Laughing in the Jungle E-Book

Louis Adamic

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The originality and significance of Laughing in the Jungle and of Mr. Adamic’s other published work, won for him a Guggenheim fellowship. The award enabled him to return to his native land, almost as much an immigrant to Yugoslavia after nineteen years as he had first been to this country. On his return to America he wrote The Native’s Return. That book and Laughing in the Jungle are complementary to each other. The two together form a unique record, the story of a Yugoslav who discovers America and of an American who rediscovers Yugoslavia.
Benjamin Stolberg said of Laughing in the Jungle: “This hook brings out his gifts even more clearly (than Dynamite). He is no mere autobiograplier. Again he is primarily a story teller. And, to my mind, he touches greatness as a story teller.”
The Bookman: “The power of the hook lies in the fact that it is an account of the experiences of an intelligent man of action, a man who has seen things in great variety, a man who has studied many kinds of people, has travelled over all of this country, has made observations in almost every phase of the American scene.”
The Survey: “Adamic is a philosopher and sociologist in the field of journalism. If his next book, which he is preparing while studying abroad, follows the method and theme of this hook he will have made a contribution to our literature of immigrant peoples as significant as The Rise of David Levinsky.”
This “next book,” mentioned in the Survey review, was The Native’s Return.

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in 1932

Copyright © 2022 Classica Libris

Dedication

To

MADSEN

Author’s Note

This book is a narrative of the influences which, in 1913, prompted me as a boy of fourteen and a half to leave my native country in Europe and go to America, and of things within my experience as an immigrant living in various parts of the United States that seem interesting or significant, or merely amusing to me personally, and give themselves to telling at this time. It does not pretend to be a complete autobiography (if such a thing is ever possible).

Immigration was a large factor in the upbuilding of America. The immigrant flood during the last seven or eight decades, and especially from about 1890 to 1914, included large numbers of my countrymen—“Bohunks,” or “Hunkies”: Slavs from the Balkans and from eastern and central Europe—whose contribution as workers to the current material greatness and power of the United States, albeit not generally recognized, is immense. “… Much of our work and our strength is frozen in the buildings of New York, and in the buildings of other cities, and in the railroads and bridges of America…”

On the other hand, of course, immigration is in no small way to blame for the fact that the United States today is more a jungle than a civilization—a land of deep economic, social, spiritual, and intellectual chaos and distress—in which, it seems to me, by far the most precious possession a sensitive and intelligent person can have is an active sense of humor.

Immigration now is ended. The United States is pulling down the “Welcome” sign. This fact appears to me one of the most significant in America’s national existence today. Hence, perhaps, it is not inappropriate for, or presumptuous of, me at this time to add a volume to the rather meager shelf of autobiographical books by immigrants.

Louis Adamic

Yaddo,

October 1931

PART ONE

Why I Came to America

Chapter 1

Amerikanci in Carniola

I

As a boy of nine, and even younger, in my native village of Blato, in Carniola—then a Slovenian duchy of Austria and later a part of Yugoslavia—I experienced a thrill every time one of the men of the little community returned from America.

Five or six years before, as I heard people tell, the man had quietly left the village for the United States, a poor peasant clad in homespun, with a mustache under his nose and a bundle on his back; now, a clean-shaven Amerikanec, he sported a blue-serge suit, buttoned shoes very large in the toes and with india-rubber heels, a black derby, a shiny celluloid collar, and a loud necktie made even louder by a dazzling horseshoe pin, which, rumor had it, was made of gold, while his two suitcases of imitation leather, tied with straps, bulged with gifts from America for his relatives and friends in the village. In nine cases out of ten, he had left in economic desperation, on money borrowed from some relative in the United States; now there was talk in the village that he was worth anywhere from one to three thousand American dollars. And to my eyes he truly bore all the earmarks of affluence. Indeed, to say that he thrilled my boyish fancy is putting it mildly. With other boys in the village, I followed him around as he went visiting his relatives and friends and distributing presents and hung onto his every word and gesture.

Then, on the first Sunday after his homecoming, if at all possible, I got within earshot of the nabob as he sat in the winehouse or under the linden in front of the winehouse in Blato, surrounded by village folk, ordering wine and klobase—Carniolan sausages—for all comers, paying for accordion-players, indulging in tall talk about America, its wealth and vastness, and his own experiences as a worker in the West Virginia or Kansas coal-mines or Pennsylvania rolling-mills, and comparing notes upon conditions in the United States with other local Amerikanci who had returned before him.

