For a decade and a half I´ve been working on a series of novels, under the general title of Generations of Leaves, which concern the Straton family (the first generation hails from Greece) as it becomes "Americanized." The first novel in the series, The Open Hearth, depicts Gus Straton, an immigrant to Western Pennsylvania, who has come to America as an adolescent to pay off his father´s debts and provide his three sisters with dowries. To survive and fulfill his responsibilities, he must deal with bravos hired to intimidate workers, as well as struggle through the "Great Steel Strike" of 1919. He leaves the Steel Works to open a bakery with a friend, finds himself locked in conflict with the local KKK that has targeted businesses owned by "foreigners", and returns to Greece to find a wife. He marries Marianthe, a woman of the Anatolian middle class whose family, as a result of the Asia Minor Disaster of 1922, has lost its wealth and left her without a dowry. With this strong, fearless woman, he raises a family during the Depression. He helps form the Steelworkers´ Union during the "Little Steel Strike" of 1937.
While describing the events of the turbulent twentieth century, The Open Hearth chronicles the gradual Americanization of a Greek family, an age-old process familiar to many of us but not as consciously as it is depicted in the foreground of this novel with the major events of political and society history looming in the background..
Though the Stratons are a unique family whose origins and history are specific, The Open Hearth makes this one-of-a-kind family representative of a group that has been relatively silent in American fiction. Aside from the fiction of Harry Mark Petrakis, Helen Papanikolas, and Elia Kazan, not many novels and short stories depict the lives of Greeks and Greek Americans in American letters. Even Doulis´s own earlier novels, Path for our Valor and The Quarries of Sicily, are more mainstream in their focus, the former using only Sergeant Gus Damianos (he appears again, but in childhood and adolescence) in the trio of protagonists, while the latter novel, set on the Island of Chios during the military dictatorship, is more Greek than Greek-American in orientation.
Since it depicts the struggles of the first, immigrant generation, however, the reach of the Stratons in The Open Hearth can be considered a modest one, since Costa Straton, the steel worker, and Marianthe, an intelligent and educated woman, are at the level where the slightest political and economic problem presents them with major turbulence.
Divided into three parts, The Open Hearth documents in Book One, From Hell to Breakfast, the life of the bachelors struggling to fulfill the obligations placed on older sons to help their families (or, rather, their fathers´ families) in Greece work their way out of debt and marry off their dowerless sisters. This was a separate culture of men without women in a society suspicious of their foreignness. Marianthe, Book Two, depicts the dowerless bride´s uprootedness from the gracious and comfortable life of Anatolia and her adjustment to marriage as the wife of a small businessman. Later, because of the Depression, she descends to the proletarian class and is the mother of a growing family of children who, despite her fondest hopes and struggles, become American. With others in their community, and Costa as the first president, they struggle to build a church that takes its place in the mosaic of America. But the Depression brings them and the nation down, they lose their business, and are threatened with dissolution as a family. Finally,
Book Three, Not That They Starve, is possibly unique in American fiction in its
depiction of what has come down in history as "The Little Steel Strike"
and the life of workers in the Monongahela Valley as they wage an epic battle for union representation.
The novel is the product of visceral knowledge and research into ethnic and labor history that place it among works like Giants in the Earth by
O.E. Rolvaag, My Antonia by Willa Cather, Christ in Concrete by Pietro de Donato, Call it Sleep by Henry Roth, Out of This Furnace by Thomas Bell, and The Godfather by Mario Puzo.
BOOK ONE: From Hell to Breakfast begins in Steeltown of Western Pennsylvania during the era of the First Balkan War, which for Greece precedes
the Great War (before we started counting them). Costa Straton, who comes to America at the age of fourteen to provide his sisters with dowries, is drawn into conflict with men who are vying with each other for the good will of the steel men, police forces, and bravos hired to keep control of the immigrant workers.
