An Amulet of Greek Earth: Generations of Immigrant Folk Culture (review)

Helen Papanikolas has long been the most influential chronicler of the Greek experience in America. Her work has always been characterized by rigorous examination of all aspects of the immigrant experience with a keen eye for feminist issues and an incredible attention to detail. This lifetime labor has utilized techniques that range from formal historical studies and biographies to oral histories, memoirs, and fiction. She also has labored to create professionally-managed ethnic archives and she has sponsored the translation of immigrant writings into English. All of this accumulated sense of the story of the Greeks in America is evident in An Amulet of Greek Earth. Her focus is a topic that has always been a critical component of all of her previous efforts: the culture that the Greeks of the Great Migration (1880-1924) brought to the American shore.

The book is divided into three broad sections, although elements of any one section sometime also appear in the others. The grouping of six chapters titled Classical and Byzantine Greece deals with aspects of immigrant culture that Papanikolas believes are rooted in Classical and Byzantine Greece. The succeeding fifteen chapters of Nationhood and Exile explore the immediate soil for the culture that Greeks brought to America and illustrate how that culture first played out in the new world. And the fourteen chapters of Americanization examine the evolving nature of Greek culture in America.

Papanikolas terms the culture of the Greek immigrants as Romiosini, derived from Romaioi, the name Greeks adopted in the Byzantine period to indicate that the empire centered in Constantinople considered itself the continuation of the Roman Empire. Thus, Papanikolas's very terminology posits that immigrant culture was deeply rooted in the Byzantine, Alexandrian, and Classical periods that pre-dated the Ottomans. Papanikolas's departure point for this conclusion is existential: her first-hand knowledge of immigrant culture and her intellectual pursuit of its origins. Although her paramount concern always is the culture of the immigrants rather than the historic arcs of Hellenic civilization, she clearly takes issue with scholars who deny any vital cultural connection between contemporary and ancient Greece.

Papanikolas presents immigrant culture and its various sources as a folklorist might, by reproducing songs, cartoons, letters, diaries, poetry, artifacts, sketches, oral histories and other direct and personal expressions of the immigrants. Her literary canvas can be termed impressionistic in that its themes are easier to grasp at a distance as a coherent whole rather than through the examination of any one element close up. Unlike the blurs of an impressionist painter's details, however, her specific historical strokes are like the deep-focus techniques of modern cinema in which both foreground and background images remain in focus. Further elaborating her canvas are numerous photographs and drawings that sometimes relate directly to her text and sometimes are independent commentary. Like the individual stories they accompany, these images are important in and of themselves but they also take on a cumulative effect as we note recurring patterns of body language and other forms of visual expression. The Byzantine double eagle insignia featured early in the book becomes linked to the wooden pony with Greek references carved for a carousel in twentieth-century Missoula, Montana.

Academics will rightly complain that episodic accounts do not constitute a formal argument. They can assert that a particular custom presented as Greek may actually be regional. They will be able to list numerous exceptions to every generalization. They can even argue that the Classical elements in immigrant culture may just have been creations of the revolutionary epoch based on the past rather than elements that had endured for two millenniums. And why should Maria Callas have a chapter but not Elias Kazan? What are we to make of a section on the Greek press that only presents three newspapers? And...