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Summary
Summary
Pears on a Willow Tree is a multigenerational roadmap of love and hate, distance and closeness, and the lure of roots that both bind and sustain us all.
The Marchewka women are inseparable. They relish the joys of family gatherings; from preparing traditional holiday meals to organizing a wedding in which each of them is given a specific task -- whether it's sewing the bridal gown or preserving pickles as a gift to the newlyweds. Bound together by recipes, reminiscences and tangled relationships, these women are the foundation of a dignified, compassionate family--one that has learned to survive the hardships of emigration and assimilation in twentieth-century America.
But as the century evolves, so does each succeeding generation. As the older women keep a tight hold on the family traditions passed from mother to daughter, the younger women are dealing with more modern problems, wounds not easily healed by the advice of a local priest or a kind word from mother.
Amy is separated by four generations from her great-grandmother Rose, who emigrated from Poland. Rose's daughter Helen adjusted to the family's new home in a way her mother never could, while at the same time accepting the importance of Old Country ways. But Helen's daughter Ginger finds herself suffocating within the close-knit family, the first Marchewka woman to leave Detroit for the adventure of life beyond the reach of her mother and grandmother.
It's in the American West that Giner raises her daughter Amy, uprooted from the safety of kitchens perfuned by the aroma of freshly baked poppy seed cake and pierogi made by hand by generations of women. But Amy is about to realize that there may be room in her heart for both the Old World and the New.
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A family saga comprising 16 self-contained chapters, each a monologue (or dialogue) featuring one of four women in a prolific Polish-American clan, this compelling debut is an example of the novel-in-stories at its best. In prose as plain and four-square as her protagonists, Pietrzyk traces the family's evolution from 1919 through the late 1980s, from its transplantation to the U.S.specifically, Detroitthrough three generations, showing how the older women (who privately refer to themselves as Marchewskas, after matriarch Rose's maiden name) preserve ethnic traditions and family customs and why their daughters shake them off. Of the 10 women of the Marchewska family, the book focuses upon Rose, her daughter Helen, granddaughter Ginger (the rebel who abandons Detroit and settles in Phoenix) and great-granddaughter Amy. The voices of these four women are quite differentRose's primal and earthy; Helen's pathetic; Ginger's cool, irreverent, iconoclastic and questioning; Amy's tempered and mature beyond her years. Reading this novel is like leafing through a family photo album (one of Pietrzyk's favored motifs) except that, once you pick up this book, it's hard to put it down. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Excerpts
Excerpts
Pears on a Willow Tree Chapter One Amy -- 1988 After I moved to Thailand to teach English to rich schoolchildren, my mother took up letter writing, and often she enclosed old photographs with her letters. "Remember when we took this picture?" she'd write. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't. Of all the photos she sent, I kept only one, a picture of my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and me, six or seven years old, lined up in front of my great-grandmother's stove, taken maybe twenty years ago. It was my great-grandfather's camera. Just before he pushed the button, I remember him saying, "Four generations of Krawczyk women. Will you look at that." My great-grandmother said, 'These are Marchewka women," using her maiden name. "That's who we are, Marchewkas. Marchewka women." As she spoke, she squeezed my shoulder hard, pressing almost down to the bone, and I wasn't used to thinking of myself as part of this tiny, tightly made woman I saw only once a year. My great-grandfather took the picture, and the four of us stepped apart, shaking back our hair, plucking at our clothing, bending away smiles. Someone checked on my sleeping baby brother, maybe the phone rang. We were at my great-grandmother's house because she was surprised my mother had never learned how to make pierogi , Polish dumplings. "There's no secret," my great-grandmother said as she opened and closed kitchen cupboards, barely glancing in them to set her hands on exactly what she wanted. "Don't all the time be looking first for shortcuts." I loved how she talked, her thick words like blocks stacking into a story. "There must be a secret," my mother said. "Some special trick you can show me." "No," my great-grandmother said. "No secrets. Everything is here in front