at me, screamed at the top of her lungs, and sprinted past me as fast as her little legs could carry her. […] It was apparent Maria wanted nothing to do with anyone, least of all me. […] I could see the headlines now, ‘Orphan Rejects Mother.’”39

33A question remains: What have been the material signs that expressed imaginings of conflictual adoption that reached into the future? For some, that is a dark prospect, and it, too, needs to be acknowledged. P. relayed the cruel comments of her adoptive mother, in a personal communication of 6 August 2022: “Whenever I was not the compliant child, my mother would point her slim index finger right at my face and state threateningly: ‘You will grow old all alone, with no one to look after you.’ That verdict has been hanging above me, and I am afraid it’s working like a self‑fulfilling prophecy.” Ironically, the troublesome statement points to what was likely the mother’s fear and reason for adopting.

  • 40 For a recent history of this voluntary philanthropic organization, see Alexander Kitroeff, The Hist (...)
  • 41 Gonda Van Steen, Adoption…, op. cit., p. 70‑71.

34The persistent invocations of good intentions, along with the many unwritten rules and obligations, ground the adoptees, countering their sense of living a false identity. They ground them in the intricate layers of history and politics as well. In a “Special Memo” issued by Leo J. Lamberson, the AHEPA middleman contrasts the adoptees’ “better” life in democratic America with their lack of chances in Greece. AHEPA stands for American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association. This Greek American order or brotherhood, founded in Atlanta in 1922, played an important if not unblemished role in devising and then implementing the Greek‑to‑American postwar adoption movement, with its migration‑related activism of the late 1940s.40 Dated May 1959, Lamberson’s antithesis is framed by the kind of Cold War rhetoric that expects also “orphan Greece”, the beneficiary of generous American aid, to come on board and show gratitude.41 Lamberson’s underlying imperialist ideology presents US life as “normal”; apparently, Greek life is not “normal”, for lacking material goods and opportunities. The true background, however, is the recent shockwave that the anything‑but‑normal Scopas scandal has sent through the Greek and international adoption industry. Brokers like Stephen Scopas and Lamberson now fear that the US government will “scuddle” the Orphan Program. In his trademark capital‑letter‑charged writing, Lamberson dramatically conjures up the danger that, without the action he urges, the Americans will

  • 42 “Special Memo” from the personal archive of M.K., signed by Leo J. Lamberson and dated “5/1959.” Se (...)

KILL THEIR [i.e., the Greek adoptees’] CHANCE FOR A GOOD, HAPPY LIFE, an education—and opportunity under our AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE FOR NORMAL MANHOOD AND WOMANHOOD.
[…] to bring happiness and love into thousands of homes, and FILL THE VOID IN 20,000 LIVES OF CHILDLESS COUPLES. Such companionships makes for a better home —a better family—which is truly the backbone of a Stronger and a Safer America.42

35Steeped in the materialities of child placement, this article has explored the adoptees’ memories and emotions and their proposed path forward, as objects become nodes of complex personal and social relationships and thus exert agency in their own right. The sections above have pondered the value of such materialities as alternative, again emotive but agentive and participative self‑representations. They have assessed the efficacy, too, of the adoptees’ life‑writing and artistic expression as techniques with which to mediate emotions. The prism of materiality, then, centres questions of age, gender, sexuality, but also of mobility, ethnicity and nationality.

  • 43 Gonda Van Steen, Adoption…, op. cit., p. 70‑71.

36Postwar international adoption was characterised by the lack of materiality, most visible in the lack of luggage with which the 1950s Greek‑born adoptees travelled to the United States. It was the designated total uprooting, which left only trinkets for the children to hold on to. These small and “valueless” objects then became the best “written” trail of crumbs that the youngsters could leave behind. Even worse, the Greek adoption movement had the adoptee become the item of luggage or the cargo itself. The charter company Flying Tiger Line advertised flying “anything, anytime, anywhere”, and it flew many Greek children to the United States in the mid‑1950s.43 This a‑material state then became symptomatic of how the children were perceived by their new parents: They supposedly came unburdened, without any baggage; they were supposedly ahistorical; they were the perfect blank slates.

