Alexia: A Tale for Advanced Children, and: Re-telling the Tale: Poetry and Prose by Greek-Australian Women Writers (review)

Alexia and Re-telling the Tale grow out of the experiences of Greek-Australian women primarily during the last fifty years since, as Helen Nickas points out in her introduction to Alexia, Greek migration to Australia is mostly a post-World War II phenomenon. Both books serve to expand the field of Greek immigration literature, which in the U.S. is most notably represented by the stories of Harry Mark Petrakis and Theano Papazoglou-Margari, some of the novels of Elia Kazan, and, more recently, by the prose of Helen Papanikolas and poetry of Nicholas Samaras. Nickas and Dounis explain in their introduction to Re-telling the Tale that their decision to provide bilingual texts was based on the use of both languages by the authors of these texts and on the potential of reaching audiences in both Australia and Greece. I suspect that an additional reason may have been their own inclination to give both languages equal status and value.

Alexia is much more than an immigration tale, even though it begins with the title character’s arrival in the “new world.” And, despite its subtitle, it is not only for “advanced children.” It is the story of a bright and observant young woman told by a sophisticated third-person narrator who employs the fairy tale format and such devices as irony, sarcasm, and a touch of humor to comment on language and people. In the course of this story, Alexia learns important lessons: that men belong to a superior club and women to an inferior one (62), that she must hide her private feelings and project a happy public image, that it is difficult to become friends with people “who talk with their lips only” (68), and why the “natives” appear so distant and unfriendly. Most importantly, she slowly comes to understand a great deal about language. The moral of the tale, Nickas writes in her introduction, “is that Alexia, the child, has a future, unlike her parents and older brother for whom . . . it is too late to learn new skills and adapt” (19). Although this is borne out in the text, which ends with Alexia’s enrollment in the university, Kefala’s writing indicates that the world is not so simple. If it were, every immigrant child would have a guaranteed future. For both Alexia and Kefala (who learned Romanian, French, and Greek before she learned English), language is not to be taken for granted, and finding one’s way through it requires constant effort.

Nickas’s translation of this imaginative and thought-provoking “fairy tale” flows as easily and effortlessly as the original. Her introduction not only serves to put Alexia in context for a broad English-speaking and Greek-speaking audience but also makes some good points that I wish she had pursued further (to show, for example, how Kefala has turned “marginality” to advantage). Overall, this is a handsome and carefully prepared volume that is bound to please.

Re-telling the Tale is the result of a conference on Greek women writers organized by Konstandina Dounis in Melbourne in May 1992 at which many Greek and Greek-Australian women were invited to read from their works. The editors indicate in their introduction that they were “astounded” by the stories the women told—stories that add up to what they term “a remarkable tale of migration and settlement” made all the more interesting by “its female voice and perspective.” Thus, even before the conference ended, they had decided to capture this “tale...