Many books about the immigrant experience in America have been written (and many films produced). Those looking to discover a little history through fiction about immigrants arriving from Italy, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, France and, of course, England certainly all have much to choose from. The same goes for the immigrant experiences of Russians, Poles, Chinese, Japanese and, of course, though in a substantially different form, any oceanfront territory on the western half of Africa. When it comes to the Slovakian-American experience, things get severely limited and rising to the cream of what crop there is Thomas Bell’s novel Out of this Furnace which mingles fact and fiction in such a way as almost to defy its categorization as simply a novel.
The book is truly a study of the immigrant experience for those escaping “the endless poverty and oppression which were the birthrights of a Slovak peasant in Franz Josef’s empire.” The narrative covers three generations of an immigrant family spanning from the Gilded Age to the New Deal. In addition to being a chronicle of Slovakian immigrants and their various means and choices in adjusting to becoming Slovakian-Americans, the novel also traces the history of the development of organized labor within the steel industry.
The realism of the book stems in part from the author basing the fictional characters upon his own friends and family, but also in part due to the incorporation of actual historical figures of significance and influence. Thus, one of the first-generation immigrants, Mike Dobrejcak, is inspired by Socialist Party Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs to become intellectually committed to worker exploitation by the steel mill owners who are in league with the Republican political machine. Like Debs, he tries, but fails and eventually is killed in a mill accident, but his son—a third-generation immigrant via his grandfather—will wind interacting with real life labor leader John L. Lewis by the end of the novel to fulfill his father’s unrealized dreams. The election of Franklin Roosevelt is situated heroically as the spark which drives the politics of organized labor finally breaking the back of the owners while Andrew Carnegie can be fairly and accurately identified as the primary individual antagonist of the story.
While Out of this Furnace does focus specifically upon the immigrant experience of Slovakians settling in Pennsylvania and finding work in the steel industry, it is not a culturally-focused story. For instance, one might expect religious observation, rituals and ceremony to play a major role in the story whereas for the most part it is entirely absent. One could well argue that the Slovakian characters could be interchanged with Polish or Czech or even straight-up Hungarian immigrants without any major alteration in the story, but that is part of the point. This novel is equally the story of how organized labor built the country and how that labor would not have existed without the arrival of immigrants from around the world. It is, ultimately, a celebration of the power of unions to give immigrants from any part of the world a fair shot at living the American Dream.
