Harry mark petrakis biography of michael

by Tina Sfondeles

At 91, Greek-American author Harry Mark Petrakis still lives and breathes Chicago.

It’s the city’s South Side where he watched his father, a Greek-Orthodox priest, help immigrants find faith while struggling to start a life and make ends meet in America. And in the South Loop, where he opened a short-lived restaurant that inspired his creative nature.

The faces he saw, the struggles of immigrants and the stories he heard inspired the characters he’d create in short stories and novels in a career that has spanned decades.

“We had as many as a dozen hobos who would sit and tell marvelous stories. I’d be sitting and listening to their stories,” Petrakis said. “I suspect some were great liars. The girl whose boyfriend had left her and she was on her way to Chicago to kill him and his girlfriend. I didn’t believe her, but these were wonderful stories, and I learned from them.”

Petrakis speaks the way he writes, full of colorful and eloquent words, like he’s writing the story of his life. Earlier this month, he traveled from his home in Chesterton, Indiana, to Chicago’s National Hellenic Museum to receive the Fuller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

His son John, a screenwriting teacher at the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago, introduced him. Petrakis became so overcome with emotion by his son’s words that he had to pause before beginning his speech.

“Many families have credos, words they live by, such as ‘when the going gets tough, the tough gets going,’ or ‘every journey begins with the first step.’ The Petrakis family credo, my father once said, is ‘Nobody suffers in silence.’ How could we possibly be mute when there are so many wonderful words out there to describe the way that life has thrown us curves, brushed us back or plunked us right

By Nicholas Cotros

(Harry Mark Petrakis, the legendary author of 24 legendary books, most-notably of Greek-American life, died this past February at his longtime home in Chesterton, Indiana at the age of 97.

“He passed away imperceptibly, like the flutter of a sparrow’s wing, seemingly without struggle, with my brother and his wife by his bedside,” his son Mark Petrakis told the Chicago Sun-Times. Author Stuart Dybek called him “a major figure, certainly in 20 century Chicago literature. He was part of a movement that was national at the time, with Chicago in the forefront, in which America claimed its identity through its ethnic writers.”

A last interview was with writer Nicholas Cotros.)

March 25th, 2021 is the 200-year anniversary of Greek freedom: Greek Independence Day. Last year, I was introduced to the work of Harry Mark Petrakis, the Greek-American novelist who first detailed the events of this war in English, in his epic novels The Hour of the Bell and The Shepherds of Shadows.

Soon though, I learned that the life and work of Petrakis far exceed his recounting of these historical events. In fact, his work, beginning with the sale of his first short story to The Atlantic in 1957, has long-chronicled the many struggles and triumphs of immigrants and other working-class peoples, like the Greek shop-owners of Chicago’s once-thriving “Greek Town.” who are at the heart of his short stories and novels.

Last year, Petrakis and I spoke via telephone several times. We discussed his novels, short stories, and life. At ninety-seven years old, Petrakis is kind and thoughtful. He often paused before speaking, as if searching for certain words before sharing them aloud. Laughing, he said, “Nick, it’s been a journey, and I’ve lived it longer than most people live. I’m ninety-eight, so imagine how I look back across the landscape of my life, and the width and the scope of it, the mistakes

The Orchards of Ithaca

By Harry Mark Petrakis

Southern Illinois University Press, 270 pages, $25

Harry Mark Petrakis has been telling great stories for half a century. His credits include nine previous novels (two nominated for the National Book Award), four short-story collections and assorted non-fiction titles. His 10th novel,

The Orchards of Ithaca,” about a prosperous Greek-American restaurant owner in Chicago in 1999, revisits, with limited success, the author’s preferred themes of family, religion and ethnic identity.

Orestes Panos’ tale unfolds on the morning of his 50th birthday. He wakes next to his loving wife of 23 years, walks downstairs for breakfast, then rushes out before his mother-in-law, a cranky widow who inspires the nicknames “old tornado” and “aging assassin,” can make it to the kitchen and sour his mood.

On this day, Orestes has decided to visit the graves of his parents before heading to work. Once in the car, he is confronted with his own mortality when, looking down at his hands, he sees liver spots:

“He couldn’t believe they had appeared over-night, but he hadn’t noticed them before. He felt a tremor of apprehension.”

But liver spots are the least of his worries. There’s a great deal he has not been paying attention to. His wife, Dessie, in whom he is losing sexual interest, tops the list. “He had been reduced to relieving himself as he had done when he was a quivering teenager,” Petrakis writes. “Helping him in his periodic need for sexual release were the plethora of sex sites he had discovered some years earlier while surfing the Internet on the computer in the privacy of his office at the restaurant.”

At a time when Orestes should be, by his own admission, reconnecting with his wife (a wife, incidentally, about whom he knows far less than he imagines), he meets a young woman named Sarah in the library who challenges his loyaltie

But I have lived long enough to understand that the suffering and separation of a black man and a young Greek girl and their child might not even earn a footnote in the long sorrowful chronicle of racial intolerance and hate.

—Harry Mark Petrakis

The above words are from Harry Mark Petrakis’s rueful conclusion to his “A Tale of Color,” an essay that tells a story about racism in 1950s Chicago. Its melancholy about the lack of a place for the downtrodden in public memory underlines the responsibility for countering this displacement, which Petrakis performs in the very act of writing the story.

Placing at the center stories that ethnic groups often relegate to the margins has been at the core of Petrakis’s project, a lifelong devotion to bringing Greek America into literary representation. The gritty realism of his fiction details the effects of damaging ideologies: the violence of patriarchy, working-class exploitation, stifling traditionalism, and Old World ethnocentrism. The ways in which certain immigrant practices and beliefs derail lives is a recurring theme in his work.

Petrakis’s literary realism works as a form of cultural chronicling. Drawing from his intimate knowledge of immigrant life, he employs literature to represent unseen or hidden social dramas. Their telling via naturalism makes a claim to their status as true. Indeed, his stories are read as accurate and candid. Petrakis’s stories echo the bitter disclosures of women in autobiography and oral history and accounts occasionally found in ethnography and the archival record. Petrakis’s fiction intersects with the ethnography of the everyday, creating a corpus of work that, in the long run, produces a counternarrative to the main narrative of public memory.

The recognition of patriarchy, traditionalism, and overall social failures within the community counters public scripts of ide