Tales of the Heart: Dreams and Memories of a Lifetime (review)

Abstract

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.