37Material objects represent realities that straddle the past and the present of the adopted person. This article has explored how the relationship between the Greek past and the American adoptee can be illuminated by considering new truths of material objects and signs, expanding into the psychological and literary as well as the material fragments that the adoptees have carried. This materiality of details raises broader issues of material resources and their fair distribution. How could the adoptee traffic itself, from poor partners to wealthy patrons, ever be a fair distribution of resources? Plenty of material goods went to Greece in the postwar era, by way of donated humanitarian aid or cheap imports, but did they reach the vulnerable birth families, some of whom could have made the decision to keep their children if access had been provided on an equitable basis? What if the resources put towards overseas adoption had gone instead to the birth mother? Transnational adoption has been creating material as well as geographical, socio‑ideological and emotional distance between birth families and adoptive families. This distance is one of being materially “better off” in the West —but it is not the kind of materiality that was important to many of the transplanted children. Indeed, in an extreme conception of materiality, adoptees were seen and treated as raw materials and as transferable properties –as goods for export.

38The child adoptions from Cold War Greece may still suffer from a lack of formal documentary evidence, reflecting a time period characterised by a lack of material goods. But the adoptees themselves have built archives of their own, which include the archive of feelings and emotions. The new perspectives that this article hopes to impart must unsilence this altogether different archive, which is far from materially poor. They may help to articulate unknown aspects of adoption processes and offer reflections on the relationship between memory and/through materiality, metaphorically as well as literally, and, ultimately, between materiality and affect.

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Notes

1 Tobias Hübinette, for instance, embodies the Korean adoptee experience and has also devoted his scholarly work to questioning intercountry adoption and the construction of race, while broadening the scope of receiving countries to include Scandinavian countries (Sweden). See, Tobias Hübinette, “Transnational Adoption and the Emergence of Sweden’s Progressive Reproduction Policy: A Contribution to the Biopolitical History of Sweden,” in Jenny Heijun Wills, Tobias Hübinette and Indigo Willing (eds), Adoption and Multiculturalism: Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2020, p. 223‑238. An older standard work is E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1998.

2 M.W., testimony of 29 September 2024.

3 I revisit the topic of using mixed empirical methods below, in the context of the play production on which I collaborated with Greek‑born adoptees and which heightened exposure and direct interaction. See in this article. For now, allow me to state that thirteen years of research delivered the contacts and, more importantly, the trust of the Greek‑born adoptees. I conducted numerous semi‑structured interviews as well as formal interviews, in which the theme of material objects tended to come up time and again, often in a tangential manner. Additionally, online historical newspaper archives such as <newspapers.com> provided the search tools that led to many news stories in the American press of the 1950s and 1960s. Again, I am aware that the printed press does not tell the whole story and go on to qualify newspaper articles as such, for the feel-good narrative that they wished to impart and their reluctance to drill below the surface.

4 Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra (eds), Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2018.

5 Vera Hajtó, Milk Sauce and Paprika: Migration, Childhood and Memories of the Interwar Belgian‑Hungarian Child Relief Project, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2016.

6 Vera Hajtó, “‘The Past Must Be Given a Place’: Migration, Intergenerational Transfer, and Cultural Memory Practices in Belgian Families of Hungarian Descent,” Hungarian Historical Review, vol. 12, no. 4, 2023, p. 555‑575 (especially p. 555, 562, 565‑566, 570), Doi: 10.38145/2023.4.555.

7 Mary Cardaras (ed.), Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption, London/New York, Anthem Press, 2023.

8 See Gonda Van Steen, “Of Foundlings and ‘Lostlings’: When the Scopas Scandal Rocked the Unstable Foundations of the First 1950s Intercountry Adoptions,” Annales de démographie historique, vol. 141, no. 1‑(Histoire de l’adoption. i. Formes adoptives [xviexxe siècles]), 2021, p. 123‑155, Doi: 10.3917/adh.1410123.

9 For a detailed analysis of these rapid developments, with appropriate comparative data, see Gonda Van Steen, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo?, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2019. The book also provides an extensive bibliography. The secondary literature on the child adoptions from Cold War South Korea is large, and it continues to grow. Good starting points are: Yuri W. Doolan, The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America, New York, Oxford University Press, 2024; Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging, Durham, Duke University Press, 2010; Arissa H. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption, Stanford, Stanford University Press, “Asian America”, 2015.

10 Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, New York, Basic Books, 1985. Zelizer’s chapter six has contextualised the 20th‑century phenomena of baby farms and black‑market babies.

