If comedian Don Rickles was born, as he claimed, with a Fudgicle in his mouth, fellow New Yorker, Alexandros Dropolous, Jr., emerged with a lump of feta in his — the food of Greek shepherds and, arguably, the cyclops Polyphemus — à la Flatbush, Brooklyn (and, later, Queens), in the 1960s. Alexandros is the beset, coming-of-age narrator of Profane Feasts who if not quite himself a hero, his Greek-American family, collectively, certainly qualifies. Self-sacrificing, hard-working (many of them) and outlandish, their often holiday-rooted escapades are memorably — and never not humorously — related by Alex. He is a capable storyteller with the reliable pertinacity of a BMT subway express. Birth, death, marriage (or “holy hammerlock” as Alex would have it), not to mention The Evil Eye, are all subject to his youthful, ever amazed, unblinkered vision in this taut collection (there is nary a wasted word) of fictional “story-chapters.” And we readers are immeasurably the richer for it. So, too, society, lest these tales of passionate endurance by a group people who never acknowledged “the harsh reality” of their poverty (being too rich in other ways to bother) be lost to the ages.
There are more than a few moments in the Profane Feasts when a true seriousness (“borrowed shade”, to deploy an Alex expression) emerges. These are as affecting as they are unexpected. When a grown Alex asks his mother to reveal how her antidote for The Evil Eye worked back when he was a ten-year-old victim of the dreaded stare, she replies, “‘It’s not so good … to talk on it, otherwise it won’t work next time.’” He then continues, “From that I gathered she simply didn’t know the answer. Like so much in her life, she took Greek matters and myths on unfiltered faith, a commodity so rare in these faithless times we sometimes mistake it for stupidity.” In the story “The Devil Loves to Roll the Dice & Play a Hand of Cards”, wherein Alex, facing financial ruin, is bailed at the last minute — big time. Afterwards, he muses “That prayers are answered if not by a host of angels, then at least through the human beings who love us.”

How did a civilization responsible eons years ago for the building of the Parthenon (in 432 B.C., to be exact) come to be eating off of 4x8 plywood sheets laid across purloined police barriers in the mid-20th century? (“These wooden ‘horses’ had been appropriated late one night … from a construction site on Flatbush Avenue.”). Every page of the collection reminds us that Profane Feasts’ raison d'être is to address this all-consuming conundrum. Grandmapou “Ya-Ya Hysterical.” Delphinia. Evangelina. Merrula and Kosmas Tarsipias. Euthalia Damocles. Mrs. Crousious. Mrs. Rhinosos (the witch). Aunt Harriet. Christos (the live-in “almost” uncle). Father Nick. Papou (Alexandros, Sr.). They all do their best to put you straight as to how things really are. How life is and should be. But my own money is on is Alex’s Uncle Stavros for the last word — and gesture. Stavros Hestiakos who “spoke kindly to cats and petted children politely” (he was allergic to the former and never had any of the latter). “But he never learned to hate,” Alex relates, and that counts for plenty.”

— Marshall Brooks, ed/publ, Arts End Books