Thomas Bell, in his novel Out of This Furnace, deals with three generations of Slovaks and their experience in the United States, and Jacob A. Riis, in his photojournalistic How the Other Half Lives, covers the experiences of immigrants of a number of
different nationalities and ethnicities at the turn of the century. This study will focus on the experiences of Jewish immigrants as depicted in Riis, comparing those to the experiences of the Slovaks in Bell's novel. Despite some important differences among the experiences of the Jews and the Slovaks, and the specific years examined, the studies are far more alike than different in their overall portraits of the suffering and exploitation of those immigrant groups in the era in which the industrial revolution exploded. The study will also briefly consider Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, in which Sinclair examines the living and working conditions of Lithuanian immigrants in the meatpacking industry of Chicago at the turn of the century.
Because his non-fictional study focuses on a relatively fixed period, Riis's work is the most discouraging. The immigrants he depicts in words and photographs seem stuck in a hell on earth, whereas in the fictional works of Bell and Sinclair, the immigrants are able to improve their lives through political action and union organization.
The first striking element of Riis's portrayal of Jewish immigrants is what could easily be read as the author's bias against Jews, with references to "their unmistakable physiognomy" and other signs which "betray their race," the "queer skull-caps" and "outlandish" clothing, and "the old women" who are "hags" (Riis 85). However, Riis's portrayal of Jews, and of all immigrant groups, is less biased than brutally honest and unvarnished, keeping in mind the era in which they lived and he wrote, and the fact that he recognized that the immigrants' best traits were distorted and their worst traits exaggerated by...