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Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19.1 (2001) 182-184



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Book Review

Tales of the Heart: Dreams and Memories of a Lifetime


Harry Mark Petrakis. Tales of the Heart: Dreams and Memories of a Lifetime. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 1999. Pp. xii + 239. $25.00.

Harry Mark Petrakis's Tales of the Heart, a collection of short memoirs and articles, provides a glimpse, albeit indirect, of the way in which Petrakis reshaped his personal experiences into literature. Petrakis's short stories and novels gave [End Page 182] permanent literary form to the experience of the Greek immigrant to America. His characters, little people like most of the Greek immigrants I have known, struggle to make it in this country, sustained by their memories of village landscapes and loved ones they left behind. His stories ring true because his characters remind me of the old, worn out immigrant men--from shoe-shiners to gandy dancers--I worked beside in Montana. For example, the gambler who would show up where I shined shoes, carrying dollar bills in his tightly clenched fist ready for an afternoon of barbuti in the back room. Petrakis's stories are filled with longing for the villages these people left behind and to which they would never return because time had run out. His women remind me of my mother and other Greek women who married old men to escape the disgrace of spinsterhood and poverty and were still vigorous and youthful even as their men passed on. Throughout Petrakis's work, one finds an enthusiasm for life, and a love of the physical world, which engourages us to imagine Petrakis as a sort of Greek-American Kazantzakis.

Those expecting to learn about the intimate details of Petrakis's life in Tales of the Heart will be disappointed. Petrakis reveals just enough about his life to permit us to follow him as he abstracts his characters and turns them into myth. Petrakis tells us he gave up betting on horses to take up writing and that, during his first years as a writer and husband, his finances were so tight he had to give up his car because he could not afford plates or insurance. However, he provides little about his wife, Diana, or about their three sons. When he writes about his sons reaching maturity, for example, he does so by recalling the much earlier departure of the son of old friends and their grief.

Now . . . I understand what I could not fathom that night in Pittsburgh when our neighbors gave the farewell party for their sons: how almost all of life is made up of journeys, beginning with our own departures from our parents' houses, our leavetakings and homecomings, the decampments of our sons and daughters, the migration of birds over the track of forest and mountains, the swoopings of wind crossing and recrossing the land, all the recurring voyages and flights and partings carrying us toward that vast silence wherein we make the final, irrevocable journey each of us must travel alone.

There is a tendency throughout the autobiographical essays, which make up the better part of the book, to either ignore the punctual or to transform it into a lyrical prose that gives it the quality of myth.

Making an American of oneself while growing up in a family with Greek immigrant parents is not always easy. It must have been especially difficult for Petrakis because his father was a priest, yet there is little in these memoirs about his relationship with his father. Indirectly, we get a sense of how much his father meant to him when Petrakis describes his Easter visit to Argyroupolis, the village his father left in 1916 to serve a parish in Price, Utah. Petrakis attends a service performed by Father Joseph, his uncle, and a retired priest in his mid-eighties. As he watches the service he recognizes his father's scarlet and gold vestments sent to the old priest when they had grown worn:

I had experienced many Easters as a child...

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