In my Wine Cellar, as a fifty-year-old, I met Klara, ten years my junior. Slim, fragile, her body bent when she heard me speak Greek as if she wanted to absorb the sounds. I called her little branch. She entered the U.S. illegally from Mexico. Her father was a small-time drug dealer, murdered by his competitors. Her mother, honest and devoutly Catholic, took her by the hand and the two of them moved to San Diego and from there to Los Angeles. I had recounted her story, altered, as if it were my own story after the last screening on the steps of Patras.

The calm waters of the conversation were disturbed by the aggressive voice of a fierce guy, with his hair tied in a ponytail and a huge beard like Bakunin's. Addressing the audience of the screening, he asked them what they think will happen in Ukraine after the war. Algeria has embraced Islam; what will happen to Ukraine? Ukraine has vast cultivable lands for exploitation by the big food companies, and it also has mineral wealth. From the steps of the Casbah, the discussion descended to the fields of Ukraine where the wheat was burning from the shells and missiles of war. Wheat that danced peacefully when the wind blew, in the film of Soviet-Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko, Earth, from 1930, a great film about the history of Ukraine before its incorporation into the Soviet Union.

In the new novel by Vasilis Ladas, "The American Dream" alternates with the mythology of old classic unforgettable films. The trigger for the unfolding of the story is the incognito short summer return of a Patras immigrant to his homeland, who connects with the place and the past through a series of screenings that he consistently attends on the steps of his city, organized by a collective of young people called "Utopia."

The narrative device gives Vasilis Ladas the opportunity to talk about many things. About America of immigration, about the iconic steps around the world and the steps of Patras that majestically connect the upper and lower town, about good wine, about youth and utopia; but alongside these, also about films that made history. The book is infused with the atmosphere of masterpieces of the 7th art. As we read, rapid images flash before our eyes: Anna Karenina ascends the heavy marble circular staircase of Karenin's mansion, Dracula dies of love in Lucy's embrace, crowds are murdered on the steps of Odessa, wheat waves in the land of Ukraine, Pepe le Moko escapes on the steps in Algiers, Elia Kazan's girl from the film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn climbs the stairs of a working-class apartment building in New York, and so on.

With his simple, flowing text, Vasilis Ladas captivates us with his images and reminds us of messages from old "revolutionary" times.