From the Mines Onward – American Ending by Mary Kay Zuravleff

Yelena was the first of her family to be born in America, in 1899. When we first meet her in 1908, she is living with her struggling parents and younger siblings in Marianna, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town southwest of Pittsburgh, though in their isolated and impoverished circumstances, it would seem light years away, though it is perhaps only 20 miles distant.

Yelena's family are Old Believer Russian Orthodox, a highly conservative sect, which doesn't allow married women to cut their hair, dancing or card playing, though all the adults, especially the men, indulge heavily in vodka. Roles are highly defined, and the men and their sons, some barely teenagers, work in the dangerous mineshafts from the early morning hours until they stagger home for dinner and then drink themselves into a stupor. The women cook, clean, sew, and perform other household tasks in primitive conditions, and there is never enough money, especially after the men indulge at the taverns. Tension and violence, domestic and otherwise, is high, due to the possibility of a mine cave-in at any time.

The town is also strictly broken down into ethnic and religious enclaves: the Russians, Poles, Italians, and "Blacks" each have their own neighborhoods. The Russians have brought a strong anti-Jewish attitude with them and they, and the Poles, their Catholic rivals, still believe that the Jews were Christ-killers.

The children, for as long as they are allowed, attend school together where they are taught by an Irish schoolmistress from New York. Yelena and her immediately younger brother, Kostia, are two of the school's brightest pupils, but they are weighed down with chores. Still, they attempt Still, they attempt to learn as much as they can. Their mother, Katya, values education, and in fact speaks several languages, and reads and writes in a beautiful script. Her husband Gregor is illiterate, though not unintelligent.

When Gregor and Katya immigrated from Suwalki in Russian Poland, they left behind their two oldest daughters with Katya's parents. Katya saves and saves to bring them to America and once they finally arrive, Yelena's role in the household is forever changed, and she resents that. She is also forced to leave school before the fifth grade, though she continues to try to educate herself.

The book progresses through her remaining child and teen years, and her early marriage to Viktor, one of a set of brothers also from Suwalki. He was the eldest, born abroad, though his younger brothers were born in America, so were citizens from birth. Hard work in the mines, food allergies and asthma, which were not well understood, have made his health precarious. Like Yelena, he is as well-read as a person of limited schooling can be.

Yelena and Viktor press on to make a life together. They leave Marianna, eventually moving to Erie, where there is other work, but it is still a struggle with Viktor's poor health. Meanwhile, Yelena has become an avid supporter of the women's suffrage movement, and has a hero in Rose Winslow, formerly Ruza Wenclawska, a suffragist and labor movement leader, also from Suwalki.

In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, and it was ratified in 1920. Yelena is at home with her two young children when a census worker arrives to interview her. The young woman, a college girl working the census as a summer job, is surprised that Yelena, whose name she Americanizes to Elaine, as a married mother of two, is just 20, her age. The two women could not be more different. Yelena tells her that she is a natural-born American but when the woman finds out that Viktor is a still unnaturalized alien, she changes Yelena's nationality to alien, much to Yelena's shock. The law of the time, it turns out, was that American women who marry foreign nationals were no longer citizens...but a different set of rules applied to men.

...that law was the Expatriation Act of 1907. It said that any American woman who married a foreigner would assume his nationality. The 1922 Cable Act partially reversed the 1907 law, but it wasn't until 1940 that all aspects of the 1907 law were rescinded and women and men had independent citizenship that could not be stripped away by marriage. These immigration laws as they applied to the period of this book were explained in an appendix after the last page, with the 1940 information here my addition.

This novel was also one of my Mark Twain American Voice Prize in Literature choices to read and rate. I hope it will continue forward in the judging. It was vividly written, deeply felt, with strongly crafted characters, and provided a historical and geographical context that made it highly accessible. The author based this novel on the experiences of her own family in Marianna, now, per Wikipedia, a town of around of 400 residents. A major explosion killed over 150 miners in 1908, and is described in the book. The mine passed through several rounds of ownership and eventually closed in 1988.