11 Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child…, op. cit., p. 204‑205. She speaks of the “sentimentalization of adoption,” which turned infant adoption into “the latest American fad” (p. 192). The majority of American adoptive homes sought little girls for their “domestic sentimental value” (p. 193).

12 See Rachel R. Winslow, The Best Possible Immigrants: International Adoption and the American Family, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, “Politics and culture in modern America”, 2017, p. 34‑69. See also Gonda Van Steen, Adoption…, op. cit., p. 150‑152.

13 Gonda Van Steen, Adoptions Reckonings: For Three Refrigerators and a Washing Machine, London/New York, Anthem Press, 2025. This volume presents the playscript accompanied by notes and a lengthy introduction advocating for the potential of collective life‑writing.

14 Grace Newton, “The Trauma and Healing of Consciousness,” Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 130‑(2‑Exploring the relationship between adoption and trauma), 2022, p. 3, Doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2022.105563.

15 “[D]reigt er, evenals er een wereldgrondstoffen- en arbeidsmarkt bestaat, een wereldwijde kindermarkt te ontstaan?,” p. 56 in M. Bronkhorst and J. Oost, “Kinderen op bestelling? Problemen rond interlandelijke adoptie,” “Children on Order? Problems Surrounding Intercountry Adoption,” Algemeen Politieblad, iii, 4 February 1984, p. 51‑57, <https://www.brazilbabyaffair.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/AlgemeenPolitieblad-4February1984.pdf>. The early date of this article, which appeared shortly before Viviana Zelizer’s book (1985), strikes home that four decades of awareness can be documented, even though many journalistic voices were dismissed.

16 Petros, email communication, 1 December 2021.

17 Maria Heckinger, Beyond the Third Door: Based on a True Story, Vancouver, [Pennsauken], [BookBaby], 2019, p. 66‑68.

18 Andrew Mossin, A Son from the Mountains: A Memoir, New York, Spuyten Duyvil, 2021.

19 Antonia, testimony of 22 April 2020.

20 R., email communication, 16 January 2019.

21 SunAh M. Laybourn, Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants, New York, New York University Press, “Asian American sociology series”, 2024, p. 4.

22 Dorothy Tilden Spoerl, ‘“It Isn’t My Real Name,’” National Parent‑Teacher, vol. 42, no. 9, May 1948, p. 26‑28.

23 D.T. Spoerl’s article in typescript, with reference to its source, was shared with the adoptive parents of Greek adoptee M.C., by the public welfare services of the state of Indiana. Ironically, the “classic” children’s book, The Chosen Baby, written by pediatrician Valentina P. Wasson, features intermediaries reassuring the prospective parents that they will find just the right baby for them; and if the adopters felt that the match was not right, they would find them another one: “The Man and his Wife watched the baby, then they shook their heads and said: ‘This is a beautiful child, but we know it is not our baby.’ And they were taken to see the next” (Valentina P. Wasson, The Chosen Baby, 1st ed., New York, Carrick and Evans, 1939). Liz DeBetta remarks: “I was a character in a fairytale, fulfilling a wish,” p. 124 in Liz DeBetta, “Negotiating Space to Heal: Adult Adoptee Narratives as Autoethnography,” Adoption & Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 2022, p. 116‑134, Doi: 10.1353/ado.2022.0005. DeBetta states that her adoption was never a secret, but “it became one when we stopped openly discussing it” (p. 126).

24 Maria Heckinger, Beyond the Third Door…, op. cit., p. 101.

25 Anon., New York Mirror, 6 December 1958.

26 Moss, Chicago Tribune, 20 December 1954.

27 Unidentified newspaper clipping from early October 1955.

28 Karl L. Peterson, The Kansas City Star, 5 April 1959.

29 Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child…, op. cit., p. 192.

30 Stella P. Nahatis, Taxi to America: A Greek Orphan’s Adoption Journey, Manchester‑by‑the‑Sea, 2022, p. 85.

31 Kimberly D. McKee, Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, “The Asian American experience”, 2019, p. 31. See also, with an emphasis on intercountry political “gift‑giving,” Barbara Yngvesson, “Placing the ‘Gift Child’ in Transnational Adoption,” Law and Society Review, vol. 36, no. 2‑(special issue on nonbiological parenting), 2002, p. 227‑256, Doi: 10.2307/1512176. Rachael Stryker points to the “specific kinds of social return to [adoptive] parents” that come with the “self‑invested act” of adopting, in the “economy of affect” generated by intercountry placements (p. 28, 34 in Rachael Stryker, “The War at Home: Affective Economics and Transnationally Adoptive Families in the United States,” International Migration, vol. 49, no. 6‑(Affecting global movement: The emotional terrain of transnationality), 2011, p. 25‑49, Doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2435.2010.00607.x).