Costa Straton (his surname was changed from Efstratiou after he participated in the Ludlow Strike in Colorado), assumes that his father is
a worthy steward of the money he dutifully sends home, expecting that after his sisters are married, he would have a nest egg secured for him on his return. As the war inhibits contact with the Europe that most young men left as boys,
a society of men takes shape. Costa works in virtual serfdom while the Bolshevik Revolution, the Armistice, the influenza epidemic, the Great Steel Strike of 1919, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan shape his everyday life, involving
him in conflicts he cannot avoid. These world-shattering events are seen through the point of view of an intelligent and honorable young man whose rudimentary education effectively bars him from the leadership role that should be his because of his talents and decency.
He and a friend buy a business and become bakers. He organizes resistance to the KKK and is asked to become leader of the Greeks, all bachelors at this point, but he declines the honor. It is time for him to return to Greece to find a wife.
BOOK TWO: Marianthe . He returns home just before the last phase of the Greco-Turkish War. None of the girls shown him as prospective brides
please Costa, but Marianthe Pappadis, the older daughter of a Smyrna merchant, with
whom he becomes friendly is not an appropriate mate for a villager. At this time, the political events in Asia Minor, already desperate, take a
disastrous turn. The Greek army is defeated, and Marianthe´s family, along with a million and a half Greeks living in Asia Minor since ancient times, is uprooted, their property lost, a brother killed. The fact that she is now without a dowry means that she can marry Costa, whom she had grown to respect and love and who, because of his fathers lack of foresight, has no property in the village.
he couple leaves Greece for Steeltown and begin a family that by the novels end numbers five children. They become part of an immigrant community that incorporates itself, is divided between married men and bachelors, and finally succeeds in building a church. Over the years, however, the family becomes alienated from Greece, distant from political and social problems that no longer make sense to them and that are virtually foreign to their current concerns. This alienation is reflected in the way the other immigrant families feel toward their homeland.
The economic stress caused by the Stock Market crash of 1929 results in the gradual shifting of authority in the family from Costa to Marianthe. Costa loses the bakery and is compelled to accept the job of driving his own truck for the new owner, an old enemy of his from their bachelor days.
BOOK THREE: Not That They Starve. By now the Stratons are deep into the Depression. Costa earns money any way he can, mainly by delivering coal from bootleg mines and vegetables from local farms to various restaurants in the Valley. But again he is getting in trouble with the authorities, in this case with three men from RAID, an organization very much like the Pinkertons, hired by the new owner of the Steeltown Works to intimidate the local workers.
After Roosevelt wins the election, Costa, who finds occasional work under the Blue Eagle, is baffled by the complexity of the New Deal. At this time, a good friend from bachelor days, Nick Damianos (father of Sergeant Gus Damianos, who appears in Path for our Valor) is murdered, certainly by RAID. Violence in the factory town becomes an everyday matter, and a series of murders of RAID men, responsible for killing Damianos, stuns the leadership of the Steeltown Works.
Nicky Straton, the first born, is old enough now to be aware of things his father is too insulated to learn, and tells Costa that Gus Damianos and another young man, both neighbors and family friends, had retaliated against RAID for the murder of Gus´s father. The industrial and moral conflict that played out in Western Pennsylvania, is covered by local newspapers owned by the Pittsburgh elite not at all chastened by the changed national and municipal political climate, for the Governor, and the State Police, are not functionaries of the steel men but neutral.
As this drama is being played out, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) is locked in combat with the company union to represent the workers. The "Little Steel" strike proves to be bloody and violent, because the owners of the Works, unlike the leaders of US Steel, "Big Steel", refuse to negotiate with the union. The reason is that war is threatened in Europe and orders for steel make labor peace attractive for "Big Steel", while the owners of "Little Steel", a group of independent steel corporations, think that they can crush the union movement. It is misfortune of Costa Straton and his family that the Steeltown Works were purchased in the early 1030s by Davies, who is adamant against the SWOC.
The concluding sections of the novel depict the final violence -- with Costa in a central role -- that occurs before then-Governor Earle of Pennsylvania declares martial law.
