Featuring
Eastern European immigrant laborers in the steel mills around
Pittsburgh, Out of This Furnace
was a regional bestseller that found a wider audience in college
classes, where it enlightens students about newly industrialized
America, the immigrant labor it exploited, and the rise of trade
unions.
Author Thomas Bell, who was born Thomas Belejcak in the mill town of
Braddock, Pennsylvania, based the novel on his own Slovak
ancestors’ experience. The book spans three generations,
beginning with Djuro Kracha, who takes one of the few jobs available to
uneducated immigrants in the 1880s: working in a steel mill where the
furnaces sometimes exploded. Djuro’s daughter Mary, the main
character in the second section, loses her idealistic husband in an
industrial accident and dies of tuberculosis herself a few years later.
The last section, featuring Mary’s oldest child, Dobie
Dobrejcak, a third-generation steelworker, ends on a triumphant note as
Dobie and his compatriots succeed in unionizing the industry in the
1930s.
People of Slovak heritage shouldn’t look to Out of This Furnace
to learn about ancestral customs. This is not a nostalgic novel, and
it’s more focused on the mill than than on domestic life. Its
ethnic pride lies in its portrayal of a hard-working, courageous people
who survived and advanced by their own sweat. This novel has broad
appeal to anyone whose impoverished ancestors came to the United States
a century or so ago seeking a better life and had to toil at grueling,
life-threatening jobs for long hours and little pay while being
belittled with epithets like “hunkies” by old-line
Americans. For the descendants of those immigrants who are comfortable
in the middle class, this book is a reminder of the sacrifice that was
required to secure our position there.
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