32 Ludivine Broch, describing her ongoing project titled “The Gratitude Train,” at <https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/directory/broch-ludivine>.

33 Unidentified local newspaper clipping, likely from Portland, Oregon, and dating back to mid‑July 1956.

34 Anon., Carroll Daily Times Herald (Carroll, IA), 25 October 1956, p. 1.

35 Respectively: Anon., Battle Creek Enquirer (Battle Creek, MI), 18 June 1952, p. 4; Anon., Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 10 September 1951, p. 23; Anon., unidentified newspaper clipping of January 1957, from the personal archive of a Greek adoptee.

36 Anon., email communication, 27 January 2021.

37 Antoinette De Boer, De vondeling van Kreta [The Foundling from Crete], Overveen, the Netherlands, n.p., 2019, p. 133.

38 Anon., Salina Journal (Salina, KS), 24 December 1957, p. 11.

39 Maria Heckinger, Beyond the Third Door, op. cit., p. 59‑60.

40 For a recent history of this voluntary philanthropic organization, see Alexander Kitroeff, The History of AHEPA 1922‑2022: A Century of Service, Brookline, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2023.

41 Gonda Van Steen, Adoption…, op. cit., p. 70‑71.

42 “Special Memo” from the personal archive of M.K., signed by Leo J. Lamberson and dated “5/1959.” See further Gonda Van Steen, “Of Foundlings,” art. cit., p. 123‑155.

43 Gonda Van Steen, Adoption…, op. cit., p. 70‑71.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: Maria’s shoes from the Patras Orphanage
Crédits Photo credit: Maria Heckinger. Used with permission.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/diasporas/docannexe/image/18446/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 133k
Titre Figure 2: The cover of Andrew Mossin’s book
Crédits Photo credit: Spuyten Duyvil. Used with permission.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/diasporas/docannexe/image/18446/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 423k
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Gonda Van Steen, « The Materialities of “Adop‑thing”: Material and Other “Witnesses” of Child Adoption from Greece to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s »Diasporas, 44 | -0001, 217-242.

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Gonda Van Steen, « The Materialities of “Adop‑thing”: Material and Other “Witnesses” of Child Adoption from Greece to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s »Diasporas [En ligne], 44 | 2025, mis en ligne le 03 décembre 2025, consulté le 14 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/diasporas/18446 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/159ti

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Auteur

Gonda Van Steen

Gonda Van Steen holds the Koraes Chair in the Centre for Hellenic Studies and the Department of Classics at King’s College London. She is the author of five books and many articles. Her 2019 book, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo?, takes the reader into the new, uncharted terrain of Greek adoption stories that become paradigmatic of Cold War politics and history. These adoptions from Greece to the United States are among the oldest (and already fraught) postwar international adoptions and merit further study. She most recently published the annotated edition of a postwar and Civil War memoir written by an American social worker active in relief services in northern Greece: The Battle for Bodies, Hearts and Minds in Postwar Greece: Social Worker Charles Schermerhorn in Thessaloniki, 1946‑1951 (2024).
Gonda Van Steen est titulaire de la chaire Koraes au Centre d’études helléniques et au département de lettres classiques du King’s College de Londres. Elle est l’auteur de cinq ouvrages et de nombreux articles. Son ouvrage de 2019, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo?, emmène le lecteur sur le terrain nouveau et inexploré des histoires d’adoption grecques qui deviennent paradigmatiques de la politique et de l’histoire de la guerre froide. Ces adoptions de la Grèce vers les États‑Unis font partie des adoptions internationales d’après‑guerre les plus anciennes (et déjà mouvementées) et méritent d’être étudiées plus avant. Gonda a récemment publié l’édition annotée d’un mémoire d’après‑guerre et de guerre civile écrit par un travailleur social américain actif dans les services d’aide dans le nord de la Grèce : The Battle for Bodies, Hearts and Minds in Postwar Greece: Social Worker Charles Schermerhorn in Thessaloniki, 1946‑1951 (2024).

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