Table Of ContentOUT OF THIS FURNACE
BY THOMAS BELL
With an Afterword by David P. Demarest, Jr.
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
Pittsburgh and London
Copyright © 1976, University of Pittsburgh Press
Copyright 1941 by Thomas Bell
Copyright © renewed 1968 by Marie Bell
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
20 19 18
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 76-6657
ISBN 0-8229-5273-4
A CIP record is available from the British Library.
TEXTUAL NOTE
Out of This Furnace was originally published in 1941 by Little, Brown and Company, then reissued by
the Liberty Book Club, Inc., in 1950.
Minor textual changes were made in the 1950 edition, and it is not clear whether these alterations were
initiated by the author or the second publisher. This new edition duplicates the original version.
ISBN 978-0-8229-7886-2 (electronic)
To the Memory
of
my mother, my father and my grandfather
CONTENTS
Author's Note
Part One, Kracha
Part Two, Mike Dobrejcak
Part Three, Mary
Part Four, Dobie
Afterword
Acknowledgments
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This book is a novel, fiction, and—allowing for the obvious exceptions—the
proper names used in it do not refer to actual persons who may bear the same or
similar names.
With that said, this much more may be: I have been as true to the events, the
people and the place as lay within my power.
Part One
KRACHA
1
GEORGE KRACHA came to America in the fall of 1881, by way of Budapest
and Bremen. He left behind him in a Hungarian village a young wife, a sister
and a widowed mother; it may be that he hoped he was likewise leaving behind
the endless poverty and oppression which were the birthrights of a Slovak
peasant in Franz Josef's empire. He was bound for the hard-coal country of
northeastern Pennsylvania, where his brother-in-law had a job on a railroad
section gang.
A final letter from America had contained precise instructions. Once landed in
New York he was to ask his way to the New Jersey ferry and there buy a railroad
ticket to Pennsylvania. It was likely that aboard ship he would meet Slovaks who
were going his way or were being met in New York by relatives; their help
should be his for the asking. If not, he was to ask his way by showing to any
policeman the enclosed paper, on which was written in English: Andrej Sedlar,
Lehigh Railroad, White Haven, Pa. He was to beware of strangers who tried to
get friendly with him on the street, and under no circumstances should he permit
anyone to handle his money.
The warnings had not been entirely necessary. Kracha knew as well as the
next man those dismal tales which had drifted back to the old country—about
trusting immigrants robbed and beaten their first day in America, about others
who stepped off the ship and were never seen again, about husbands found in
alleys with their throats cut from ear to ear while their brides of a month
vanished forever into houses of prostitution. Determined that no comparable
calamities should befall him, he had set out prepared to assault the first stranger
who so much as bade him good day.
Unfortunately no one had thought to warn him against his own taste for
whisky and against dark women who became nineteen years of age in the middle
of the ocean.
He had first noticed Zuska on the pier at Bremen. Later, aboard ship, he met
her and John Mihula, her husband; in the crowded steerage that took no
planning. They were Slovaks from Zemplinska, the province to the northeast of
Kracha's own Abavuska, and they were going to Pittsburgh, where Zuska had a
married sister. Mihula was several years older than Kracha, a pleasant, quiet
young man with delicately pink cheeks and blond, wavy hair. There was nothing
else noteworthy about him except, possibly, his possession of a woman like
Zuska.
She was as dark as her husband was fair, as lively as he was grave, a dark-
skinned, compactly plump girl who missed beauty, even prettiness, by a face too
broad at the cheekbones and a nose that matched. She lacked beauty, but had no
need of it; the day after she boarded the ship every man on it was as keenly
aware of her as if she had come among them naked. She had a throaty laugh, a
provocative roll to her hips and she could warm a man to the roots of his hair
with a look.
Long before the voyage ended—it lasted twelve days—Kracha had convinced
himself that Zuska was a deeply passionate woman unluckily married to a
husband whose abilities were hopelessly unequal to her needs. His pity for her
was as profound as his own sense of frustration; in the congestion of the steerage
the privacy necessary for such condolences as he felt like expressing was
unthinkable.
A week or so out of Bremen, however, Zuska revealed that the day was her
birthday, her nineteenth, and stirred by no clearly defined impulse Kracha
bargained with a steward for two quarts of whisky and German wine in a long-
necked bottle. His appearance, laden, was a triumph. The inescapable accordion
player was summoned, the bottles opened, and they had a little party. They
drank, danced and sang. Kracha undertook to explain why, among people who
were not from Zemplinska, Mihula's way of saying he had just risen would be
sure to arouse ribald laughter. He did not convince Mihula, who no more than
anyone else could tolerate being told how to speak his own language, but Zuska
glanced at Kracha and laughed. Encouraged, he pretended to be drunker than he
was and took liberties with her person which she repulsed with surprising
ferocity but without changing his opinion of her.
And that was why Kracha, who had left home with enough money to carry
