A Greek Odyssey in the American West

Helen Papanikolas has been the storyteller of Greek America. Recently described by Miriam Murphy as "a unique voice in America" (in Worth their Salt: Notable but Often Unnoted Women of Utah, edited by Colleen Whitley, 243-256 [Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996]), Papanikolas has made it her life's scholarly project to collect and disseminate often unnoted Greek American voices. Whether in the historical documentation of the lives of Greek immigrant women, the collection and prefacing of oral histories, the ethnohistoric accounts of pioneer immigrants, or her most recent literary venture into fiction featuring Greek America, Papanikolas has consistently produced evocative, thickly textured narratives in the best tradition of ethnographic realism.

Her painstaking interest to document ethnohistorical accounts fits in well with our era's almost compulsory concern with preserving the past. Yet her project sidesteps the excesses of our "heritage age," which can be arguably associated with the superficial production of history in commodified heritage sites, the selective preservation of national monuments at the expense of minor histories, and the narcissistic overindulgence of narratives devoted to self. Rather, Papanikolas's documentation of the memory of the past can be situated in the post-national phase of remembering and commemorating. This involves the production of socially embedded small narratives about often marginalized pasts that expand knowledge, challenge taken-for-granted assumptions and, in doing so, enable the rethinking of past social practices as well as present ones. Our thinking of the present cannot be divorced from our understanding of the past.

As a multilayered account of the Greek American past weaving together personal, family, and immigrant history, Helen Papanikolas's A Greek Odyssey in the American West (originally published as / Emily-George [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987] and reviewed in JMGS 6:156-157 by Eva Topping) offers itself for reflection on the present use of memories activated by accounts of the past. Thus the major concern I bring to my reading of this book involves the following questions: In what manner can a book on the Greek immigrant past intervene in our thinking about Greek America today? What does its evocation of historical memory accomplish and how does it affect our present conceptualization of Greek America?

A Greek Odyssey in the American West defies classification in a single genre. In moving between the personal and the collective, the historical and the ethnographic, it activates elements of autobiography, family history, immigrant lore, historical evidence, and ethnographic observation to evoke the circumstances leading to Greek emigration and to describe the social and economic dimensions of early immigrant life in America. The book traces the life histories of the author's parents, Emily (Emilia) and George (Yoryis). Thus it takes us through a journey to the places of their birth, their struggles with poverty, their sojourns in , their relentless efforts to create a place for themselves in the host country. Their journeys repeat customary routes connecting places historically associated with a Greek presence. Yoryis's effort "to escape the village" (102) leads to a short-lived sojourn in Alexandria, Egypt. Emilia moves to Thessaloniki to work as a domestic servant and later follows her employers to Constantinople. As part of the Greek wave of immigration to in the 1900s, Yoryis's and Emilia's westward migratory routes add new toponymies, ones that we now associate with Greek diasporic presence. Their odyssey takes them through the predominantly male immigrant worlds of Greek enclaves in New York City, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Chicago, Pueblo (Colorado), Great Falls (Montana), Gary (Indiana), Denver, Salt Lake City. Other less well known sites mark migratory routes of labor gangs indelibly inscribed in immigrant memory—Yoryis "would remember their names until he died: Rawlins, Kemmerer, Converse, and Lyman, Wyoming; Elva, Meadows, Council, Evergreen, Payette, Rigby, and Lorenzo, Idaho" (209).

A Greek Odyssey in the American West is a text obstinately positioned against amnesia. It pays tribute to remembering by refusing to succumb to the processes leading...