Open Hearth: The First Generation (review)

Thomas Doulis, The Open Hearth: The First Generation, A Novel of Immigration. Philadelphia: Xlibris. 2000. Pp. 480. $21.24.

The history of immigration is considered an integral part of the narrative of the United States, informing the discourse of the "American Dream" and providing ample material for scholars and artists alike. In the case of the Greeks, Helen Papanikolas and Harry Mark Petrakis have, most notably, written histories, novels, and stories of immigration. In this long, ambitious historical novel, Thomas Doulis attempts to place the personal experiences of a Greek immigrant family in the broader perspective of the great historical events of the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, he narrates the everyday "history" of a fledgling Greek community struggling to keep its identity in a strange country where assimilation is a threat to tradition, language, and religion, and where the vicissitudes of the steel industry take a high human toll. The first in what is intended to be a series of novels called Generations of Leaves, The Open Hearth spans the period between the first Balkan War and the "Little Steel" Strike of 1937. In each of its three sections Doulis explores what he sees as the major trends in the development of the immigrant community and juxtaposes this tale with historical events and social, political, and economic developments taking place in the United States. The novel tells the story of Costas Efstratiou (known to the American characters as Gus Straton), an immigrant from the village of Mastichochora, on the island of Chios, who becomes a steelworker in the Monongahela Valley, Pennsylvania, around the turn of the last century.

Book one ("From Hell to Breakfast") finds Straton in "Steeltown," a composite portrait of the typical mill town, where he and other single, male immigrants work long, grueling days in order to send their extra money back to Greece. In Straton's case he believes he is helping his family pay for the dowries of his sisters, but instead, his father squanders whatever he sends home. These men are "birds of passage" (16); sojourners who hope make enough money to return quickly to Greece. Doulis depicts a transient "community" of men that is fractious, divided in terms of politics, regional origins and social class. What begins to unite them, however, is their experience as laborers, the exploitation they suffer at the steel mill, the terrorism of the local Ku Klux Klan, as well as the church services they begin to hold in the kafenio on Sundays. The larger historical background that informs this part of the book consists of the First World War, the labor union movement (with ample references to events such as the Ludlow massacre), the influenza epidemic, and the rise of the KKK. Where Doulis's prose is at its best is in the vivid, highly detailed, realistic depictions of working conditions in the steel mill. Doulis also exhibits a quiet sensitivity to the developing relationships between his characters, as in the case of Costas and "the Pananos." The two men lead the immigrant community in the cause of defeating the violence of the K.K.K., weather the storm of unsuccessful strikes at the mill, and eventually leave it to open a bakery together.

After Costas's bakery becomes successful, he decides, in book two ("Marianthe") that it is time to return to Greece, settle his affairs with his family, and find a wife. What is evident here is that Costas feels no sense of "nostos," (return); instead, village life seems limited after having seen a wider world:

He'd rushed to the Sterna like a man obsessed by family and village, only to learn that he had wasted his youth for people who wanted still more than he had sent them. . . . Didn't he own a bakery? What did he want with an olive press, with grazing land or orchards and groves? (165)

Costas's nostalgia for...