GREECE

READ

I looked at a few book options for my blog post about Greece. Contemporary novels such as The Scapegoat, by Sophia Nikolaidou, and The Third Wedding, by Costas Taktsis, looked interesting, but in the end, I decided to go with the Nikos Kazantzakis classic, Zorba the Greek. I wish I’d chosen a different book.

The title character, 65-year-old Alexis Zorba, is portrayed as a larger-than-life man of the earth, the perfect Dionysian foil to the narrator’s Apollonian personality. The narrator, who is never named, and Zorba meet in a café and decide to go to Crete together, where Zorba will supervise the workers in a lignite mining operation the narrator is financing.

They quickly settle into life in the village, where Zorba immediately takes up with their landlady, an older woman whose glory days are behind her. He has a pattern of seeking out widows in whichever towns he visits, assuming they’ll be grateful for his attention.

The narrator, on the other hand, is more interested in his studies. He is a student of Buddha and spends his time reading and writing. Zorba is determined to make the narrator more like him, enjoying the here and now, rather than burying his head in his books. The narrator seems to agree. At one point during a hike through the countryside, he sees a flock of cranes and thinks, “Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes’ cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us.”

It seemed to me that it would have been better if Zorba had tried to be a little more like the narrator instead, or if they had each tried to learn from the other. The choice shouldn’t have to be between purely flesh or purely spirit – a happy life should embrace both.

I know that it’s unrealistic to read older books through the lens of today’s social mores, but I was never able to get past the attitudes toward women displayed in this book. Zorba’s belief that women were just waiting to be grabbed and made love to, the disgust of one old man with the fact that his old wife was no longer young and pretty, and the agreement among the townspeople that a young widow should die because she resisted the advances of a young man who later killed himself all made me question why on earth this was such a popular book. I haven’t seen the movie version of Zorba the Greek, but I can only hope that Anthony Quinn evoked Zorba’s earthiness and joie de vivre without also glorifying his misogyny.

COOK

As one might expect in a book extolling earthly pleasures, food descriptions are sprinkled liberally throughout Zorba the Greek. The island of Crete had an abundance of fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs, but no specific dishes were mentioned. In looking through Greek recipes online, I found one on the Gourmandelle website for a vegan pastitsio, a baked pasta dish topped with bechamel sauce, that sounded good. The list of ingredients was long, and the recipe involved lots of chopping and several different steps. The lentils and veggies could have used a little more simmering, and the bechamel sauce never did thicken. Nevertheless, the pastitsio was good – even my non-vegan husband liked it – but making it definitely requires a time commitment. 

GIVE

GlobalGiving.org listed a couple of dozen projects for Greece. Most of them involved assistance to refugees, but I wanted a project helping the Greek people themselves. I found one that provides emergency relief packages to families who are suffering the effects of the austerity measures the Greek government has been forced to adopt.  According to the project description, “63 percent of the Greek work force is unemployed or poor,” with “more than 1,000,000 jobless in Greece.”

The emergency relief packages, which are being provided to 4,750 newly-jobless parents with young children, include things like food, personal hygiene items, and school supplies. In addition, people identified for assistance receive “free psychological support sessions to both fragile parents & children, free health care and optometrist, free hairdressing, free private lessons for kids who need it.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/relief-distributions-greece/.

NEXT STOP: GRENADA

GHANA

READ

After struggling with the book I chose for my post about Germany, I was happy to find a book for Ghana that kept me interested and entertained. I hesitate to call The Seasons of Beento Blackbird, by Akosua Busia, a beach read, since that conjures up an image of literary fluff, which this book was not. But it was full of romance, sympathetic characters, and beautiful descriptions of exotic locations, making it the perfect book to take on vacation.

Solomon Eustace Wilberforce is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who writes bestselling children’s books under the pseudonym Beento Blackbird. He is tall, handsome, wealthy, charming, kind, well-spoken – in short, he is the epitome of the saying, “Men want to be him, and women want to be with him.” He has a complicated life, although apparently it works well for him. He spends winters with his Caribbean wife Miriam on the island of Cape Corcos, summers with his second wife Ashia in a small village in Ghana, and spring and fall in Manhattan writing his books and dealing with his publisher, where his agent Sam is secretly in love with him.

Why, then, is he living as a hermit in a cave on the tiny Caribbean island of Saint Germaine when the book opens? He has been missing and presumed dead for five months, leaving behind a trail of broken-hearted women.

In spite of outward appearances, Solomon’s life is not as perfect as it seems. He has abandonment issues, stemming from no relationship with his father in the early years of his life, followed by an uneasy relationship with him in Solomon’s teen years, and rejection by his father’s wife and other children. His biggest sorrow, though, is that he has no children of his own, despite having two wives. Hiding from the world for five months gives him the time and space to work though these issues and decide what is really important to him.

The book’s author, Akosua Busia, is an actress who played the role of Nettie Harris in The Color Purple. The Seasons of Beento Blackbird is the only book she has written, which is a shame, because I would certainly like to read more of her beautiful writing.

