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/.

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