Under the benign influence of cvichek—Lower Carniolan wine—and often even when sober, the men who had been in America spoke expansively, boastfully, romantically of their ability and accomplishments as workers and of the wages they had earned in Wilkes-Barre or Carbondale, Pennsylvania, or Wheeling, West Virginia, or Pueblo, Colorado, or Butte, Montana, and generally of places and people and things and affairs in the New World. The men who returned to the village, either to stay or for a visit, were, for the most part, natural men of labor—men with sinewy arms and powerful backs—“Bohunks,” or “Hunkies,” so called in the United States—who derived a certain brawny joy and pride from hard toil. Besides, now that they had come home, they were no longer mere articles upon the industrial labor market, “working stiffs” or “wage slaves,” as radical agitators in America referred to them, but adventurers, distant kinsmen of Marco Polo safely returned from a far country, heroes in their own eyes and the eyes of the village; and it was natural for them to expand and to exaggerate their own exploits and enlarge upon the opportunities to be found in America. Their boasting, perhaps, was never wholly without basis in fact…

I remember that, listening to them, I played with the idea of going to America when I was but eight or nine.

My notion of the United States then, and for a few years after, was that it was a grand, amazing, somewhat fantastic place—the Golden Country—a sort of Paradise—the Land of Promise in more ways than one—huge beyond conception, thousands of miles across the ocean, untellably exciting, explosive, quite incomparable to the tiny, quiet, lovely Carniola; a place full of movement and turmoil, wherein things that were unimaginable and impossible in Blato happened daily as a matter of course.

In America one could make pots of money in a short time, acquire immense holdings, wear a white collar, and have polish on one’s boots like a gospod—one of the gentry—and eat white bread, soup, and meat on week-days as well as on Sundays, even if one were but an ordinary workman to begin with. In Blato no one ate white bread or soup and meat, except on Sundays and holidays, and very few then.

In America one did not have to remain an ordinary workman. There, it seemed, one man was as good as the next. There were dozens, perhaps scores, or even hundreds of immigrants in the United States, one-time peasants and workers from the Balkans—from Carniola, Styria, Carinthia, Croatia, Banat, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Serbia—and from Poland, Slovakia, Bohemia, and elsewhere, who, in two or three years, had earned and saved enough money working in the Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Illinois coal-mines or steel-mills to go to regions called Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nebraska, and there buy sections of land each of which was larger than the whole area owned by the peasants in Blato… Oh, America was immense—immense!

I heard a returned Amerikanec tell of regions known as Texas and Oklahoma where single farms—renche (ranches), he called them—were larger than the entire province of Carniola! It took a man days to ride on horseback from one end of such a ranch to the other. There were people in Blato and in neighboring villages who, Thomas-like, did not believe this, but my boyish imagination was aflame with America, and I believed it. At that time I accepted as truth nearly everything I heard about America. I believed that a single cattleman in Texas owned more cattle than there were in the entire Balkans. And my credulity was not strained when I heard that there were gold-mines in California, and trees more than a thousand years old with trunks so enormous that it required a dozen men, clasping each other’s hands, to encircle them with their arms.

In America everything was possible. There even the common people were “citizens,” not “subjects,” as they were in Austria and in most other European countries. A citizen, or even a non-citizen foreigner, could walk up to the President of the United States and pump his hand. Indeed, that seemed to be a custom in America. There was a man in Blato, a former steel-worker in Pittsburgh, who claimed that upon an occasion he had shaken hands and exchanged words with Theodore Roosevelt, to whom he familiarly referred as “Tedi”—which struck my mother very funny. To her it seemed as if some one had called the Pope of Rome or the Emperor of Austria by a nickname. But the man assured her, in my hearing, that in America everybody called the President merely “Tedi.”

Mother laughed about this, off and on, for several days. And I laughed with her. She and I often laughed together.

II

One day—I was then a little over ten—I said to Mother:

“Some day I am going to America.”

Mother looked at me a long moment… She was then a healthy young peasant woman, not yet thirty, rather tall, with a full bust and large hips; long arms and big, capable hands; a broad, sun-browned, wind-creased Slavic face; large, wide-spaced hazel eyes, mild and luminous with simple mirth; and wavy auburn hair which stuck in little gold-bleached wisps from under her colored kerchief, tied below her chin. She had then four children, two boys and two girls; later she bore five more, three boys and two girls. I was the oldest. Years after I came to America my oldest sister wrote me that there was a story in the village that Mother had laughed in her pains at my birth—which probably is not true; mother herself, who is still living, does not remember. But I know that when I was a boy she had—and probably still has—the gift of laughter in a greater measure than most people thereabouts; indeed, than most people anywhere. Hers was the healthy, natural, visceral, body-shaking laughter of Slovenian peasants in Carniola, especially of peasant women—variable laughter; usually mirthful and humorous, clear and outright, but sometimes, too, mirthless and unhumorous, pain-born, and pain-transcending…

“I am going to America,” I said again, as Mother continued to look at me in silence.

I imagine she thought that I was a strange boy. Now and then she had remarked in my hearing that I worried her. Often she looked at me with silent concern. In some respects I was a self-willed youngster. I usually had things my way, regardless of opposition.

Finally, Mother smiled at me, although I do not doubt that what I said frightened her. She smiled with her whole face—her mouth, her wrinkles, her eyes, especially her eyes.

