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412 Western American Literature urban and rural immigrant fam ily experiences. Hers are the fam ilies of urban workers and entrepreneurs, miners, and those who go “out to sheep” in the arid, mountainous countryside. A 1939 setting for the opening story and a 1995 end­ ing for the final story provide the book’s chronological contours. Gendered immigrant fam ily experience is of special interest to Papanikolas, whose complex fem ale protagonists often feel resentment (usually suppressed rather than overtly expressed) at the male privilege that suffuses their culture of origin; simultaneously they retain significant, even fierce, attachment to that cul­ ture. The stories’ women also demonstrate considerable ambivalence toward the Mormon culture of Salt Lake City and toward the larger culture of the American West, which often clashes with Greek culture while inexorably reshaping it in som e measure. Educational opportunity, for instance, appeals strongly to some fem ale characters, but “overeducation” creates anxiety about decreased chances o f marriage within the Greek American community. One woman observes that arranged marriages spared Greek women the pressure felt by American women to attract eligible men. Food, religion, and language appear in the stories as vital conduits of tradi­ tion, ritual, and culture. Use o f a proverb for the book’s title and title story is especially appropriate since proverbs, most often conveyed from parent to child, are sown throughout the stories as seeds and bearers of culture. Paradoxically, whatever ambivalence some of Papanikolas’s characters may feel toward Greek culture, loss of that culture constitutes loss o f voice, individuality, community, meaning, and even life— all inextricably interrelated. W hile struggling to reclaim those losses, Athena, the title story’s protagonist can only whisper, “I gave up who I w as.” But even a whispered refusal to be com pletely silenced proves ultimately strengthening. In these substantial stories, which reflect a quiet and subtle beauty, to be individually intact is to be at least somewhat culturally intact. -Picture Bride. By Yoshiko Uchida. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. 216 pages, $14.95.) After President Theodore R oosevelt signed the Immigration Act of February 20, 1907, otherwise known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement, some remaining loopholes allowed sizable numbers of Japanese to immigrate. Among these loopholes was the custom of “picture marriages,” a variation of the usual arranged nuptial, accounting for the jump from 410 married issei women in the United States in 1900 to 22,193 by 1920. During this time, a man seeking a wife could send his photograph back to Japan, where a go-between (usually a fam ily member) would shop it around until G a y n e l l G a v in U n iv e r s it y o f N e b r a s k a - L in c o l n Reviews 413 finding a suitable mate agreeable to the long, hard journey to America ending with marriage to a virtual stranger. It is here where the story of twenty-one-yearold Hana Omiya begins in Yoshiko Uchida’s novel, Picture Bride. The arrival of women such as Hana changed the community of Japanese America from pre­ dominantly bachelor laborers to fam ilies seeking permanent settlement. W hile the literary theme of separation is widespread, almost a necessity throughout western historical fiction, the raw edge of Japanese-American histo­ ry is particularly rife with involuntary and unplanned disconnection. In her story spanning Hana’s life from 1917 through 1943, Uchida illustrates this severance with simple grace in many ways, clim axing at Topaz, a World War II internment camp in the Utah desert. Because readers are perhaps most familiar with racism regarding Native Americans, Uchida’s novel is an important voice for expelling the myth of “give me your tired, your poor” and the conception that all settlers follow ed a compass pointing westward. Unadorned by unnecessary complexity of subplot and m otive, the book carries readers along by the strong, emotional undertow of Hana and Taro’s conjoined life in Oakland, a life more often heart­ breaking than triumphant. If the sim plicity of the story is its strength, it is also its weakness. Readers would do...

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