Irene Sardanis was born into a Greek family in the Bronx in the 1940s in which fear and peril hovered.
When she finally escaped her mother as.
Faced with their mother\'s violent outbursts in the wake of this betrayal, Irene\'s older siblings found a way out, but Irene was trapped, hostage to her mother\'s rage and despair.
Her father drank, gambled, and enjoyed other women--and then, when Irene was eleven, abandoned her family altogether.
Her mother had come to New York for an arranged marriage.
Irene Sardanis was born into a Greek family in the Bronx in the 1940s in which fear and peril hovered