I smiled, too. I was a healthy boy, tall and strong for my age. Physically, as Mother often remarked, I resembled Father, who was a peasant in body and soul; but evidently I was not made to be a peasant. If necessary, I could work hard in the fields, but I very much preferred not to. I liked to move about the village, roam in the woods, go to neighboring villages, stand by the side of the highway, and observe things.

With a little catch in her voice, Mother said: “To America? But when are you going?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “When I grow up, I guess. I am already ten.” I had not thought of it in detail but had merely decided to go some day.

Mother laughed. Her laughter was tremulous with apprehension. She could not make me out.

I realized then that she would not like me to go to America. A cousin of hers had gone there twenty-odd years before, when she was still a little girl. She scarcely remembered him but had heard other relatives speak of him. The first year he had written a few times. Then Heaven only knew what became of him. And, as it occurred to me later, Mother knew of other men in Blato and the vicinity who had gone to America and had sunk, leaving no trace, in the vastness of America. She knew of men in villages not remote from our own who had returned from the United States without an arm or minus a leg, or in bad health. There was an Amerikanec in Gatina, the village nearest Blato, who had come home with a strange, sinful, and unmentionable disease, which he later communicated to his wife, who, in turn, gave birth to a blind child. There was a widow in Podgora, another village near by, whose husband had been killed in a mine accident in the United States. Mother had only a faint conception of what a mine was; there are no mines in Lower Carniola; but she dreaded the thought that some day one of her children might work underground.

III

All of us, parents and children, slept in the izba—the large room in a Slovenian peasant house—and that night, soon after we all went to bed, Mother called me by name in a low voice, adding, “Are you asleep?”

I was awake, and almost answered her, but then it occurred to me that she probably meant to discuss me with Father. I kept quiet. The bed which I shared with my brother was in the opposite corner from my parents’.

“He is asleep,” mumbled Father. “Why do you call him?”

“I want to tell you what he said to me today,” said Mother, in a half-whisper, which I heard clearly. “He said he would go to America when he grew up.”

Father grunted vaguely. He was heavy with fatigue. He had worked hard all day. He was one of the better-to-do peasants in Blato, but, with Mother’s aid, did nearly all the work on the farm, seldom hiring outside help. He was a large, hard man, in his late thirties; blue-eyed and light-haired; a simple, competent peasant.

He grunted again. “America? He is only a child. How old is he, anyhow?” he asked. He was too busy to keep up with the ages of his children.

“He is ten,” said Mother. “But he is like no other boy in the village.”

“Only a child,” Father grunted again. “Childish talk.”

“Sometimes I am afraid to talk with him,” said Mother. “I don’t know what is going on in his head. He asks me questions and tells me things. Nothing that occurs hereabouts escapes him. And he reads everything he finds in the village.”

They were both silent a minute.

“I’ll send him to city school, then,” said Father, “even if he is our oldest.” According to custom in Carniola, as the oldest son, I was supposed to stay home and work on the farm, and after my father’s death become its master. “He isn’t much good on the farm, anyhow,” Father went on. “I’ll send him to school in Lublyana”—the provincial capital. “Let him get educated if he has a head for learning.”

“That’s what Martin says we should do, too,” said Mother. Martin was her brother, the priest in charge of the parish of Zhalna, which included the village of Blato.

“They say children are God’s blessing,” said Father, after a while, “but—”

“Oh, everything will be well in the end,” Mother interrupted his misgiving. “There is little to worry about so long as God gives us health.” She was a natural, earth-and-sky optimist; a smiling, laughing fatalist. Then, after a few moments, she added: “Maybe—maybe, if we send him to school in Lublyana, he will become a priest, like my brother Martin.”

Father said nothing to this. Mother was silent, too. By and by I heard Father snore lightly, in the first stage of his slumber.

Mother, I believe, did not fall asleep till late that night. She probably smiled to herself in the darkness, yielding her consciousness to delicious thoughts. It was absurd to think that I should go to America! I was only a child, and one should not take seriously a child’s chatter… They would send me to Lublyana; that was settled. Then, after years of schooling, I would become a priest and the bishop might send me to the parish church in Zhalna. “Oh, that would be beautiful!” she exclaimed to herself, half aloud. I heard her clearly, despite Father’s snoring, and I imagine that this is what she was thinking to herself. She probably figured that by the time I would be ordained a priest, Uncle Martin would have been promoted to a bigger parish than Zhalna, making a vacancy for me.

