Alexander Kitroeff, professor of history at Haverford College, is one of a handful of scholars in North America engaged in comparative Greek diaspora studies and immigration history. In addition to his recent book on The Greeks and the Making of Modern Egypt (American University in Cairo Press, 2019), he is the author of many articles and shorter pieces that explore Greek colonies in Balkan commercial hubs and Mediterranean and Black Sea ports, their migrations, and their continuing impact on Greek cultural identity. This makes him uniquely qualified to tease out what has made the diaspora experience of Greeks in America distinctive.

Early Greek colonies in America began in much the same way as those in the Old World: as “communities” dominated by bankers, export merchants, consular officials, and others whose financial resources and social networks gave them sufficient means to support cultural organizations, benevolent societies, and educational institutions as well as churches. Even for the nonreligious, the church was a valued reminder of Old World life, but—as a Chicago Greek-language newspaper put it—“the Church is our creation to serve the spiritual needs of the community. The Church is not the community; it is an institution of it” (27). In America, that relationship begins to change. As Kitroeff argues, the Greek Orthodox Church comes to play a determining role in community affairs, from language, education, and charitable and cultural activities to relations with the motherland, with other Orthodox churches in America, and with the public square. As the church established its hegemony over the community, it “helped shape Greek American identity throughout the twentieth century,” but it did so “by adapting to the steady Americanization of the Greek Americans” (9).

While setting forth this basic argument in his lengthy introduction, Kitroeff also surveys the relevant scholarly literature in several fields. These include sociological studies on the place of religion in shaping the ethnic identity of immigrants. Did religion and its institutional expression in the church provide a haven from the maelstrom of American life, or did it provide a pathway to assimilation and acculturation? If the latter, was America a melting pot, or did it allow for a segmented process by which certain ethnic ties are maintained, albeit in transmuted form? In the title of his pioneering study of European immigration to the United States, Oscar Handlin referred to immigrants as The Uprooted (Little, Brown and Company, 1951). Kitroeff prefers the gentler metaphor of transplantation that developed in the mid-1980s and the more recent concept of hybrid identities. Among other things, this allows space for consideration of Greek Orthodoxy as a transnational phenomenon “connected with Greece the topos but also with Greek culture and its manifestations” (12).

As Kitroeff's subtitle suggests, this book is meant to be a history of the Greek Orthodox Church in America. It is a history of a specific institution and not a general survey of Orthodox Christians in America nor a synthetic study that encompasses Orthodox theology, worship, and spiritual practices along with history. But while the book is cast in the familiar form of a historical narrative, it is not without theoretical underpinnings. For these, Kitroeff draws especially on the work of British social theorist Anthony Giddens and his concept of “structuration.” In the American context, Kitroeff argues, there has been a reciprocal relationship between Greek Orthodox Americans and the church and wider society in which they live. Greek Orthodox Americans have contributed to structural developments even as these structures have informed their own actions.

As Kitroeff adds, “Powerful historical agents—the archbishops, for example—were often able to navigate within those structures and produce outcomes that confirmed their ability to transform the church's evolution” (12). It is precisely on archbishops that Kitroeff focuses. Chapters 1 and 2 cover the establishment of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America in 1922 and its tumultuous first two decades. Chapters 3 and 4 cover the tenure of Archbishop Athenagoras (1931–1948, thereafter Patriarch of Constantinople until his death in 1972), who was certainly a towering figure. Chapter 5 covers the quiet tenure of Archbishop Michael (1949–1958). Chapters 6 through 11—nearly half the book—cover the drama-filled tenure of Archbishop Iakovos (1959–1996), who emerges at once as heroic, tragic, and deeply human. Chapter 12—effectively an epilogue—covers the troubled post-Iakovos tenures of Spyridon (1996–1999), Demetrios (1999–2017), and now Elpidophoros (2017–present).

The book is based on Kitroeff's research in the archives of the archdiocese, where he concentrated on documents relating to the biennial archdiocesan Clergy-Laity Congresses. This is supplemented by reportage from Greek American and mainstream press, archival material in the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs and several smaller collections, and personal contact with many key players in archdiocesan history. Systematic coverage of Clergy-Laity Congresses gives Kitroeff a convenient way of tracking the major components that enter into his basic argument. In twentieth-century America, the Greek Orthodox Church played a hegemonic role in community life: “It was able to define Greek Americanness, or rather determine the parameters of the conversations around Greek American identity and how to preserve it” (263). At the same time, the church's gradually Americanized membership has not been a merely passive element in church life. The slowly changing agendas, addresses, and debates at Clergy-Laity Congresses make this clear.

Still, Kitroeff's concentration on archbishops and Clergy-Laity Congresses conveys a rather top-down picture of church life, one suggestive of corporate board rooms and annual stockholder meetings, of backroom deals and well-choreographed public photo shoots. We learn very little about the lived religious experience of ordinary Greek Orthodox Christians in America and very little about other Orthodox churches in America whose ethnic backgrounds, histories, and transnational connections vary considerably from those of the Greek Orthodox. This is quite understandable given the nature of the archival and media sources that Kitroeff utilizes. One may hope, however, that scholars will take this fine book not as the last word on the Greek Orthodox Church in America but as a point of departure for further exploration.