"Aliki is one of the last of her kind, a lamenter who mourns and celebrates the passing of life. She is a part of an evolving Greece, a country moving steadily away from its rural traditions. To capture the fading folk art of lamenting, an American researcher asks Aliki to record her laments, but in response, Aliki sings her own story. It begins in a village in northeast Greece, where Aliki witnesses the occupying Nazi soldiers execute her father forstealing a squash. Taken in by her friend Takis's mother, Aliki is joined by a Jewish refugee and her son, Stelios. When the village is torched and its people massacred, Aliki, Takis and Stelios are able to excape just as the war is ending. Fleeing across the chaotic landscape of a postwar Greece, the three become a makeshift family."--Dust jacket.
