Peasant-Citizen

HUNKY--Thames Williamson--Coward-McCann ($2.50).

Jencic, gigantic, untidy prototype of all Slav immigrants in the U. S., lives in fat little Mrs. Posilipo's lodging house and works in a bakery. So does handsome Teena, representing the Latins. Her lips and dress are red. Her eyes and teeth flash against the swarthy background of her skin. Jencic, in a big, slow, dumb, serf-like way, wants her. Because the girls at the bakery dared her to, she took Jencic's hand one day and told him she liked him. When he humbly tries to follow this up, she turns on him angrily with: "I'm not so hard up I got to walk with scarecrows like, you!" She certainly is not "hard up." The toss of her head, the swing of her hips as she walked away from Jencic, bespeak an alley queen who can pick and change her lovers as she chooses.

A few evenings later she seems to relent. She has Jencic take her to the Arcade. But this is only to excite jealousy in Louie, her latest. Dark and dapper, Louie steps up to Jencic, who just stands there like a block of wood, patient and talkative. Louie punches him on the jaw. Sitting on the sidewalk, hulking Jencic looks up with sick eyes, whispering, "Don't hit me."

Baker Krusack is Jencic's confidant and civic tutor. He got Jencic's citizenship papers for him at the City Hall and delivered with them this speech: "Now . . . you belong here and nobody can run over you. If anybody makes trouble for you, stand right up to him and tell him not to forget who you are. . . . The new nationalities are according to jobs. Some of these days nobody will ever say a man is a Swiss or a Slav or anything like that; they will say he is a plumber or a baker or a machinist, and what he does for a living will be his nationality and his destiny!"

When Baker Krusack hears about Louie and how Jencic is accepting defeat in love, he promises to fire Jencic if he does not lick Louie at once, and without getting drunk first.

When he sees Louis and Teena approach, Jencic hides in a dark doorway. Sharp-eyed Louie yanks him out by the collar. At last Jencic awakes. He grabs Louie by the throat, smashes his face. Down goes Louie, then up with a knife. Mighty Jencic just advances slowly, arms out seeking to crush, face murderous. Louie retreats. Baker Krusack commends Jencic: "You've been a worm, but now you've turned over, and you'll stay turned over. . . . Well, there must be rewards for all good work. . . . I will show you another part of the trade, so you will learn it all the faster."

Teena, however, offers no congratulations. "Get Louie back," she mutters to Jencic. "Ask me anything you want to and I'll give it to ye, but you got to promise to get him and see that he comes here."

Jencic refuses until she weeps. Then Louie cannot be found. Then the truth comes out. Louie has got her pregnant. This time Jencic proceeds against Baker Krusack's advice. He is his own man now. He says : "I know all about Teena, more'n you do. It is true she done something she shouldn't do, but after we get married it will be all right. Everybody makes mistakes. What if people didn't forget such mistakes, then everybody would be mad at everybody else, and nobody would have even one friend."

Churchbound, hulking Jencic shakes with love. "Don't shake," says Teena, "what's there to shake about?"

The Significance. Novelist Williamson always makes his plots go by putting them on the roller-skates of a social theme. The evolution of Jencic from peasant and Hunky (short for "Hungarian" -- colloquial for Slav) to U. S. citizen and worker, is obvious and anything but original. But it is done so cheerfully, so sincerely, with such brave and decent effort at realism, that it far transcends what might be banality. It is a warm, vigorous, if somewhat naive book by a writer who has known and taken seriously all kinds and conditions of his fellow men. The Book-of-the-Month Club chose it for July.

The Author. Cabin-boy on a whaler, sheepherder, newsgatherer, fingerprint expert at a penitentiary, college professor (Smith, Simmons), social worker (with Jane Addams in Chicago), are some of the things Thames (pronounced Tahm'-ez) Ross Williamson has been. Besides novels he has written textbooks on economics, sociology. His novels (Stride of Man, Run Sheep Run, Gypsy Down the Lane) are meant to constitute a U. S. panorama. He was born on an Indian Reservation near Genesee, Iowa, 35 years ago of U. S. parentage.