In common with many peasant women in Carniola, Mother was not deeply religious in the ordinary sense. I believe that she scarcely concerned herself with the tenets of the Catholic faith. She was innately pagan. In her blood throbbed echoes of prayers that her ancestors—Old Slavs—had addressed a thousand years ago from their open-air sacrificial altars to the sun and to the wind- and thunder-gods. What largely appealed to her in Catholicism, although, of course, she was not conscious of the fact, were the ritual and the trappings. She loved the vestments that her brother and other priests wore at mass. She loved the solemn processions with bells tolling long and sonorously on big holidays or on hot, still days in midsummer when drought threatened to destroy or harm the crops. She loved the jubilant midnight mass at Christmas. She relished the incense, the smell of lighted candles, the pictures, the stations of the Way of the Cross, and the statues of saints at the main and side altars, and the organ music on Sundays. She sang in the choir with a strong and clear, although untrained, voice. Sometimes, when she sang solos, her fellow parishioners from Blato said they detected a ring of laughter in her singing. She did not care for sermons, not even her brother’s; at least, so far as I know, she never praised a sermon; but I think it was deeply satisfying to her to see Uncle Martin stand in the pulpit, read the Gospel, and preach… And some day, perhaps—perhaps, I, her son, would stand in the pulpit at Zhalna and preach! She would be so proud of me. All the people of the parish would be proud of me, just as they were proud of Uncle Martin, who was also a native of the parish and a peasant’s son.

In my father’s life, too, religion was of no great moment. He was essentially a practical man who had serious and constant business with the ancient earth. He went to church on Sundays and prayed to God every evening with his family, but I think he did so more because that was the conventional tiling to do than because he felt it necessary. Basically, like most peasants in Carniola and elsewhere, he was a hard realist, a practical man, a fatalist, possessing a natural, almost biological good sense and a half-cynical earth knowledge older than any religion or system… However, he probably figured, if a son of his was cut out to be a priest—why, well and good. Priests were an important part of the scheme of things. To have a priest in the family added to one’s prestige. Father knew that. He felt that even now peasants in the parish showed him a special sort of deference because his wife’s brother was a priest. To have his own son become one, he possibly said to himself, would be even better. At any rate, he decided to send me to city school which—for the time being—was agreeable to me.

IV

Lute in the spring of 1909, four months before I was taken to school in Lublyana, and six or seven months after I had first announced my intention to go to America, there returned to Blato a man who had been in America for more than twenty years.

He was Peter Molek, brother of Francé Molek, a rather well-to-do peasant who was our nearest neighbor. Peter had no property in the village, and so he went to live in Francé’s house. His brother had not heard from or of him for eight years. He had thought him dead. None of the returned Amerikanci had seen him in America. Then, of a sudden that spring, there came a letter from him that he was “coming home to die.”

Peter Molek was an unusual Amerikanec to return to Blato.

At the supper table the day after his homecoming, I heard my parents discuss him. Father said that he remembered when Peter had gone to America. “He was one of the sturdiest and lustiest young men in this parish, even stronger and taller than Francé,” who, although in his fifty-seventh year, was still a big and powerful man. “Now look at him!”—and Father shook his head.

Although not yet fifty, Peter Molek was a gaunt, bent, and broken man, hollow-eyed, bald, mostly skin and bone, with a bitter expression on his face; suffering from rheumatism and asthma—two diseases till then all but unknown in Blato. He was eight or nine years younger than Francé, but only a shadow of his brother.

“America is an evil place,” said Mother, glancing at me concernedly, although I had not spoken of going to America again. “They say Peter came home almost penniless. I guess Francé will have to keep him till he dies.”

Which, to me, was the most extraordinary aspect of Peter Molek. With my ideas about America, I could not understand how anyone, after spending twenty years in that country—in the midst of abundance—could return home in such a state. And it doubtless was true what people said about Peter Molek having no money. He brought no presents even for his closest relatives. He did not go to the winehouse, nor talk about his adventures in America with anyone. He kept, for the most part, to himself. All day long he sat in the sun on the bench in front of his brother’s house. He read books and papers which evidently were American publications. He took slow walks in the fields. Sometimes he coughed for ten or twenty minutes at a spell.

Peter Molek’s cough was a great sensation among the children in Blato. When the asthmatic spasm seized him, his face turned purple, his deep-sunken eyes bulged and looked wide and terror-stricken; and bending over, he held his chest in desperation. The first two or three weeks after his return, as soon as one of the boys heard him cough, there was much yelling in the village and, with the heartless, unthinking curiosity of youth, ten or a dozen husky, barefooted urchins came dashing from all sides to Molek’s house, to watch the strange Amerikanec choke, and listen to the wheezing sound that issued from his tortured chest. When he emitted an especially long wheeze, the boys looked at one another in wonder and smiled.

In this respect I was no better than the other boys, until Mother forbade me to go near Peter Molek when he coughed. Then I watched him from the distance. Our house was only a couple of hundred yards from Molek’s.

But occasionally, when he was not coughing, I walked by him. I wanted to talk with him but could not work up enough courage to address him first.

One day he smiled faintly and said to me, “You are the neighbor’s boy, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “My father remembers you when you went to America.”

Peter Molek nodded his head. “That was a long time ago,” he said.

“Why do you cough like you do all the time?” I asked.

