A Fallible but Loving Father : A PLACE FOR US <i> by Nicholas Gage (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 419 pp.</i> )

Nicholas Gage published in 1983 the successful and now widely famous “Eleni,” the story of his mother’s execution by firing squad in 1948 at the hands of Communist guerrillas near the end of the Greek civil war. Now, with similarly painstaking detail and thoroughness, he has produced a sequel to that work, picking up his family’s story in 1949, when Gage and three of his sisters came to America (the fourth, still in forced conscription behind Communist lines, was to arrive later), and continuing it up to the death of their father, Christos Gatzoyiannis, in 1983, the same year that saw publication of “Eleni.”

Gage made no secret of the driving forces behind the writing of that earlier book--his own emotional need to confront at last the entire truth about his mother’s death; his towering, Olympian outrage at the murderous injustice of it. The question that arises here is whether there exists another Gage-family subject of power and moment equal to the death of Eleni, or of sufficient dramatic weight to propel a second book of much the same breadth and scope.

The answer, although it may take a reader some time to come to a realization of it, seems to be that, yes, maybe there is, although it’s by far a quieter, more domestic, less-tragic (and often repetitive, doubling back over the earlier work) theme that lies at the heart of this longish effort. Gage writes this time around about Greek-American life over some decades, but he writes also, and more centrally, about the character of his father, whom Gage had come to blame fiercely--and unjustly, he finds--as being the one ultimately responsible for Eleni’s death.

Christos Gatzoyiannis came to America back in 1910, at age 17, drawn by the fabled wealth that could be earned there. Working first as a day laborer and then, with a countryman as partner, starting a fruit- and produce-delivery business in Worcester, Mass., he did well enough to make return visits home with a big-spending and Midas-like aura about him, but never enough to return for good. On one such visit back to his remote, northern-Greek village of Lia, he married 17-year-old Eleni Haidis (by then it was 1926), and on subsequent return visits, Christos sired an unbroken string of four daughters, causing the wedded but most of the time separated couple to despair that they would ever produce a son. In 1939, at last a son was conceived--to become, of course, Nicholas Gage; but almost at once, World War II intervened, and soon after that came the Greek civil war, isolating the Gatzoyiannis family in the war-torn country and making it impossible for Christos to return from America. He was not ever to see Eleni again, nor would he see his son Nicholas until 1949, when the children came to join him in Worcester.

Here, then, begins the new story proper, and it opens with disappointment. Expecting to find a prospering father of wealth and influence, these children from the poor northern mountains discover instead that Christos has suffered business reversals, that he is hardly Midas, that in America, there will in fact be scarcely enough to go around. “(Even) Father’s irrepressible optimism,” Gage writes, “must have wavered on that day in March, 1949, when his newly arrived children discovered that he was not the tycoon they believed but an out-of-work, fifty-six-year-old short-order cook.”

The book’s first half edges slowly toward its later pace and theme, chronicling what often feels like the by now very nearly conventionalized--certainly the oft-told--vagaries and struggles of growing up in America foreign and poor. Gage’s commitment to this long and sometimes touching album of detailed family and immigrant-community life--marriages, illnesses, job losses, setbacks, unflagging efforts to keep up old customs, school and playground tribulations--is never in doubt, but the book takes greater and fresher dramatic hold as it becomes more and more apparent that its real subject is Christos Gatzoyiannis himself.

Telling the story of his own American boyhood and schooling (unlike his more vulnerable and less adaptable sisters, he is a great success in school), Gage also tells the story of the bitter resentment he felt toward his aging father--not only for his general failure, after all those years in Worcester, to achieve wealth and high position, but more specifically for his failure to bring his family out of Greece in time to have saved the beloved Eleni’s life. The young Gage’s unexpressed resentment takes the form of various youthful rebellions and misjudgments--stealing money from his father, lying to friends about his family’s affluence, brushing sleeves with a youthful neighborhood crime ring--as the boy, all the while, waits for the opportune moment when he can unburden himself fully and condemn his father openly for his many failures.

The turning point comes by surprise in early high school, though, when Gage, driving a “borrowed” car, causes a half-serious accident and then leaves the scene, getting in trouble with the law. The boy expects the towering and pitiless wrath of his father to fall upon him, but finds instead that the suddenly pensive Christos takes the blame upon himself and chooses this opportunity to admit his own failures in not having brought his family from Greece in the short respite between the Nazi occupation and the start of the civil war. “ ‘They said the guerrillas were fighting for democracy. I believed it,’ ” he tells Gage. “ ‘I want you to know that I loved your mother very much,’ he said. ‘Not a day, not an hour goes by when I don’t think of her and how I failed her. I failed all of you, and all I can say is that I never meant it to happen.’ ”

Seeing his father now by a human scale, “naive and fallible” but deeply loving, Gage carries on the Gatzoyiannis saga with his father placed at the dramatic and symbolic center of it: the flawed but honored, loved and loving, instinctively generous patriarch residing in the midst of a growing and increasingly thriving clan. Sisters marry; grandchildren are born; sons-in-law open pizza stores and begin to thrive after years of uncertainty and bare survival. Gage’s own success story--discovering journalism in high school; working his way through Boston University; receiving, in 1963, a national journalism award personally from President Kennedy’s hand; joining the staff of the New York Times--is saved from self-indulgence by being made the story of Christos Gatzoyiannis’ success as much as of Gage’s own. Says Christos, now an old man: “ ‘Educated son with college degree. Honors from the hand of the President. What more I want out of life? Don’t care if I drop dead tomorrow, I’m satisfied.’ ”

Gage is not a high stylist (“Olga rose from her sickbed like Lazarus from the dead, her heart bursting with joy”) or always his own best editor against the seduction of repetitiousness or the clankingly forced detail (“ ‘But I thought Nassio betrayed you by selling the produce truck and buying the restaurant and never making you a partner!’ exclaimed Olga”). But in general, what he gives us here, written in homage to his mother and father and their long domestic and tragic past, are large, unpolished handfuls of life and memory and love, unpretentious, unfalsified, and therefore welcome.