COOK

Peanuts are an important crop in Ghana. During one of his visits to the small village where his Ghanaian wife lives, Solomon, Ashia, and her little brother and sister visit a peanut farm and eat their fill. “Solomon felt like Kummaa looked, and Kummaa looked stuffed.” With that in mind, I searched for a recipe that included peanuts and found one on Mealz.com for Ghanaian vegan peanut soup. Mealz.com is a website that advertises various food brands, which meant that the peanut rub the recipe called for wasn’t something I could find at any local grocery stores, so I left it out. I also skipped the fufu. I thought this soup was exceptionally good – the type of thing I’d be thrilled with if I’d ordered it in a restaurant, and the perfect dish for an unexpectedly rainy day.

GIVE

In The Seasons of Beento Blackbird, Solomon is passionate about making life better for children. In one part of the book, he reminds himself about why he writes the Beento Blackbird books: “Beento Blackbird, freedom flier from the Ashanti gold mines of Ghana, West Africa. My mission is to protect, enlighten, and inspire all the underprivileged and misinformed children of the world.” Solomon has traveled all over Africa doing research for his books, but the place that has been seared into his soul is Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal, which, according to the UNESCO website, “was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast” from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. In particular, he agonized about the room where the children had been kept. “Once alone inside the room, Solomon had slid down, leaned against the stone wall, and grieved over all the children who had died in that very spot.”

We like to think that slavery is a thing of the past, but in looking through the projects in Ghana listed on the GlobalGiving.com website, I found one titled, “Saving Children Sold Into Slavery in Ghana,” and this is the project that received my donation. According to the description on the website: “Lake Volta is one of the world's largest man-made lakes and sustains a large fishing industry. Due to extreme poverty and lack of information, some parents/caretakers give their children to fishermen, unaware of the harsh living and working conditions awaiting them. The children work extremely long hours, are mostly deprived of education and often malnourished. Some of them are exposed to physical and sexual abuse.”

The International Organization for Migration works to rescue these children, and also to educate communities about “the rights of children and the responsibility of parents and communities to protect them and not give them away to fishermen.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/africa-child-trafficking/.

NEXT STOP: GREECE

GERMANY

READ

Germany has a rich literary history, so I had lots of books to choose from for this post. I decided to go with a book that’s on the late rock icon David Bowie’s list of one hundred books. The author of A Book of Book Lists, Alex Johnson, describes Bowie’s list this way: “It is a list of books he felt were important rather than his actual 100 favourite reads.”

I wish I could have seen whatever it was that Bowie saw in this book, but unfortunately, I found The Quest for Christa T., by Christa Wolf, to be confusing, hard to follow, and frankly, somewhat tedious. It tells the story of a young woman – always Christa T., never just Christa – who grows up in Germany during the Nazi era and then the Soviet occupation of East Germany.

The book’s narrator is a friend who met Christa T. during what appears to have been their high school years. They lose touch, but reconnect later in graduate school. We learn early on that Christa T. dies at a relatively young age from leukemia, and her friend, the narrator, whose name we never know, ends up with all of Christa T.’s writings. It seems that Christa T. had a fear of vanishing without a trace, so she was always writing things down – in her diary, on scraps of papers, in letters – writings that she often then destroyed “so that the right hand needn’t know what the left hand is doing.”

Christa T. goes through the motions of living – school, work, getting married, having children – but seems to find little joy in any of it. At one point, she even contemplates suicide: “Why should I go on deluding myself: there’s no gap for me to live in.” And yet something about her is a source of endless fascination to the narrator.

Apparently, this book was extremely controversial when it first came out. According to the blurb on the back of the book, “When The Quest for Christa T. was first published in East Germany, there was an immediate storm: bookshops in East Berlin were given instructions to sell it only to well-known customers professionally involved in literary matters; at an annual meeting of the East German Writers Conference, Mrs. Wolf’s new book was condemned. Yet the novel has nothing explicitly to do with politics.”

Maybe The Quest for Christa T. would be more meaningful to me if I had a better understanding of the events that were occurring in East Germany during the time covered by this novel. As it is, I’m sure the significance of many of the book’s details were lost on me, so I’m hard-pressed to explain how the government of East Germany could have found this book to be so threatening.

COOK

Food didn’t play a huge role in The Quest for Christa T., but there were several references to potatoes, so I made Black Forest Potato Salad from a recipe I found on the International Vegetarian Union (IVU) website. This isn’t your typical potato salad, as the ingredients include sauerkraut and an apple, both of which were also mentioned in The Quest for Christa T. The recipe was very easy to make, and it was tasty enough, but the cider vinegar and the sauerkraut made it rather more tart than I would have liked.

GIVE

One of the themes in The Quest for Christa T. appears to be the struggles that young people face in school and in life. Teachers and mentors can help students cope with these problems, which is why I chose an organization from GlobalGiving.com’s website that helps to find and support mentors for pupils in Berlin. Most of the children helped by this program live in an area in which the majority of the inhabitants are immigrants from many different countries. Among the benefits of providing mentors to the children in this program are improved language skills and increased self-esteem, which lead to better opportunities for them in the long-run. More information about this mentoring project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/pasch-mentoring-project/.

NEXT STOP: GHANA