A Review of David Salner's A Place to Hide

“Tsedekah…It is an old Jewish term. It refers to our obligation to right the injustice of society. I feel that obligation but don’t always know how to let it guide me.” These words are spoken by Virgil Pushkin Shulman, a resident, along with his wife Rosie and daughter Sylvie, of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to his new friend Bill. Virgil and Bill have been recruited to work as “sandhogs” in the construction of the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River. The work is grueling and dangerous, but the pay is good. Bill is new to the city, and Virgil makes it his mission to help him out by offering him a place to stay. Bill is a man with a past which he must keep hidden because he is a fugitive from the law. In fact, Bill is not even his real name. Bill is Jimmy Little, the younger brother of Frank Little, a man students of history may recognize as the labor organizer for the IWW who was lynched in Butte, Montana in 1917.

How Jimmy/Bill winds up in New York City after running from the law in Montana is the subject of a stirring first novel A Place to Hide by David Salner. Not only does one man from one side of the continent become close friends with a man with an entirely different background from the other side of the continent, but they each have vivid and horrible memories which they share with each other, the one intimately involved with the Speculator Mine Disaster in Butte, Montana, which killed 168 miners, and in it’s wake resulted in the death of his brother Frank, the other intimately involved in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Greenwich Village, in which his mother died along with 145 workers, most of whom were women and children. Both historically true disasters occurred only a few years apart, and a reader might do well to scan youtube and other sources for detailed descriptions of the disasters, as well as the construction of the Holland Tunnel. Through their shared sorrows and bitterness, Bill and Virgil find an unshakable bond centered on what it means to be a laborer in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Salner knows of what he writes. Like his main character Bill, he has traversed the continent working at a great variety of jobs, most of them as back-breaking and perilous as those of his characters. He has been a steel worker, miner, garment worker, and longshoreman, among others. His experiences are evident in his descriptions of the work environments in the novel, in which, detail upon detail, the reader is invited to experience the sweat, grime and near suffocation of working underground, be it under a river or under a mountain. Take, for example, the following description of the work of “sandhogs” on the Holland Tunnel.

“Together they began filling a cart from the dirt piled by the bulkhead. It was loamy and damp and had a brackish stink., which was unpleasantly multiplied by the high-pressure atmosphere…When the cart was full, they pushed it down the tracks to the other end of their giant work chamber, to a door where a man waved, shaping the words, “Hurry, push, push!’…it was heavy with sodden earth and the weight of the air…They turned back toward their bulkhead, where another man had positioned a new cart just in time to catch rocks and mud deluging down the chute.”

Add Salner’s many work skills and experiences to his skills as a writer, and the result is a winning combination of verisimilitude and lyricism. Because David Salner, as many readers might recognize, is an accomplished and widely-published poet and has put his experiences in four books of poetry, among them Blue Morning Light and his latest, The Stillness of Certain Valleys, which describe the hardships, frustrations, and camaraderie among workers. A reading of any of his poems quickly demonstrates an acute attention to the details of the world of work, whether it is underground or above. But, more to the point, the reader is witness to the great heart Salner has for the men and women he describes. That same devotion to detail and affection is present in A Place to Hide. In addition to Bill and the Shulmans, there is a cast of characters, fellow workers in the Holland Tunnel and the mines of Pennsylvania, as well as the inhabitants of the roach-infested tenement building where Bill and the Shulmans live, one of whom, a woman with an illegitimate child, becomes Bill’s lover. And, of course, there are villains, most notably a man named Arnoldson, who is constantly on Bill’s trail, eager to return him to a Montana prison. Some villains go unnamed, the vigilantes, gangsters, and the police used to suppress and round up strikers, who have earned the distrust of working stiffs throughout the broad landscape of the novel. Others have names writ large in history: John D. Rockefeller, John D. Ryan, the chief executive of the Anaconda Copper Company, Max Blank and Isaac Harris, the owners of the Asch Building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

It should not be surprising if even a quick look at A Place to Hide reminds a reader of such classic works of labor fiction as those of Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, or John Steinbeck. The history of labor is in large part a history of struggle and repression. Pressed between the bookends of the Speculator Mine Disaster and the opening of the Holland Tunnel, Salner makes us acutely aware of how difficult and arduous has the push in the arc of Justice been in the struggle for workers’ rights. It is Bill/Jimmy’s crime, for which he was handed a life sentence, to have led strikers, as did his murdered brother before him. What moves a man to take the giant step from grief to action is poignantly underlined in Salner’s descriptions of the aftermath of mine disasters, euphemistically called accidents by the powers in control.

“They found some bodies perfectly intact, huddled against those concrete bulkheads, intact except for fingers that were worn down to bone scrapping against the barrier as lungs filled with smoke. Bill had worked for days laying out what was left of the bodies… They carried stretchers…Some were as light as feathers even with the remnants of more than one man. They couldn’t tell how many were jumbled together.”

This is a story not only about the few characters who weave through the pages of A Place to Hide, but of every man and woman who has played a part in the advance of humane working conditions and freedom from preventable work disaster in America.