Elena Kracha Character Analysis

Elena is George Kracha’s wife. She is a deeply tragic character who suffers from ill health and depression and falls victim to Kracha’s dismissiveness, inattention, and cruelty. Throughout the novel, Elena embodies the unappreciated and often invisible hard work and suffering that Slovak women endure from a patriarchal Old Country culture that immigrants re-establish in Braddock. Elena and Kracha meet and fall in love in Slovakia before Kracha leaves her behind to go to Pennsylvania. After Kracha leaves, Elena gives birth to a baby boy who dies shortly afterwards. Following the birth, Elena becomes sickly and develops and unsightly goiter. When she joins Kracha in America, he is no longer attracted to her thin frame and melancholic personality, although the couple do have three daughters: Mary, Alice, and Anna. Throughout the novel, Elena and Kracha’s marriage is largely cold and unhappy, as Kracha continually dismisses his wife’s depression. After Kracha opens a butcher shop, he begins an affair with Zuska while Elena grows sicker and withdraws into herself. She dies shortly afterwards, an unappreciated, sickly, and miserable victim of Kracha’s indifference.