Peter Molek did not answer for a while. He stared at me in a way that made me uneasy. Then he looked away and swung one of his large bony hands in a vague gesture. “America,” he said. “… America.”

I did not know what he meant.

“How old are you?” Peter Molek asked me.

“Ten,” I said. “Soon I’ll be eleven. I am going to city school in the fall.”

Peter Molek smiled again and nodded his head. “You are all right. He said “all right” in English.

“I know what that means—‘all right,’” I said, eagerly. “It means ‘good’ in the American language. I have often heard other men who came from America say, ‘all right.’ I also know other American words. ‘Sure Mike!’‘Sonabitch’…” I was pleased with my knowledge.

Peter Molek peered at me from under his eyebrows. He seemed to want to touch me, but probably was afraid that I might draw away from him because he was a sick man. “You are all right,” he said again.

I was delighted with his approval.

On the bench beside him I noticed some papers and books. I stepped close. “What are these?” I said.

“Books and papers from America,” said Peter Molek. “I brought the books with me. The papers I get by mail once a week.”

The newspapers were copies of the Appeal to Reason, a radical sheet then printed at Girard, Kansas. One of the books was The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair.

“Are there pictures in them?” I asked. “Pictures of America?”

“No,” said Peter Molek. “But I have some pictures inside. Wait; I’ll bring them out.” He went into the house and presently returned with some photographs, postcards, and newspaper clippings.

I sat beside him.

“This,” said Peter Molek, showing me the first picture, “is a coal town in Pennsylvania. Forest City. This, which looks like a mountain, is a pile of coal, dug out of the ground—thousands of feet below—mostly by our people from Carniola. Nearly all the miners in Forest City are Slovenians. I worked in one of the mines there for seven years.”

He showed me the next picture. “A steel-mill in Pennsylvania. Once I worked here awhile, too. Most of the time I worked in the mines. I worked from one end of the country to the other—not only in Pennsylvania, but in Ohio, in West Virginia, in Illinois, in Montana, in Nevada—in places you have never heard of.”

“I have heard of Pennsylvania,” pronouncing it Panslovenia, “and Ohio and—”

Peter Molek smiled wanly. He liked me, and I was happy that he did.

“This is New York,” he said, showing me another picture. “You see these buildings? Some of them are many times higher than the highest church tower in Carniola.”

“I know about the buildings of New York,” I said.

“They are building them higher every year. Skyscrapers, they call them. You know what that means?”

“No,” I said.

Peter Molek explained to me why the tall buildings in America were called skyscrapers. It was the most interesting talk I had ever heard.

Then I said, “Some day I am going to America.”

Peter Molek looked at me, startled. He was about to say something, when another asthmatic spasm seized him.

V

“This is what America did to me,” said Peter Molek, after he had stopped coughing.

“What does this mean?” I said, pointing at the title of a book on the bench.

“The Jungle,” said Peter Molek. “That means dzhungla in Slovenian.”

I did not even know what dzhungla meant. The forests around Blato were neat, thinned-out, idyllic groves where one went to pick berries or gather mushrooms.

“A jungle,” Peter Molek explained, “is a wild place, a great forest, all tangled up with vegetation, everything growing crisscross, almost impenetrable, mysterious and terrible, infested with beasts and snakes, and spiders bigger than my fist… This is a book about the United States, although there are no jungles in the United States, so far as I know. But the whole of America is a jungle. This is a story about people like me—foreigners—who go there and are swallowed by the jungle. Understand?”

I nodded in the affirmative, but I did not really understand.

“America swallowed me,” continued Peter Molek, “but she did not digest me.” He smiled, as if to himself, a peculiar, mirthless smile.

Peter Molek went on: “America the jungle swallows many people who go there to work. She squeezes the strength out of them, unless they are wise or lucky enough to escape before it is too late; unless they work in the mills or the mines only a few years and save every cent they can and return home or buy themselves a piece of land where land is still cheap.”

My understanding of Peter Molek’s words was scant, but I listened and remembered everything he said.

“… I was there too long,” he was saying. “I worked too hard. Here is New York,” pointing at the picture he had shown me before. “I—we helped to build these buildings—we Slovenians and Croatians and Slovaks and other people who went to America to work. We helped to build many other cities there, cities of which you have never heard, and railroads, and bridges, all made of steel which our people make in the mills. Our men from the Balkans are the best steel-workers in America. The framework of America is made of steel. And this smoke that you see here—it comes from coal that we have dug up; we from the Balkans and from Galicia and Bohemia. We have also dug up much ore. I myself worked for a few years in the iron-mines of the West. I lost my health in the mines. Miners get asthma and rheumatism.

“Three times I was in accidents. Once, in Colorado, I was buried for four days three thousand feet underground. There were seven other men buried with me—three of them Slovenians like myself, two Poles, one Dalmatian, one American. When they dug us out, the Dalmatian and I were the only two still living. Once, in Pennsylvania, a rock fell on me in a mine and broke my right leg. The leg healed and I went back to work. I worked two months, and another rock fell on me. It almost broke my left leg.

