Pears on a Willow Tree

Reviews:
Publishers Weekly, August 24, 1998
The New York Times, October 4, 1998
Booklist, October 15, 1998
The Washington Post, October 19, 1998
Times (London) Literary Supplement, October 15, 1998
The Times (London), November 19, 1998
Woman's Journal (Great Britain)
The Detroit News, January 13, 1999
The Herald-Sun (Durham, NC), April 25, 1999
The Knoxville News-Sentinel, May 1, 1999
Editorial reviews on amazon.com
Customer reviews on amazon.com

Pears on a Willow Tree Home
Leslie Pietrzyk Home

Finding the Stories

This is the way to make good pickles. This is how you slit and fold your dough to make chrusciki (angel wings), and your oil needs to be this hot before dropping in that first cookie. This is the amount of cheese you wrap inside each pierogi so that it is full enough but doesn't leak when you boil it; this is how much salt to put in the boiling water, and this is how many pierogi to drop into your pot at one time.

I grew up in Iowa, and the only brush I had with what it meant to be Polish-American was visiting my grandmother in Detroit for a week every summer. It was a typical child-centric type of visit--trip to the zoo, shopping in a big department store, going to an amusement park. But we always spent one afternoon with my great-grandmother. Our visit mainly consisted of listening to her converse with my grandmother in Polish and politely eating hard candies filled with stiff sugary goo, fiddling with the cellophane wrappers, not sure whether to put them on the coffee table or sneak them between the couch cushions.

My great-grandmother spoke only sprinkles of difficult-to-understand English, and my answers to her simple questions had to use easy words, pronounced very clearly and loudly. Everything about her felt slow and from another place--her words, her gestures, the shuffley way she walked. The furniture in her apartment was squashed too tightly in the room, and she had no games or toys or snacks except for that icky candy. The experience would seem to be a kid nightmare--especially when compared to a trip to the zoo. But I couldn't take my eyes off her. Any time I glanced over, she smiled--not a watery, old-lady smile but a smile like a thousand unspoken words. Since we couldn't say much--how is school, are you a good girl?--we smiled again and again, ate more candies, hugged long and tight before I left. There was nothing particularly Polish about those visits, but when I saw her I felt connected to something

This is how you know good kielbasa from poor; this is how to grind your own pork, and here are the seasonings to add, this amount, this order, and if you use a sausage stuffer this way, you can make your own kielbasa and not have to worry about what the butcher's selling you, and then here is how to fry up your fresh sausages, first simmering them in this much water until the water boils away and then letting the sausages fry this much longer until they're the way your husband likes them.

My great-grandmother lived to be 101, and towards the end of her life I asked her what it was like to come to Ellis Island from Poland. She said, "Bananas," and the daughter who was taking care of her and who spent the most time with her interrupted and said, "That's the first time she ever had bananas. They all got free bananas. That's all she remembers. That's all there is." I asked another question about coming to America from Poland, and again my answer was, "Bananas." So my great-grandmother and I nodded our heads vigorously as if we could shake out the rest of the words.

This is what we put in the tomato sauce that is poured on top of the golabki (stuffed cabbage) to give it exactly that not-too-sweet taste that blends just right with the cabbage that has been boiled this amount of time to make it completely pliable but not limp shreds, and if you roll your golabki this way, they will hold together; this is how much rice you should mix into the meat, carefully kneading it in with your hands like this, remembering to take off your wedding ring and set it here before you start.

My grandmother's house was made of dark red bricks, and the walk leading up to the door was patterned with a fascinating design of random diagonals and jagged shapes that fit together. No other house on the street had that kind of walk. The house had a cement front porch shaded by a big awning, and there was a squeaky gliding chair with a long, worn-too-thin cushion covered with daisy-patterned terrycloth. The porch was an excellent place to play because I'd never lived in a house with a front porch. The cement was always cool and shaded, almost damp in a pleasant way, as I sat on it and played games with my sister. After dinner, we fought to sit next to my grandmother on the glider and squeaked ourselves back and forth, back and forth, pushing off the cement with our bare feet. The other adults sat on the porch in lawn chairs, and the evening drifted into night, and in the dark no one could tell I was listening to their conversation, and I desperately wanted to hear the stories, the secrets, the history that makes a family, but they talked about the weather a lot. Even after I was sent up to bed to the stuffy attic room directly above the porch, and I propped open the window to see if any breeze whatsoever would squeeze in through the screen, and I fought sleep to keep listening to the adults, but no one said much of anything and there had to be more than that, more than dull words about weather and gas mileage and taxes, but no one ever seemed to say the words I wanted to hear.

This is how long you fry the bacon and onions, until the onions are clear like this, and then you add the sauerkraut and this much water and this much caraway seed, and you cook it all with the lid on top for this long, lifting the lid only this number of times to give a quick stir, and you can make this even when there's a baby fussing in the next room over.

When I was older, I asked my grandmother direct questions: "How did you know you were in love?" or "Did you ever want to go visit Poland?" I was doled out quick one-word responses like "because" or "no" or two-worders like "why not?"--answers that weren't meant to be evasive but that said this without saying it: "No one's interested in all that old history."

