Dr Phil Kafcaloudes, former ABC Radio National breakfast presenter, has seen his 2011 novel Someone Else’s War—adapted into a play with his wife as Of Forgetting—reprinted for a second time, now in Greek as Ο Πόλεμος της Όλγας (Olga’s War).
The story is based on the secret life of his grandmother, Olga Stambolis, a one-time actress who left a fish-and-chip shop in Sydney’s Ultimo to work with the Greek Resistance during WWII, running operations against the Nazis.
“I love the thought that people in Greece have been reading the book,” Kafcaloudes told Neos Kosmos. He recalls meeting his Greek publisher, Mr Psichogios, in 2012, “He was thrilled when he read that my yia yia had a house in Pendeli — because that’s where he lives.”
Publishing the story in Greek, Kafcaloudes says, allows Greek Australians “to read it in the language in which so much of it would have been spoken.”
Someone Else’s War was launched in Sydney in 2012 and went into reprint just two weeks after its Athens release.
“When I gave a presentation at the Athens Centre in 2023 about my play adaptation, my editor at Psichogios said they’d sold out — twice!”
Sales, however, aren’t his main concern. “It’s the response that matters from the readers.”
One encounter stays with him: “An older Greek man came up to me at a launch and referred to the scene where my yiayia gets out of Averoff Prison after six months and sees the famine and the dead on the streets of Athens, he said he’d been there that very day — and that I’d written it exactly right.”
“It was one of the most gratifying moments of my life.”
For Kafcaloudes, the book was revelatory.
“I realised my grandmother was this other woman,” he says, after discovering her diary — the foundation for the novel. “Mrs Stan, as she called herself, died in 1960, aged 58.”
Her life was marked by personal tragedy — the death of a child, the breakdown of her marriage, complex relationships with her other children, and long unexplained absences while spying for the Allies.
Later, she worked for John Emil Peurifoy, the U.S. ambassador to Greece, sent by President Truman during the Greek Civil War. “She ended up hunting down her former comrades,” Kafcaloudes says. “She had spied against the Nazis — but things got very confused during the Civil War.”
“I really don’t know what she did for Peurifoy,” he said, “but given her background, it could’ve been anything.”
Kafcaloudes is now refining his play adaptation, Of Forgetting, and editing a video version to pitch to theatre companies and film producers. He’s also completed the first draft of a new novel — “nothing like Ο Πόλεμος της Όλγας,” he says — a psychological fantasy about a man who goes back in time.
He breaks into laughter, “I’ve just got my first acting gig — playing a grandfather in an ad. I’m too young for this.”
Ο Πόλεμος της Όλγας is available on Amazon.