“For many years I did not understand America. Then I began to read and understand…

“The day before I sailed for home I walked in these streets,” he pointed at the picture, “where the buildings are tallest. Steel buildings—and I looked up, and I can hardly describe my feelings. I realized that there was much of our work and strength, my own work and strength, frozen in the greatness of New York and in the greatness of America. I felt that, although I was going home to Blato, I was actually leaving myself in America.”

VI

That spring and summer I had more sessions with Peter Molek. Between asthmatic spasms he talked to me of the vast jungle that he conceived America to be. His view of the country, as I remember it now, was one-sided, bitter. He told me of accidents in the mines and iron-foundries which he had witnessed or of which he had merely read or heard; of labor upheavals; of powerful capitalists who owned immense industries and whom he sketched as “the beasts in the jungle”; of rich people’s orgies in Chicago and New York at which, as reported in socialistic prints, men smoked cigarettes wrapped in hundred-dollar bills; of millionaires who wore diamonds in their teeth and had bands playing while they bathed in champagne; and of slums where people lived in rags and misery.

I listened open-mouthed.

“But for some people America is not a bad place,” said Peter Molek one day. “Many foreigners have greatly bettered themselves there, but these fortunate ones are few when compared with the multitude of immigrants who, I believe, would be better off had they remained in the old country. American industries use them, then cast them off.”

“More people go to America all the time,” I said. Lately I had read in a newspaper to which my father subscribed that four thousand more persons had emigrated from Carniola to the United States in 1908 than in 1907.

“Yes,” said Peter Molek. “They go because each thinks that he will get the better of America and not America the better of him. They listen to the few who return home from the United States with two or three thousand dollars. They hear that some one else who stayed there has succeeded on a big scale. And they think they will do the same. America is the Land of Promise to them. She lures them over by the thousands and hundreds of thousands—people from many countries, not only from Carniola. She needs their hands even more than they need her dollars and makes use of them. Once upon a time immigrants were called ‘dung’ in America; that was a good name for them. They were the fertilizer feeding the roots of America’s present and future greatness. They are still ‘dung.’ The roots of America’s greatness still feed on them… Life in America is a scramble. More people are swept under than rise to riches.”

All of which, on top of what I had previously heard and thought of America, tended to bewilder me.

Chapter 2

“Do Not Go to America!”

I

What country schooling I had received in Blato qualified me to enter the pre-Gymnasium class in the primary school in Lublyana (Laibach) from which I advanced, the following year, to the Gymnasium, or “Latin school.”

The first three years of my student life in Lublyana, if compared with my later years, especially those in America, were, while not uninteresting, almost uneventful. I was a fairly good student, passing the examinations with ease. I did my homework during rest periods in class, so that after school I could wander—usually alone—through the streets of the city, over the castle-crowned hill which dominated the town, along the river Lublyanica which flowed through it, or by the ancient crumbling Roman wall around it, and look at things. The first year I found the little provincial city, with its forty thousand inhabitants, interesting, even mildly stirring; the second year less so, and the third year hardly at all. In all that period I made no especially pleasing or exciting personal contacts. Occasionally I went to lectures, theatrical performances, and sporting events, and always read a good deal.

Mother, in her simple way, was a happy woman. She warmly told me that I was a good boy. When, every other month or so, she came to see me at the students’ boarding-house in the city, bringing me fruit and home-made potica—Carniolan cake—or when I came home to Blato at Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations, she glowed with parental pride at sight of me. I imagine she was saying to herself over and over what a nice young priest I would make twelve years hence.

For a time there was a vague and tacit understanding between Mother and myself that at the end of my eight years of Gymnasium studies I would enter the seminary of the Roman Catholic Church in Lublyana, and four years later be ordained a priest. In common with my parents, whose attitude toward religion I have described, I had not a deeply religious nature in the orthodox sense. In the basic phases of my character I was (and still am) essentially a Slavic peasant; but during the first and perhaps a part of the second year in the city school I thought, with a mingling of adoration for and a sense of duty toward Mother and a youthful peasant cynicism, which was half fatalism, that I might as well enter the priesthood to please her—although perhaps deep down in me I knew or felt all the time that I would never become a priest.

I recall that I had momentary misgivings about entering the holy orders even before I went to the city schools. Later I remotely admitted to myself, off and on, that I still wanted to go to America no less than I had wanted to go a year or two before. But then I said to myself, with a glow of filial virtue, that, things being as they were, I had to choose between going to America and fulfilling Mother’s wish to see me ordained a priest. Subsequently, however, when I learned that not a few young Slovenian clerics emigrated, to take charge of Slovenian churches in various parts of the United States, I decided to do both—become a priest, to please Mother, and after a few years of ministerial service at home apply for transfer to America. Mother, I thought, might not object to my going there as a clerk of the Church.