"She's the oldest," one of her sisters whispered to me, "and she had to go off to work so early in her life. The stories get pushed out of you when you're working like that all day in a factory, everything always the same."

But I'm a writer, and I can't believe there aren't any stories left, anywhere.

This is the kind of rye bread we buy at this bakery, the loaves that come in this white wrapper, and these are the days we buy bread, and we put this bread on this plate at every meal, and here is how much oleo we set out because butter is so expensive, and there is talk of another strike, the second this year.

I made pierogi (dumplings) for the first time maybe six or seven years ago. I'd been buying them hand-made from a Polish butcher shop up in Baltimore, and I'd become the kind of cook who thinks everything is better "from scratch." I'd even become a little obsessive in this way.

I had my recipe from a cookbook. I had my ingredients all lined up--flour, eggs, cheese, a kettle of boiling water. I had everything I was supposed to have. I read the recipe once more and began to cook.

The dough was too sticky. Then the dough was too floury and stiff. The cheese was too runny. Some pierogis were too flat. Some were too round and I couldn't crimp the edges closed without tearing the dough that I had worked so hard to roll out. Too many pierogi burst open in the boiling water, smidges of cheese rolling with the bubbles. Maybe I cried just a little from frustration, from the mess of the kitchen with flour strewn everywhere and still no dinner to put on the table. Maybe I ordered pizza that night.

I saw my grandmother a couple months after that, and, to fill up one of the many pauses that collected around our stumbling conversation, I related my experience making pierogis. "I make the best pierogis in the family," she said. "Of my sisters, of my mother, of everyone. Mine are the best. I can tell you how to make pierogis."

She smiled.

I smiled.

There were no more pauses in that conversation or any other conversations we have had since.

copyright 1998 by Leslie Pietrzyk reprinted from The Voice of Bard, a newsletter published by Avon Books

Pears on a Willow Tree Home
Leslie Pietrzyk Home

-An Excerpt-
SHORTCUTS
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 doll houses 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 outlast 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 Xeroxed 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 grey 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, 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.

"How many cups?" she asked. "I can't get this recipe down if you don't measure." She was cranky, her voice lined up on that edge you didn't want to see her cross.

"Cups?" My great-grandmother looked as if she'd never heard of such a thing. She held out her palms. "Use your hands to introduce yourself to the dough. Four handfuls, five, six. Enough to give a good greeting. We did not need measuring cups. We used our hands; we felt what we were doing instead of always thinking it."

My mother wrote on her notebook, and I peeked over her shoulder. She'd written "4 C flour."

Meanwhile, my grandmother pulled a big pot from under the sink and began running water into it; the clatter filled the small kitchen. As she turned off the faucet, she said, "I saw they've got ready-made pierogi at Kroger--in the freezer case yet."

My mother said, "Are they good?"

My grandmother shrugged. "Who would buy them?"

"Maybe they're easier than all this." My mother gestured around the kitchen, at the bowls and spoons and the film of flour coating the counter and the dishtowels and the mushrooms I was chopping into tiny bits and the sauerkraut soaking in water and my grandmother lighting the stove with a match.

"Like a T.V. dinner is good," my great-grandmother said.

"Amy likes T.V. dinners," my mother said.

As a child, I didn't lie often, but this one unwound quick as thread off a spool: "I tell you I like them, but I don't." Probably my mother knew I was lying; I felt her looking hard at me, so instead I watched my great-grandmother burrow a hole into the mound of flour and then with one hand crack eggs into it, setting aside the shells to dig into her garden.

"Write this, four eggs," she said to my mother. "T.V. dinner, what kind of meal is that? Food served in compartments. What are we now, astronauts going into space?"

"They're nutritionally balanced," my mother said. "And they're fast and easy. It would be a snap to feed a family of eight with T.V. dinners."

There was a long pause as my great-grandmother stared down at the eggs nestled in the flour.

"That may be," she said finally. "A T.V. dinner may be simple, a `snap.' But when I think of those days when every meal was a struggle, when I woke with the roosters to build the fire, I do not remember wishing that food was a snap. I worked for every meal, I thanked God for every potato and every shred of cabbage, every drop of soup, each crust of bread. You go to the market and everything is there in front of you, so how can you understand what is important to us? How do you know who we are? All you do is rush, rush, rush, shortcuts here, secrets there, hurry, hurry. Never stopping to listen." And she attacked the flour and eggs, squeezing again and again with her strong hands.

The butter in the frying pan caught onto the chopped onion and set it sizzling. My grandmother rustled through the refrigerator searching for the cheese.

Was this why women had daughters? When husbands and sons refused to listen, there was the daughter. I imagined my grandmother's ears filled with this talk, and then, like a waterfall downstream, my grandmother tipping it into my mother's ears. And then my mother leaving for somewhere dry, leaving behind this family and this talk for the stillness and emptiness of the desert.

"I'm sorry," my mother said. "I just meant maybe you would have saved yourself some time."

"What did I want with time?" my great-grandmother asked. "What happens to all this time you save? Where is it? Is it in the bank? Do you keep it under your bed?"

"I'm only trying to point out that--."

"I held a duck in my hands, its heart pushing against my skin, and I knew my family would feast on its blood in czarnina soup, and its body two days later with red cabbage. I knew I'd boil down the bones for broth. There would be moments I'd love that duck more than I could love any living creature." Her eyes circled the kitchen, as if pulling everything into a net. "Don't ask me now to love a T.V. dinner."

My mother tried again: "I'm only--."

My great-grandmother said, "This is what I did for my family, made their food with my hands. This is who I am, what I have--back then in the old country, when I first came to America, and still now, today. Never forget this."

There was a silence, but my mother did not try to speak.

My grandmother stirred the onions, slid my mushrooms from the cutting board into the frying pan, handed me the wooden spoon which I swirled around and around, watching the mushrooms darken as they soaked up butter.

My great-grandmother looked at the balled-up egg and flour she held in her hands. "Add water, salt, sour cream. That's the secret," she said to my mother. "I know you, Ginger Marchewka, you are always looking somewhere else for secrets. Here is what you want. Add some dabs of sour cream, two, three, whatever you have, whatever you can spare. One-half cup, let's say. That is all I can tell you. Pears on a willow tree with you--always wanting what's impossible."

My mother wrote it all down--what was in the fillings, how much farmer's cheese, how much onion; she wrote that the fillings had to be cooled. She wrote down everything, every detail, and she even sketched a picture of the crimping pattern. But I knew she'd forget. She liked to cook fancy, flaming things that set a table of adults applauding. Those were the nights she allowed me to eat T.V. dinners in my room while the guests ooohhhed and aaahhhed late into the night, their laughter seeping under the crack of my doorway, keeping me awake.

We all have reasons for wanting to go. Clocks are on mantels everywhere.

I left behind an empty desert to go to a school filled with students similar to the students I already knew, a country connected to my own by CNN, Newsweek, McDonald's, an airplane ride.

My great-grandmother had two choices, and so she came to America in 1919. She was 17, her husband 24, and there was a baby on the way. To step into a future you couldn't picture, for the sake of children you could barely imagine; to pack up all you had so it could be carried in your own hands--that's what deciding to leave should mean.

I thought about all this many times, but until I was in Thailand and my mother started to write me letters and she happened to send this photograph of the "Marchewka women," I couldn't understand what it was I needed to know, what was missing.

When I looked at that picture, I remembered how delicious those pierogi were when they were finally finished, how the drift of their aroma reached my great-grandfather and pulled him out of his nap on the easy chair and brought him into the kitchen, and he looked at all of us, all of us Marchewka women, and he said, "Never have I seen anything so beautiful," and as he went to get his camera a second time, I felt a knot wrap round my throat, and my great-grandmother pulled me tight into the strong circle of her arm and whispered, "Save as much time as you want, but when you go looking for it, nothing's there."

We posed for a second picture, the four of us in the kitchen, smudged with flour, sweat beading our faces, the pierogi steaming on the platter in front of us, and we smiled and linked arms. "Beautiful!" my great-grandfather said. "Do you see how beautiful?"

Who knows why, but that second picture didn't come out, though of course we didn't know that until the film came back from the developer, long after we'd cleaned up the kitchen and all the pierogi had been eaten by the family.
Copyright, 1998

Pears on a Willow Tree Home
Leslie Pietrzyk Home

A Synopsis

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 pries 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 Ginger raises her daughter Amy, uprooted from the safety of kitchens perfumed 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.

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Reviews

Publishers Weekly
August 24, 1998
Pears On A Willow Tree
Leslie Pietrzyk, Avon, $23 (272 p) ISBN 0-380-97667-6
(Starred 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 it s best. In prose as plain and four-square as her protagonists, Pietrzyk traces the family's evolution from 1919 through the late 1980's, from its transplantation to the U.S.--specifically, Detroit--through three generations, showing how the older women (who privately refer to themselves as Marchewkas, 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 Marchewka family, the book focuses upon Rose, her daughter Helen, her granddaughter Ginger (the rebel who abandons Detroit and settles in Phoenix) and great-granddaughter Amy. The voices of these four women are quite different--Rose'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.)
© Copyright, 1998, Publishers Weekly

The Times
London, November 19, 1998
Evoking souls of the departed

The River Midnight
By Lilian Nattel
Review, £ 12.99
ISBN 0 7472 2215 0

Pears on a Willow Tree
By Leslie Pietrzyk
Granta, £ 9.99
ISBN 1 86207220 5

Most Jews nowadays view Poland as a graveyard: the site of the most clinical of this century's various experiments in extinction. For the Polish Catholic diaspora, the link is probably more positive. For both sets of emitters, such events as the installation of a Polish Pope and the cracking of the Communist carapace will have quickened the pulse.

Although individual Jewish lives continued in Europe after the war, Jewish life was eradicated. And it is this, in its most lively incarnation--the 19^th century, Yiddish-speaking, Polish shtetl, or village--that Lilian Nattel evokes in her first novel.

The meticulously assembled social detail in The River Midnight, far from trumpeting its historical authenticity, adds a vital dimension to an engaging talk about the inhabitants of the fictional shtetl of Blaszka.

The superstitious urgency of shtetl life is highlighted by the technique of presenting a handful of key events--an arrest, secret sexual liaisons, a scandalous pregnancy--from the contrasting perspectives of different characters. Less successful are the random touches of magic, the intrusion of occasional clairvoyant commentary, and the brief excursions beyond Blaszka to New York and Warsaw.

If one is constantly aware of the division between sentimentality and schmaltz, for the most part Nattel exercises enough control to keep on the right side, conveying a real sense of the spiritual warmth of a community and of its erosion.

Much of this emerges from mother-and-daughter relationships, the central preoccupation of Leslie Pietrzyk's equally remarkable first novel. To such a degree that Poland--the homeland to which her four generations of women can trace their lineage--is itself a kind of mother.

The novel is set in the United States, mainly in Detroit, the focus of Polish Catholic immigration, but also in Arizona, where the rebellious Ginger attempts to escape the hold of the past. She succeeds only in embracing a destructive alcoholism, leaving her fully Americanised daughter Amy to pick up the pieces.

Pietrzyk's portrayal of the bonds between mothers and daughters is both powerful and subtle. "The old ways" are gradually squeezed out through the generations like toothpaste from a tube, but unless their importance is acknowledged, they cannot be relinquished without pain.

Gerald Jacobs
© Copyright, 1998, The Times, London

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Leslie Pietrzyk Home

Washington Post

'Pears on a Willow Tree':
An Immigrants' tale that Bears Plentiful Fruit

By Roland Merullo
Special to the Washington Post
Monday, October 19, 1998, Page D09
By Leslie Pietrzyk
Bard. 272 pp. $23

By Roland Merullo, who teaches at Bennington College; his third novel, "Revere Beach Boulevard," has just been published.

In "Pears on a Willow Tree," her impressive first novel, Leslie Pietrzyk marches boldly into some pretty risky territory. In print and on the screen, readers have heard and seen so much about the families of European immigrants--Irish, Italian, Jewish and, in this case, Polish--that all the types, all the stories, all the triumphs and hardships can seem like old news. Men on strike at the factory? Grandmothers in the kitchen speaking with accents and preparing Old World delicacies? Children struggling to find their own paths between the rigid, dependable rules carried across the Atlantic in steerage and the fickle laws of American society? Been there. Read that.

The problem with such curt dismissals, though, and the thing we may have forgotten in our rush to glue one-line descriptions onto books, is that the novel is not primarily about groups, types and political factions, but about individuals. Burrow deeply into any human personality and you wriggle free of the cliches, the stereotypes, the sticky hairs of the broad brush. In a society growing blander and more superficial by the day, the serious work of fiction remains one of the last voices arguing for the absolute uniqueness of a given individual or family.

Pietrzyk has an intuitive understanding of this uniqueness, of familial eccentricities and of the lush gardens of humanity that lie beneath the paved-over parking lots of cliche. Her story centers on the lives of four generations of Marchewka women--Rose, Helen, Ginger and Amy--Polish Americans who have settled in Detroit. Via first-person narrations that alternate in no predictable order and carry the reader back and fort in time, these women give us not so much the story of Poles in America but the story of these Poles, these people in this particular corner of America.

In the very early going, "Pears on a Willow Tree" seems to be a somewhat soft-focus and unsurprising book. There are well-drawn but common scenes of family weddings, squabbles, kitchen tasks. With the emergence of Ginger's alcoholism, however, Pietrzyk opens the door on both another layer of the story and another layer of her own talent.

Pietrzyk knows these people, knows the way addictions resonate in the chamber of family love, knows the story she wants to tell. That story is full of original detail (a guest breaking a just-baked cookie over a napkin to demonstrate that it is slightly overcooked) and pleasingly short on neat solutions.

The old superstitions and traditions that enfold the other members of the family like a warm quilt on a cold Detroit night feel more like a straitjacket to second-generation daughter Ginger. Always pushing at the rules, always looking for what cannot be (pears on a willow tree, for instance), so determined to get out of Detroit that she steals waitresses' tips and saves them up for the bus fare south, she stumbles down her own gin-soaked path, dragging her children and husband, mother and sisters out of the warm, close parlor of family life.

Glad as I was to see the author bring these ordinary working-class women to life, I couldn't help wishing she did as well with the other half of the species. Pietrzyk's men are shadow figures, speaking a total of about half a dozen sentences of dialogue in the first 200 pages and contributing nothing to the rich carpet of relationships upon which the story rests. For instance, Ginger's son, Cal, merely bounces a few basketballs and stays conveniently offstage much of the time while his sister, Amy, is complicated and confused and complete. The book is about women, but because of the accuracy and depth of their portrayal it will certainly be as interesting and moving to other men (and to no-Polish American readers) as it was to me. It's a special shame, then, given Pietrzyk's abundant abilities, that she casts such a blind eye upon the men of the family she has created.

I would also have liked a bit more of the visual sense of the Detroit and Phoenix neighborhoods in which most of the action takes place, but the author concentrates on interior scenes without giving us much of a feeling for the world in which those scenes are set.

Those two failings mar this book but do not come close to spoiling it. "Pears on a Willow Tree" marks the debut of a genuine and fully developed talent with a most promising future. It is a rich, intricate, heartfelt novel that moves with a smoothness and sureness many experienced novelists will envy, a book that breaks through the crust of expectation and stereotype and gives us a sweating, crying, shouting, laughing group of women struggling to preserve and pass on that most precious of old family recipes: love.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company

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Leslie Pietrzyk Home

The New York Times

The Matriarchs
Date: October 4, 1998, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Ann Harleman
Lead:
Pears On A Willow Tree
By Leslie Pietrzyk
272 pp. New York:
Bard/Avon Books $23

The year I lived in Warsaw, 1981, has always presented itself, in retrospect, as the Year of Women. The Polish women I knew--passionate, astringent, implacable--did not seem to fear, or even acknowledge, the iron grasp of Soviet rule, the shortages of food and goods, the bitter winter darkness. Leslie Pietrzyk's quietly convincing first novel traces this spirit through four generations of Polish women in 20^th-century America. Chief among the questions she asks is What happens to women who will not bend?

With its feminine ending, the family's very name, Marchewka--insisted on by the oldest of the novel's central characters--affirms the matriarchal line that extends from Rose to Helen to Ginger to Amy. Pietrzyk meets the challenge of keeping these four characters distinct within the compass of a relatively short book by letting them speak for themselves.

Rose, who arrived in Detroit from Poland early in the century, is the voice of wisdom. Even at the age of 18, she uses her letters home to chart the losses that are the price of hope, of a new start. She knows that "It is the girls who keep the family alive."

In contrast, Rose's daughter Helen--who never leaves home, remaining her whole life in Detroit--manages no more than the sparse insights of the permanently resigned. Most of her energy goes into wishing her own daughter, Ginger, were different.

Ginger, who hops a bus to Arizona the minute she graduates from high school, is the liveliest of the four narrators, an endearing bad seed who take on herself and everyone else is full of wicked humor. Particularly telling is her description of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings were cigarette smoke stands "like columns" and the sound of a roomful of people "trying to out-pathetic, out-sad each other" reminds her of the sins she used to invent for confession. Not surprisingly, she argues for the thrilling pleasures of gin "going down…like ice melting into a cold, hard stream."

It is left to Ginger's daughter, Amy, to show us the other side of the drinking life. The vigilant guardian of her mother's sporadic sobriety, Amy eventually responds like a true Marchewka--she flies to Thailand. Why do some women leave rather than bend? "Because you have to," Amy tells herself. "How else will you know who you really are? You think maybe you're more than the person pouring tomato juice for the hangovers, but how can you find out?" Like the generations before her, Amy pays a price for the knowledge she seeks.

"Pears on a Willow Tree" focuses on ordinary life from close-in domestic perspective. The novel's structure--composed of linked stories, nine of which have been published in literary magazines--addresses the dangers of monotony by presenting a fractured, shifting vision of its subject, leaping from person to person and jumping backward and forward in time. The dangers inherent in the form itself--a sketchy rendering of character and setting, the compression of insights into formulas that seem at once too pithy and too pat--are not so well evaded.

Pietrzyk's prose is simple, unornamented; it never turns clunky, but it never really takes flight. More than serviceable, every now and then her language opens up, rendering the everyday world in fresh ways. Rose's heavily accented English comes out in "thick words like blocks stacking into a story"; Ginger's "cheerful, hostessy" voice warns her daughter that she's started drinking again; for cousin June, necking with a high school beau is like kissing a pot roast.

"Pears on a Willow Tree" suggests untapped gifts of eye and ear. And Pietrzyk's depiction of her characters--their vividness and contradictions constrained by the novel's structure--hints that there's more to them than has been revealed. Given greater scope, the humor and outrage that only glint here and there could have rivaled the intoxicating, exhilarating effects of Ginger's gin. Nevertheless, this novel, heartfelt and game, augurs will.
© Copyright, 1998, The New York Times

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Times Literary Supplement
October 23, 1998
Passing it on
Wendy Brandmare
Pears on a Will Tree
228 pp. Granta Book; Paperback, £ 9.99

From the Times Literary Supplement, October 23, 1998

In Leslie Pietrzyk’s tale of four generations of Polish-American women, there are no good mothers or grateful daughters, only the tormenting myth of a perfect relationship. At the beginning of Pears on a Willow Tree, Amy remembers posing for a photograph with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, yet this is a rare memory of oneness. Rose, the matriarch, is a wise stubborn woman whose actions have been in some ways more daring than any of the rebellions of her granddaughter and great-granddaughter. She left her mother to voyage across the ocean to strange locations; she took a new, "American" name. When her husband went on strike and there was no money to feed the family she sold her body for food. Her daughter Helen rebels against the traditions and expectations of her family in more furtive ways; when she is pregnant, she secretly wishes for a daughter while everyone else prays for a son. Although she teaches her daughter, Ginger, (named after "the glamour movie star"), the housewife’s trade, "one part of her—maybe not the one part I’ll always like or understand—but that one part of her will be a girl who lets a rosary drop to the floor and lay there because she refuses to let go of a kiss."

Ginger scorns her mother's homilies, ignores her cooking hints, but heeds her underlying discontent. She becomes the first in the family to leave Detroit, yet her escape from her too loving, too knowing family ends with her alcoholism, and her dreams of flight then become her daughter Amy's birthright. Amy moves to Thailand to teach English and "see the world," and put as much distance as she can between her mother and herself. After she crashes her motorcycle on a trip to a rural temple and is saved by some tough looking drug-runners, she decides to stay in Thailand for another year. She has learned that, unlike her mother, who later dies in a drunk-driving accident, she can take risks and survive. Amy, voyager with a guidebook and journal, has inherited not only her great-grandmother's pluckiness but also her need to preserve all that she may leave behind.

Leslie Pietrzyk is still at heart a short-story writer. Pears on a Willow Tree, her first novel, is episodic, more a play for voices or a collection of related stories than a fiction informed by one plot with a beginning, middle and end. The chapters are named after the women who speak in them, their pattern dictated by family gatherings: a wedding, a Christmas feast, a funeral. The men hardly exist here; they form the background to these women's lives; the fathers who remain outside the kitchen where their wives and daughters cook and argue, the brothers whom everyone ignores. Rose tells her daughter to want a boy; "Because a boy will not be you. You know that. But a girl you expect will be you. And then she isn't." The book resonates with the struggle between mothers who want their dreams fulfilled in their daughters and daughters who believe they will never become their mothers.

Amy Tan and scores of other American authors, both women and men have written about the reverberations of the immigrant generation. This version of the story is written with much affection and clarity. While the smells of the kitchen—poppyseed cake, pierogi, and pickles, the folklore about wily wolves, and the abiding faith—sustain both the characters and the narrative, Ginger’s scathing voice, the strongest and most eloquent in the novel is corrective to nostalgia. I suspect that Pietrzyk is too close to Amy to write about her with the same bitter brightness. Yet Amy provides the novel’s reconciliation. However far she wanders from her mothers, she remains their daughter, to be born again is as impossible as it is to grow pears on a willow tree.
© Copyright 1998, Times Literary Supplement, Great Britain

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Booklist
October 15, 1998

Pietrzyk, Leslie, Pears on a Willow Tree
October 1998, 288 p. Avon/Bard S23 (0-380-97667-6).

"If we know we can’t have the one thing we want most, why does our desire for it never lessen?’ asks Amy, the fourth generation of Polish women in this memorable first novel. Although there are snatches of Polish lore an cuisine, this taut story is really about mothers and daughters. From rose, who in 1919 writes to her mother in Poland that she has a new, American name to Helen, who made her peace with old ways and new in Detroit, to Ginger, who left the family she found suffocating only to find another kind of slow asphyxiation in alcohol, to her daughter Amy, who taught English in Thailand but holds the ties of memory her mother tried so hard to cut, the tale dips and weaves like the ebb and flow of voices overheard from the kitchen. Pietrzyk is neither sentimental nor detached, instead, her women, tied by blood, sound like relatives we recognize. Similar in its grace and theme to Anna Monardo’s lovely Courtyard of Dreams (1993).

--GraceAnne A. DeCandidu
VA/L: The exploration of the mother-daughter relationship is compelling. GAD
© Copyright 1998, Booklist, Great Britain

Woman's Journal
Books by Kate Figes

Pears on a Willow Tree

This family saga, spanning four generations of Polish-American women, is one of the most astonishing and moving debut novels of the year. Rose emigrated to Detroit in 1919 and gave birth to a dynasty of women. Her daughter Helen tried to preserve the close knit, traditional nature of Polish family life, but couldn't make 'peirogi' like her mother did and, like many other mothers of her generation, suffered as she watched her children discard their family traditions completely during the Sixties. Her daughter Ginger moves to Phoenix, separates from her husband and becomes and alcoholic. She drives with her daughter Amy to Detroit to visit her mother each summer and in a series of deeply intimate scenes, the distance between them is painfully obvious. This is powerful, captivating stuff, a rare beast that manages to capture the way that the swift changes of the 20th century have divided mothers from daughters and how we long to fill those distances between us.

Journal Bookshop price: £8.99
© Copyright, 1998, Woman's Journal, Great Britain

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The Detroit News
January 13, 1999

Book Review: Generations of Polish life unfold in "Pears on a Willow Tree"
Sit at the family table and laugh and cry with Detroit-based novel
By Monica Williams/The Detroit News

You can almost taste the pierogi, kielbasa and sauerkraut as you turn each page of Leslie Pietrzyk's novel Pears on a Willow Tree.

It is over these Polish dishes that the inseparable Marchewka women argue, celebrate, grieve, tell stories and bond. Their story centers around four generations of Detroit women who alternate between embracing and rejecting their Polish-American values. Through their experiences, readers get a glimpse of Polish-American life and what it means to be a woman

The four women are the foundation of a family that has learned to survive the hardships of assimilation and foreign customs in 20^th-century industrial Detroit. The story, comprising 16 self-contained chapters, traces the family's evolution from rural Poland in 1919 to Detroit in the 1980's.

Iron-willed Rose, who emigrated from Poland, writes in the early years to her mother back home about her new name "Americans understand." Rose's daughter Helen is a willing vessel for the family traditions, folk beliefs and recipes, but learns to adjust to Detroit in a way her mother never could.

As the century evolves, so does each generation of women. Ginger, Helen's daughter feels suffocated among the "string of visits to houses that smelled and looked identical." She flees Detroit's Polish-American community for Phoenix, where she replaces the "old world" traditions with gin and bitterness. Three generations after her great-grandmother Rose arrived in Detroit, Amy learns to hold together the ties of tradition her mother, Ginger, tried so hard to cut.

Readers will laugh, cry and occasionally want to join the frequent family feuds at the kitchen table. But Pietrzyk's impressive first novel is not just about being Polish, being an immigrant or being female. It's about the American experience, the importance of maintaining cultural traditions and the most complex of subjects: the human spirit.

Local residents will appreciate the references to shopping at Hudson's and Crowley's, dining on coney dogs and Boston Coolers (with Vernors) at the local coney island and eating chrusciki (angel's wings) at the nearby Polish bakery.

Reading the book is like viewing a photo album: Each chapter is a snapshot of family history. Written in a delightful prose, the book sheds light on how current generations can find strength, wisdom and inspiration in the ways of the past. The heartfelt novel offers believable insight into one of Detroit's most vibrant and close-knit communities.
© Copyright 1999, The Detroit News

The Herald-Sun
Durham, NC
April 25, 1999
Betsy Carson, Special to the Herald-Sun

No matter how vast the distances between mother and daughter, whether physical or spiritual, the emotional bond is as strong as an umbilical cord ever was.

In Leslie Pietrzyk's novel "Pears on a Willow Tree," the author brings to life four generations of a Polish family held together by ritual and love.

Although filled with Polish lore and tradition, if other customs were inserted, "Pears on a Willow Tree" would be a tale of a Presbyterian, Jewish or Hispanic matriarchy, because it is about love and loss.

The story weaves back and forth through time, as the lives of Rose, Helen, Ginger and Amy--all Marchewka women--unfold in perfectly crafted, almost seamless prose. Men are relegated to the living room; this is a story for and about women.

Rose emigrated from Poland with her young husband early in the 20^th century. They began life in America in Detroit.

It is a wrenching experience for Rose to leave her mother behind, because on some level she knows that she will never see her again. She does not, and that fact is a weapon she uses against her husband as they struggle to establish themselves.

Outside the steamy, odoriferous kitchens, the men strike against unfair labor practices, while the women are left, as women always are, to find ways to feed their families.

Among the many strands that bind this lovely book together, food is the most dominant. Amy's story begins the narrative as she recalls a time from her childhood when her great-grandmother was trying to teach Amy's mother, Ginger, how to make pierogi, Polish dumplings.

The conflicts among the generations are readily established. The clash between old and new is clamorous. The personalities of the women are flawlessly drawn.

Ginger fled the gossip-filled kitchens of Detroit for the desert of Arizona where she drowns herself in gin. It is bad enough that she is a drunk, but she feeds her daughter TV dinners. As Rose prepares the dough for the pierogi, she tries to make Ginger understand.

"This is what I did for my family, made their food with my hands. This is who I am, what I have--back then in the old country, when I first came to America, and now, today. Never forget this."

Ginger--restless, driven and ever judgmental--cannot and does not ever understand. Her grandmother says, "Pears on a willow tree with you--always wanting what's impossible."

Amy realizes that "…like my mother, I didn't know how to go back once I'd been away."

That theme runs throughout the book. Mothers may want to keep their daughters at home, or call them back, but do not, because they understand that the daughters need to leave even if they do not really want to go.

This quiet book is haunting. The women and their stories lingered with me long after I regretfully, and tearfully, turned the last page, and even after a second time.

Never have I read a first novel that was as beautifully constructed. The ease with which Pietrzyk takes us from time to time is wonderful. "Pears on a Willow Tree" is a book that I am giving to my mother and both of my daughters with the admonition that they save it for their own daughters.

I recommended the book to a friend in Illinois and she took the time to write me a thank you note.

© Copyright 1999, Durham Herald-Sun
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The Knoxville News-Sentinel
May 1, 1999
Donna A. Cruze

In "Pears on a Willow Tree" by Leslie Pietrzyk, four generations of women in a Polish-American family discover that, no matter how far you run, you can't escape your family and your heritage.

Each chapter in "Pears" is narrated by one of the Marchewka women; Rose, who left Poland for Detroit in 1919; her daughter, Helen; Helen's daughter Ginger; and Ginger's daughter, Amy, who brings us up to the present day. Even though the chapters are not chronological, the order is not confusing.

Each generation assimilates more than the one before it, but each one is drawn back, sometimes against individual's wills, to the old ways. "The old ways didn't follow us here. We brought them," Rose says.

In the first chapter, a photograph of the four women together--sent by Ginger to Amy while she is in Thailand teaching English--explains the title. As the women make pierogi, Ginger hammers away, asking about shortcuts and secrets to making the labor-intensive dish. Rose tells her "I know you…Pears on a will tree with you--always wanting what's impossible."

Rose's first chapter is written in the form of letters home to her mother in Poland. It is very effective in establishing Rose's character and telling how her early days in America shaped her. She tells a story told to her by her mother about the tragedy that befalls people who forget their families and grab for what doesn't exist.

While when is pregnant, Helen, who can't break away from her family, wishes for a daughter who will be able to do so. She gets that and more in Ginger. Years later, Helen says all the questions she was afraid to ask ended up in her daughter.

Ginger moves from Detroit to Phoenix to escape but comes to realize her life would have been no different had she stayed. She ends up a divorced mother of two and an alcoholic.

"May she follow the stars through that desert of hers and find her way home," Rose says, but Ginger fights being a real part of her family as much as part of her despairs at not being able to find her place among its members.

On an annual summer visit back home, Ginger tells Amy resignedly, "No matter what we do, or where we go, we are them. We just are."

The book ends where it begins, in the kitchen, where all the traditions live on through the women.

Tired of dealing with her alcoholic mother, Amy does the reverse of what her great-grandmother did--she leaves America. While in Thailand, she is what her mother feels like, a "farang"--the Thai word for someone who doesn't belong.

Ginger dies as a result of driving drunk, and Amy returns home. Left alone to clean out her mother's house, she finds a bag of poppy seeds while cleaning out the cabinets. Her grandmother Helen, who is in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer's disease (Amy and Helen co-narrate the touching chapter when she is in the disease's grip), calls and asks for Ginger. To connect with her grandmother, Amy asks her how to make a braided, poppy seed-covered cake.

Helen remembers, and Amy writes it down verbatim and after several failed attempts, makes the loaf that connects four generations.

Amy realizes she's responsible for carrying on her family's history. While placing a piece of the cake on her mother's grave, she makes peace with Ginger, telling her, "We know you had it in you. Mom, in your veins. Just like it's in mine."

At the end, Amy has married and has a daughter of her own. She thinks about her grandmother, talking about pears on a willow tree when asked a certain kind of impossible question.

Amy thought that maybe, somewhere, pears did grow on willow trees, if she could just find them, but she comes to realize they don't do so in Poland or Detroit or Phoenix or even exotic Thailand.

© Copyright 1999, Knoxville New-Sentinel

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Pictures

Rose's Wedding

Although Pears on a Willow Tree is fiction, some of the characters are inspired by family members. In several instances, I used family names. It made me feel as though I was among friends as I was working on the book. This is my great grandmother Rose's wedding. Both she and the groom had emigrated from Poland in the late 1800's. My great grandfather left Poland to escape conscription into the Russian army.

Great grandparents--the immigrants from Luxemburg

The other side of the family--here is another set of great-grandparents who emigrated from Luxembourg and became farmers in Iowa.

More great grandparents--the Scotch/Irish branch

For additional diversity, here are more great-grandparents. They are of Scotch-Irish ancestry and also farmed in Iowa.

Home town reading

I was thrilled to be invited to do a reading in my home town. At the reception after the reading, there were pears on a willow tree (well, pears on a fake fig tree).
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Book Group Discussion Guide:
PEARS ON A WILLOW TREE

1. Why is this book not told chronologically? How does this reflect the motif of "time" that runs through the novel (i.e. the clock on the mantel, Ginger arriving late for her grandmother's funeral, the painting of Kala that Amy wants to see in Thailand)?

2. Is the story of the wolves running through the snow true? Does it matter if it isn't? "And just because I wasn't there, that doesn't mean I don't remember [the story] too, Matka," Rose writes. (p. 17)

3. How would this book be different if it were told from only one point of view--for example, Amy's? Or Ginger's?

4. Why is Helen the only one of the four women who is never able to physically leave her mother?

5. How do each of the five superstitions in "Things Women Know" relate to the real lesson that follows?

6. Why does Amy decide to stay in Thailand for another year after meeting Taklaw? How does her decision compare to Ginger's decision to move to Phoenix? Rose's decision to leave Poland? Did they all leave for the same reasons?

7. How does Amy's sense of being foreign in Thailand compare with Rose's sense of being foreign in America? In what ways do Helen and Ginger feel "foreign"?

8. Why does Helen name her daughter after a movie star? How does Rose feel about changing her name when she arrives in America? Why does Ginger not give her real name in "No Last Names" until the end? Why does Amy say "I am a teacher in Bangkok" several times to Taklaw?

9. Does Ginger find redemption in the end? Does she ever understand herself? Is she understood by those around her? In "Wigilia: The Vigil," she asks Helen, "Why am I so far away? Why?" and Helen replies, "Always so many questions, Ginger. I know you. You'll find answers for every one, I promise." (p. 131) Does she?

10. How does "Wedding Day" compare with "Shortcuts," the only two chapters in which all four of the women are present?

11. Each woman struggles to find and maintain her own identity, separate from that of the family. In what ways does each succeed? Fail? Where and when does each woman feel most comfortable with herself?

12. Helen says, "A mother understands her daughter better than the daughter ever knows" (p. 257). Is this true for these mothers and daughters?

13. "It's impossible for a good daughter to leave; it's impossible for a good daughter to stay," Rose says. (p 265) Is the message of this novel that leaving one's family is bad? Is staying with one's family good?

14. "Pears on a willow tree with you--always wanting what's impossible," Rose says to Ginger. (p. 7) What "impossible pear" is each of these women looking for?

15. Why does the book open and end with photographs?

16. "Because a boy will not be you. But a girl you expect will be you. And then she isn't," Rose says. (p. 21) How is this true for the mothers and daughters in this book?

17. Why do the men in this book have such comparatively minor roles?

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