I’ll be reading one of my Greek American stories this Monday night, June 18, at The Penny Farthing!
The Storytellers event, hosted by C3, starts at 7 and will be in the super cool downstairs speakeasy of The Penny Farthing at 103 3rd Avenue (@ 13th Street) in New York City.
Hope to see you there!
When I was a little girl, my father used to surprise me with roses. Most of the gardening my father did was of a practical nature: cucumber and tomato plants, the occasional “karpouzi” (watermelon) if the raccoons didn’t get to it first (they always got to it first). He had grown up on a farm in Greece, and gardening was not a hobby so much as a way of life and a means toward putting food on the table. There were very few flowers in our garden in New Jersey.
In our backyard, there was a tattered fence that separated our yard from a little brook. It was here that he planted roses. In the spring, the thorny bushes climbed up the fence in a tangled mess. Then one summer morning, while I was still asleep, they bloomed pink, yellow, white, and red, opening their petals up to the blue, blue sky. My father would cut these beautiful roses and present them to me. He told me I was a delicate flower.
I’ve been swirling in these memories of my father out in the garden, as I’ve been writing my memoir.
All the endangered language research I’ve been doing seeped its way into the rough draft of my memoir. Below is a scene in which I encounter two darker-skinned boys at the Greek Consulate in New York City. From the looks of them, I gather that they must be Albanians. As I’m dealing with my own language issues at the Consulate, I begin to think about theirs. This section turned out to be too Wikipedia-ish in comparison to the lighter, humorous tone of that chapter in my memoir, so I was advised to take it out. Still, I found the subject matter fascinating, and so I’m posting it here as an outtake.
Two dark-skinned boys in their teens or twenties—it was hard to tell—filled out paperwork at the long table. They wore motorcycle-style jackets that made them look tough but in more of a poor than badass look. I wondered if they were perhaps Albanian refugees. Cham Albanians began migrating to Greece during the Middle Ages. They speak the Cham Albanian language, a type of Tosk Albanian that was the language of the most well-known bejtexhinj, Muhamet Kyçyku, first poet of the Albanian National Renaissance. Bejtexhinj is the oftentimes religious poetry written in Albanian with Arabic alphabet and Persian, Turkish, and Arabic words, that began in the eighteenth-century to rebel against the influence of the Ottoman Empire. During that time and also in the early twentieth century, Albanians known as Arvanites came to Greece as well. The Tosk Albanian dialect they speak, known as Arvanitika, is now an endangered language, as they assimilate into Greek culture. Though sometimes Arvanitika is used interchangeably, the Orthodox Albanians who in the 1920s came to northeastern Greece, namely to the areas of Western Thrace and Greek Macedonia, are called Shqiptars. They speak the Northern Tosk Albanian. Although many Arvanitika fought against the Ottomans in the Greek War for Independence from 1821 to 1832, by World War II the Cham Albanians had sided with Italy and Germany and had to flee from Greece to Albania, Turkey, and the United States. After the fall of Communism in 1991, another group of Albanians came over to Greece to escape economic depravity. Today, most Albanians living in Greece self-identify as Greek; they have converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity and speak the Greek language. Now, listening in on the two boys consulting each other for their paperwork, I couldn’t tell whether they spoke an Albanian dialect or Greek.
I wasn’t a fan girl when I was a teen. I never really had the audacity to write a letter to an author or musician or to stand in line to ask for their autographs. These were important people with busy lives. I didn’t want to interrupt their work with my silly, affectionate musings. I had too much respect for them—and too much pride. I would’ve been crushed if they’d turned me down.
That wasn’t the case with sixteen-year-old Bruce McAllister. In 1963, he sent off a survey to the most famous authors of the day, including my personal favorites, Jack Kerouac and Saul Bellow. And they wrote him back.
The Paris Review published these letters, in which the authors answer McAllister’s survey about symbolism.
Jack Kerouac’s response:
Symbolism is alright in “Fiction” but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.
I find his use of the word “simply” so fascinating. The response could be matter-of-fact (I’m just telling a story and not thinking about writerly devices) or it could be methodology (I tell stories in a simple manner and don’t put symbols in it).
A few months ago, someone read a portion of the memoir I’m writing and said they saw symbols pertaining to two of the people in the story. They suggested I push those symbols further. It was an interesting conversation because I was simply writing true life events, and the symbol they saw for one of the people just happened to be something central to who they are. It’s something I associated with the person long before they became a “character” with “symbols,” similar to the ideas I wrote about in my Burnside Writers Collective essay “Coffee and Portraiture and the Associations We Make.” The dangerous part, though, in assigning symbols in real life stories is that life and people are complex, not easily contained, shifting. So when my reader pointed out the obvious “symbol” of one “character,” they immediately leapt to the conclusion that the other character was in contrast to that person and deserving of an opposite symbol. Maybe there’s some validity to that idea in fiction, but in real life people don’t exist simply to define, parallel, or contrast other people.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
It’s been four years since I’ve seen my brother.
About five years ago my brother moved to Greece. He was twenty years old at the time. He’d been enrolled in undergrad in Boston and decided to move to Greece and go to school there.
I didn’t want my little brother to leave. I told him he could live with me. But he left anyway. I suppose it made sense for him. The rest of our family was already living there.
I visited the first summer after he moved to Greece. I intended to visit again the year after that. I really did. But, I didn’t make it that year. And I haven’t make it in the years that have followed.
I have excuses reasons. Lots of them. I moved twice during that time period. One of the moves was an out-of-state move. (If moving from one side of the George Washington Bridge to the other counts.) I wanted to travel to more places than just Greece. I’ve transitioned between three different jobs, making accruing time off from work more difficult. I started grad school.
The decision not to go to Greece felt right each time. It seemed “practical.” The economy was plummeting, and I had to count pennies. These were years of upheaval, transition, exploration with where I lived and where I worked and what I did in my free time. But now I wonder how it got to be four years since I’ve seen my brother. Now I question what being “practical” really means.
I’ll be reading from a story about the summer before my brother moved to Greece tonight at Redeemer. You can register for free to attend. Hope to see you there!
Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer, editor, writing teacher, and speaker based in New York City.
She is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of "Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road.'"
You can email her at stephanie_701 {@} yahoo.com
Stephanie Nikolopoulos 