of you. Just watch. That's the secret, for you who must have one. Watch and listen." My mother tied an apron around her waist. "I'm watching," she said. But I saw her face turn to the window. She didn't care that she'd never made pierogi . My mother didn't like Detroit; and as soon as she could, she'd left for the farthest place she thought of, which happened to be Phoenix. She loved the flat, wide city, the desert enclosing it like a moat. When she said, "Valley of the Sun," you could almost see it the way she saw it, waves of sunlight rolling down the mountains to collect in a warm shimmering pool. But once a year she went back to Detroit. Everyone in my mother's family lived in Detroit or its close-in suburbs: aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, great-aunts, great-uncles. Any relation you could think of. Our stay in Detroit was a string of visits to houses that smelled and looked identical, musty dollhouses left behind after the little girl grew up. You could count on finding the same things inside each: A glass dish with cellophane-wrapped candies on the coffee table. One or two lamp shades still shrink-wrapped in plastic. The freezer packed with Tupperware and old bread bags holding enough food to last two winters. Conversation in these houses moved around and around in loops, but it never tightened into a knot. Or maybe we were the ones who didn't fit. After all, their news was shared over cups of coffee in the kitchen instead of through mimeographed Christmas letters jammed last-minute into a card. We were always "Ginger's kids, way out west," and no one from the family came to visit us. Many times I asked my mother why she left Detroit, and sometimes she said "always that same gray sky overhead" and other times she said "too much bustle" -- but once she told me she had to escape the clock on the fireplace mantel. My great-grandmother had given it to my grandmother as a wedding present, and it struck every quarter hour, the chimes stretching themselves longer and longer as the quarters passed, and my mother said there was never a moment that she was not aware that time was slipping by, and that every chime meant something had been lost. I remembered that clock on my grandmother's mantel, but I liked following its steady march through day and night. My great-grandmother rolled up the sleeves of her dress and smiled as she gave me a small knife and a mound of mushrooms to slice. "Do you cook, Amy? When I was a girl, my mother took sick one winter, so it was me and my sisters working to feed a family of eight three meals a day." "Amy bakes cookies," my mother said. My great-grandmother said, "Cookies won't feed a family. You pay attention now, learn yourself some good cooking." "We can be thankful she doesn't have to feed a family," my grandmother said. "There was no choice for me, Helen," my great-grandmother said. "If I didn't cook, we didn't eat. Life was simple that way. There were two choices only, cook and eat, don't cook and go hungry. No, like this," and she took the knife from me and turned the mushrooms into tiny pieces with a quick tick-tick-tick. I watched my mother and grandmother pass a look between them, each blaming the other for what my great-grandmother had said. 'Those are the old ways, Ma," my grandmother said. "Times have changed." They seemed to be words she'd spoken many times. But my great-grandmother continued: No one said so, but we all knew. There was no shame in only two choices, living or dying." My mother stroked my hair. But things are different for us," she said. "We have choices." She was almost talking to herself, not to me, not to my great-grandmother, who moved around her kitchen, finding a frying pan, unwrapping a stick of butter, no pauses to stop and think what to do next. My grandmother said, 'Are we here for pierogi or nonsense chatter?" Then my great-grandmother dropped handfuls of flour onto a wooden slab, sending up a white cloud that made my mother twist and sneeze into her shoulder. Pears on a Willow Tree . Copyright © by Leslie Pietrzyk. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Pears on a Willow Tree by Leslie Pietrzyk All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Shortcuts: Amy--1988 | p. 1 |
Stories from America: Rose--1919 | p. 9 |
Cravings: Helen--1940 | p. 18 |
Blue Beads: Ginger--1969 | p. 33 |
Wedding Day: Rose, Helen, Amy and Ginger--1967 | p. 52 |
No Last Names: Ginger--1973 | p. 75 |
All I Know to Tell You: Ginger--1974 | p. 103 |
Wigilia: The Vigil: Helen--1958 | p. 120 |
The Wanting-To-Be-An-Artist Summer: Amy--1975 | p. 133 |
Those Places I've Been: Helen--1967 | p. 151 |
Things Women Know: Rose--1925-35 | |
I Want You to Have This Now: Helen and Amy--1979 | p. 183 |
Farang: Amy--1987 | p. 201 |
Best Friends: Ginger--1987 | p. 222 |
Braiding Bread: Amy--1989 | p. 237 |
Pears on a Willow Tree: Amy--Present | p. 268 |