Stephanie Cotsirilos

“It’s one thing to get by in a language. It’s another to absorb inferences babies learn while growing up. If you didn’t learn English that way, you can miss unspoken rules, especially when you’re caught in brawling American life, from which Xanthi was insulated when she lived with my suburban family outside Chicago. Incomplete acculturation can go very wrong.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“Whether she knew it or not, Xanthi prepared me to fight for even my most damaged defendants...”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“Xanthi came into my childhood in August of 1954, arriving at Union Station near the Chicago River, final stop in a transatlantic journey to help take care of me and my siblings in suburban Oak Park while Mom underwent treatment, such as it was in those days, for breast cancer metastases. Xanthi was a friend of my maternal grandmother’s, maybe even a distant relative. Didn’t matter to me as a four-year-old boy. Whoever she was related to, she left her home on the Peloponnesus to live with us for room and board and some money to send back home after a string of cataclysms bludgeoning Greece at the time.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“Xanthi had passed through Union Station’s vast Beaux Arts atrium, the Great Hall, magnificent and scary to me as a kid...There she stood in black garments, individual, resilient. Her green eyes anomalous to the Peloponnesus, more common among mountain Greeks. She was like that one blade of grass my dad’s lawnmower couldn’t cut, no matter how many times he went over it. Almost no gray hairs glinted among her dark ones tucked back into a tiny bun. She stepped toward us, pulling out of a movie, away from the first decades of a century pockmarked by war, famine, earthquakes, and a Great Depression denting the hubris of Union Station, colossal behind her.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi