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Pears on a Willow Tree
Novel by Leslie Pietrzyk
Reviewed by Vivian Dorsel
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"Am I a mother or a daughter, a wife or a woman, someone who wants to leave or needs to stay?" is the question asked by four generations of Marchewka women in Leslie Pietrzyk’s impressive first novel, Pears on a Willow Tree. The story, which spans the century from 1919 to the present, is told by the women themselves: Rose, her daughter Helen, granddaughter Ginger, and great-granddaughter Amy.
Rose left Poland at 17 with her new husband, carrying with her the beginnings of her first child, a trunk filled with painstakingly handmade linens, and generations of traditions born in the country she was leaving. "The old ways don’t follow us here," she says. "We brought them, carrying them with us as any piece of china or silver candlestick or photograph, wrapping them carefully as we did all our treasures." |
 Pears on a Willow Tree Novel by Leslie Pietrzyk Hardcover - $ 10.00 Published July 1999 Bard |
Not long after Rose arrives in Detroit, her mother dies, a fact that continues to haunt her. But despite her longing for home, she is determined that her own children will be born in America.
Rose’s daughter Helen, like her three sisters, is content to remain in Detroit, marry a Polish-Catholic man, and raise her daughter in the bosom of the extended family. Like her mother, she knows that the women are the ones who keep the family alive, and the kitchen is where the traditions are nurtured, the truly important things discussed. She dreams of traveling to other places and, after her husband dies, even buys a matched set of luggage, but never uses it.
The family closeness Rose and Helen experience as warmth and safety, Helen’s daughter Ginger sees as a trap. She hates Detroit, her Polish background, and her grandmother’s slow, careful English speech. "We all looked alike," she says. "My cousins and I were confused with one another at school and church. That made me feel I’d never get out..."
But she does get out, leaving Detroit the summer after her high-school graduation, becoming the first to marry a non-Polish, non-Catholic man, the first to get a divorce, the first to join AA. During each of her annual visits back home, she re-experiences the restlessness, the need to escape, that drove her away. "There was noise always around me, people talking, too many relatives wanting to know what I was doing now, was doing next, what I did yesterday."
At twelve, Ginger’s daughter Amy, born and raised in Arizona, is so ignorant of her ethnic heritage that, when she hears a "Polack" joke, she doesn’t know what it means, but laughs anyway. She, too, escapes her mother’s house, traveling to Thailand to teach English, and waiting, like Ginger, for her mother to ask her to come home. In the end, it is left to her to find the meanings of the family traditions her mother never taught her.
"This is what my grandmother always said when I asked a certain kind of impossible question: ‘Amy, you’re looking for pears on a willow tree . . . ’ Pears grow on pear trees, I thought, but maybe somewhere they didn’t, maybe somewhere they grew on willow trees, if I could just find them."I met Leslie Pietrzyk last summer at a writers' conference, where we were in the same fiction workshop. A talented and sensitive young writer with a clear, straightforward prose style, she has won many prizes and awards for her short fiction. Now, drawing on her own ethnic heritage, she has written a compelling first novel that is not just about a Polish family in Detroit, but about all families and their traditions—families to cling to and escape from—and most of all, about mothers and daughters everywhere.
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Vivian Dorsel, Managing Editor of The Berkshire Review, lives and writes in Richmond, Massachusetts. She holds degrees in psychology from Williams College and UMass/Amherst, and recently co-edited a volume for the Advances in Psychology Series published by Elsevier Science Press of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her fiction, poetry and brief memoirs have appeared in The Berkshire Review, The Women’s Times, The Artful Mind and Portfolio.