The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree Thomas Doulis Helen Zeese Papanikolas, The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press. 1996. Pp. vii + 241. $27.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. Readers of JMGS should need no introduction to the work of Helen Papanikolas, who established her reputation initially as the ethnic historian of the Greeks of the inter-mountain states and produced austere monographs of the first generation of immigrants. Papanikolas adapted her skill as ethnic historian to suit the role of biographer in her fine Aimilia-Georgios = Emily-George (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987). Written with great scope and sympathy, this novelistic version of the marriage of two strangers—her parents—is a plain, unadorned, and profoundly moving narrative, richly comic in places. Small Bird, Tell Me: Stories of Greek Immigrants in Utah (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1993) shows Papanikolas’s struggle to free herself from the historian’s task, the embedding of necessary information in narrative, and to achieve fictional autonomy. Part of her problem is that she cannot be confident that her readers know enough of Greek-American culture to understand her fiction fully. She has made major strides with the present collection, however, and by and large achieves her goal, though she still grapples with the challenge of providing necessary information to the reader without overburdening her story. To use Percy Lubbock’s metaphor in The Craft of Fiction (New York: Scribner, 1921), she is stabilizing her ladder without leaning it against the wall of external reality, since as he points out, “there is no wall” for fiction “to stand against.” Technical information of impressive scope is skillfully embedded in these narratives, two of which, “County Hospital, 1939” and the title story, are novella length. The former contains observations of Depression era austerity seen through the point of view of Kallie Poulos, a medical technologist who must deal with peasant values of the Old World. Though she has gone to college and is a mature young woman, she must take a position secondary to her brother, who gets to drive the automobile bought explicitly for her use. The richly textured story is dense with contemporary scientific processes and with relatively few parenthetical asides meant to provide cultural information to non-Greek readers. Papanikolas does not take the easy way in defining the conflict her protagonist embodies: by educating herself, Kalliopi is narrowing her chances for finding an appropriate mate among Greek males. With little closure at the story’s end, the reader is left uncertain about what becomes of her. Using the point of view of three generations of Greek-American women, “Getting Ready for the Festival” is a study of manners and morals of a Utah Greek Orthodox church community. The oldest women are hardened, fixed by their immigrant and picture-bride status. It is their daughters, women born in this country rather than those who emigrated after the second world war, who try to cope with change. They grew up in a time when family secrets had to be kept “within four walls” and children would be beaten for revealing any detail that might harm a sister’s marital prospects. Now they live in a time when moral conduct, verbal expression in magazine subject-matter, and life styles have [End Page 158] loosened to tabloid vulgarity. Two young women, Tiffany, with her “surgically pretty nose,” and her friend Chrissie, listen to the conversations passively but judgmentally. Hovering over these themes are doubts about the prospects for the continuation of the festival as a way for the community to organize itself and support the Church. The out-marrying, primarily with Mormons, which is the major theme of the title story, is touched on here. In “Neither Nose Nor Ass,” two childhood friends, Greg and Manny, sons of old immigrants, marry twin sisters and progress though life from the 1930s to the 1970s. Greg, conservative and afflicted with ancestor-worship, is preoccupied with the achievement of Periclean Athens, while Manny, entrepreneurial and studiously anti-intellectual, is a counter to what he considers Greg’s flaws. Papanikolas, interested more in narrating external events...