At vacation time in Blato I still talked with Peter Molek, whose health appeared to be slowly improving, or rather I listened to his talk. His fondness for me was palpably increasing. I did not tell him that I meant to become a priest. I had an instinctive feeling that he would not approve of my intention. His words often verged dangerously upon heresy; he was a socialist and, as I learned later, an atheist. He was the most exciting person I knew then. I could have listened to his version of America forever.

In the city, too, I pricked up my ears every time I heard mention of the United States. I read such books as Stric Tomova Koča (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and Zadnji Mohikanec (The Last of the Mohicans), and numerous American dime novels, translated into vile Slovenian.

II

At the beginning of my fourth student year, when I was going on fifteen, I struck up a close and satisfying friendship with a youth a year older than myself. His name was Yanko Radin. Like myself, he was a tallish, healthy, avid-minded, active boy. He hailed from a little town somewhere in the province of Istria, north of Trieste, which then was an Austrian seaport. We lived in the same students’ boarding-house. We were third-Gymnasium students and classmates.

Yanko had a brother in America, who was three or four years older than himself. The brother’s name was Stefan, but in his infrequent letters to Yanko, most often only brief notes, he signed himself “Steve.” Now and then he sent Yanko copies of Narodni Glas, a Slovenian newspaper published in New York, which Yanko and I read together. Nearly every issue contained a picture of some scene in America. Every now and then the cut was a photograph or an architect’s drawing of New York’s newest and tallest skyscraper, which always gave us a great thrill.

One day Yanko said to me: “You know, some day, I think, I’ll go to America, too. Maybe after I finish Gymnasium. My brother Stefan went there too soon. Three years ago. He was only sixteen then. He ran away from school in Trieste and stole aboard a Dalmatian barkentine bound for America which happened to be in port and concealed himself in the vessel till she sailed. He landed in New York. But I think he was foolish. He had had only two years in the Gymnasium. He should have acquired more education before venturing to America. I believe that if one has some education, one does not have to be an ordinary laborer in the United States.”

I narrated to Yanko some of the things that Peter Molek had told me of America.

To this Yanko remarked: “That may all be true. I know that Narodni Glas often writes about accidents and labor strikes in the American mines and factories in which men are hurt and killed. For many people, I don’t doubt, America is a bad place, but I am not afraid of the country. I am sure it doesn’t get the better of you if you are smart and know how to go about things. America is a new country—very inviting! Enormous! Carniola, and for that matter all of Europe, are old and set. Life here is no longer vital. Recently I read somewhere that in America everything is, more or less, ‘in the process of becoming.’”

“Some day, perhaps, I’ll go to America myself,” I said. I had not previously told Yanko that I meant to become a priest, to please my mother, and I said nothing about it now.

“Perhaps we can go together, eh?” said Yanko, eagerly.

I nodded.

Of a sudden I was happy to talk this way with my friend. I forgot all about becoming a priest. We spoke of New York, of the buildings and bridges of New York, and of Cleveland, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, all of which places we meant to see when we went to America.

III

Adventurous as we both were, early in our third Gymnasium year, Yanko and I joined a secret students’ political club, affiliated with the general revolutionary Yugoslav Nationalist Movement that had sprung up in the South-Slavic provinces of Austria five or six years before the outbreak of the World War.

For a little while I found life in Lublyana very fervid. Yanko and I attended secret meetings of our group, listened to impassioned speeches by adult leaders and agitators of the Movement, many of whom were sought by the Austrian police. We joined other boys in trampling upon the Hapsburg emblems and singing ribald parodies of the Austrian anthem. At night we prowled through the city, armed with sticks of chalk, and upon the walls and on the sidewalks in front of government buildings wrote insulting words after the name of the Emperor Francis Joseph. Frequently we were chased by the police, and we reveled in this fact.

Generally, we behaved in the manner of romantic, daft devotees of the goddess Liberty, although I recall that I never intensely believed in the idea behind the Movement. Nor, I suppose, did Yanko. We were both peasant lads from fairly well-to-do homes, as were one or two of the other boys in the club, and as such we actually cared little whether our fathers and brothers tilled the soil under the Austrian domination or within the borders of a Yugoslav country ruled by the king of Serbia. We were in the Movement, as I might put it now, for the fun of it—because it was perilous and heart-swelling.

Every once in a while the question of emigration to America came up at our secret meetings. The leaders of the Movement who addressed us were opposed to people emigrating to the United States. Down with Austria! Down with America! Austria drove the good Slovenian peasants to America, and America ruined them. True, a deal of money came from the United States, but (asked the propagandists) was it worth the price? America broke and mangled the emigrants’ bodies, defiled their souls, deprived them of their simple spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities, corrupted their charming native dialects and manners, and generally alienated them from the homeland. The peasants (said the agitators) were lured to America by her dollars and so-called opportunities because at home the Austrian oligarchy denied them the soil, which was their birthright, and on which they might have made decent livings. Emigration and America, in other words, were issues in the Movement. Indeed, one could hardly do anything or go anywhere in Carniola without coming upon something that had to do with the United States. Our people had already begun emigrating in the 1870’s.

