Desire for a Better Life

The desire for a better life is one of the recurring themes of the novel. All of the immigrants leave their home countries to come to America, hoping to find jobs and a better way of life. George Kracha leaves his wife behind in his small Hungarian village to immigrate to America. When he arrives in New York without money, he walks to White Haven, Pennsylvania where his sister lives. Her husband works for the railroad and George obtains a job there. He leaves Hungary because of the poverty and oppression, as he tells Mike Dubrejcak later in the book. Everything is owned and run by the emperors and dukes with the population subject to them.

The desire for a better life continues in America. He eventually decides that the only way for a man to get ahead is to go into business and...