A widely read book in Carniola at that time, sponsored by the Yugoslav Movement, was Obljubljena dezhela (The Land of Promise), an anonymous novel dealing with the unhappy voyage of a small party of honest, simple Slovenian peasants to the falsely called Land of Promise, and their brief and heartrending sojourn within its borders, where, swindled by sharpers out of all they possessed, most of them perished from hunger, thirst, and exposure in a desert. The dreadful tale ended with these words: “Ne v Ameriko!” (“Do not go to America!”)…

The author, in all likelihood, had never been in the United States, and his story, perhaps, had meager factual basis, but Yanko and I believed that it was essentially true. Only we did not take to heart the advice at the bottom of the last page. The horrible story, on the contrary, stimulated our passion for America. It would be, we thought, exciting to live in such a country. Yanko and I were not ignorant peasants. We were educated. We would be careful. We were confident that “land sharks,” such as described in the story, could not sell us worthless land in the desert. Indeed, we imagined that it would be great sport to guard ourselves against such characters, to outwit them…

IV

Soon after Yanko and I got into it, the Yugoslav Movement in Lublyana began to come defiantly and recklessly into the open. In broad daylight, mobs of students dashed through the streets, pulling down German signs from above the entrances to stores and the Austrian double-headed eagle from government buildings, breaking windowpanes, staging small demonstrations. Occasionally a few of them achieved the status of heroes and martyrs within their respective groups by getting their heads bloodied in encounters with the police.

One afternoon fresh from a mass-meeting at which the Austrian rule had been rhetorically defied by the speakers, several hundred youths marched through the streets of the city, singing, shouting, waving the Slovenian colors. They had no permission for the “parade” from either the municipal or the local military authorities.

One of the boys carried a huge brass cuspidor tied to the top of a long pole. It dangled over the heads of the mob bound for the courthouse square. The idea was to “crown” with the cuspidor the large white-marble statue of the Emperor Francis Joseph in front of the courthouse.

Yanko and I were in the mob, burning with excitement. He held my arm as we marched.

“Look!” cried Yanko.

But before I had a chance to turn where he had indicated, a detachment of Austrian cavalry, of which two regiments were garrisoned in the city, charged the mob from a side street, where it had been waiting for us in ambush. In a moment the mounted soldiers were upon us with drawn sabers.

Then one of the hotheads from our midst hurled a rock at the lieutenant leading the detachment, whereupon that officer commanded:

“Fire!”

The soldiers not wielding sabers commenced to fire at will, creating a panic in the mob which until then had been full of mischief and fighting spirit. We retreated in all directions before the shooting soldiers. Some of the boys sought safety in stores, cafés, and in doorways of private residences.

Suddenly Yanko, who was running ahead of me, dropped. He was dead, a bullet in his head. I suppose he never knew he was hit.

I stumbled over him and fell, scarcely knowing what had occurred.

Then the firing ceased. The total casualties were two dead and four or five wounded, all of them students. The whole thing happened in perhaps less than two minutes.

Aside from a few bruises, I was unharmed. I knelt beside Yanko’s body, still but dimly realizing what had transpired, when a gendarme yanked me up and arrested me. I was one of a score or more who were imprisoned.

For three days, in the city jail, I was in a daze. The whole affair was too terrible to think about. Only now and then, for a few minutes at a time, I fully allowed myself to realize what had happened. Yanko was dead, and I remember that I wept. One of the jailkeepers, who was sympathetic to the Yugoslav Movement, slipped a newspaper into the cell that I occupied with three other boys, and we read of the tremendous funeral that the city of Lublyana had given Yanko and his fellow victim. They were national heroes. We also read that most of us who had been arrested were to be expelled from Gymnasium and in the future forbidden to enter any educational institution conducted by the Imperial and Royal Government.

What would I do in the event I really should be expelled from school?… Inevitably the thought of America began to buzz in my mind again. I would go to America, without Yanko. And then I bawled again, while my cellmates—youths, like myself, in their mid-teens—who appreciated the friendship that had existed between Yanko and myself, tried to console me.

V

The fourth day after the bloody incident, the day following the funeral, most of us were turned out of prison.

At the boarding-house, Mother, Father, and Uncle Martin were waiting for me.

Mother smiled, although no doubt she felt more like crying, and embraced me. Father and Uncle Martin looked stern.

“What have you done, son?” said Father in a hard voice. He had been informed, he added, that I was expelled from school and that thereafter he would personally be held responsible by the Imperial Authority for my future political activities till I attained majority.

“I haven’t done anything, Father,” I replied, “except—” I gave them my version of the Yugoslav Movement and the demonstration.