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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Childhood</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jEhNuAw0E5I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I love my mom and I have no complaints about my upbringing, but I think we were just, like, running wild. I remember running around the city when I was really young. Getting on the tram unattended. Going downtown, running around. It’s not like here where you’re worried about what’s going to happen to your children. We’d walk to the doctor on your own. That’s what I remember. It’s a strange thing to say, but I remember total freedom as a kid.”</p><h4>Dallas</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/arwBLQOVZfI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We landed at Love Field in Dallas, Texas. I remember that very clearly. Karel made some friends, they picked us up, we drove down Lemmon Avenue, went through my first drive-thru, I had my first hamburger and a Dr. Pepper. I still love Dr. Pepper; the smell has a very specific smell. Because Dallas has the plant where they make Dr. Pepper and, to me, it’s just a feel-good thing. Good drive-thru hamburger – Princess burgers – and a Dr. Pepper. That was my first American joy.”</p><h4>Learning English</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K-8vZwzvpvI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had no English; I started school. Every hour, the teacher took the smartest kid in the class, and that student and I went to the back of the room or in the hallway, used flashcards and first-grade readers and I can tell you this – this is what I remember, I could be exaggerating – but I remember at the end of that school year, what is that? Maybe two months? Two and a half months? I understood and was able to speak probably 90-95% of what I know now. My English was perfect, very heavy accent.”</p><h4>Parents</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LqqwLKqjAZI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“If they would have stayed in America, they would have had to work their crap jobs until they died. They were sort of bound to the mortgage; bound to paying for life. Really, their American success story is us, is me. That I have choices. That I can get away with being an artist and not having a ‘real job.’ That I was able to realize who I am. That’s their American dream. I think they didn’t benefit from it they way I clearly did.”</p><h4>Czech-American</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9_TRbfmjza0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You know, it’s a funny thing. When I go back there [to Prague], I’m a foreigner. Living here, I’ve been here most of my life, but I’m realizing I don’t actually fit. I’m more of a Czech-American than American. When I go back to Prague, I’m a total foreigner. They don’t recognize me as a Czech person, so it’s funny.”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lMO-IhlWu14?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When my mom and I went back for three weeks, it was like this emotional roller coaster. When you walk through big streets and little streets and all these places, the park where you grew up. I was like a really dried up sponge and all the sudden I was soaked in water and I just, it was like a wafer that expanded. I was so emotional back then, I couldn’t even tell you. It was crazy. It’s like I was asleep and I woke up. And I can’t even define it. It was like in a big stroke way, not in little details. Literally, that’s the image I get. I was like a little wafer and I just puffed up. That’s the big thing. If you have to sort of identify the Czech-ness and the American-ness, that’s when the Czech-ness sort of woke up. And I thought ‘Oh! Hello.’ Part of it was, it’s that time, there’s like there’s this big, dead, blind gap between then and what was then now. There was no memory. But all of the sudden, going back to those streets, to the smells, to the same stores. Like Bílá labut’, it was just a department store – and it actually finally closed a few years ago – but we went there when I was a shorty. It was still there. Obviously Prague didn’t change a whole lot, but a lot of the places were still there and all of the sudden it woke up all these memories; and it was like dead silence for, what, 30 years, filled up with pictures and smells. It was crazy. So that was sort of the identity awakening.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Yvette Kaiser-Smith
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Yvette Kaiser Smith was born in Prague in 1958. Her father <a href="/web/20170609161810/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/karel-kaiser/">Karel</a> worked in theatre, and her mother Vlasta was a secretary. Yvette’s sister, Miroslava, was older by 18 months. Yvette recalls having ‘total freedom’ as a child in Prague, walking the city streets alone and taking the tram to extracurricular activities and doctor’s appointments. She participated in what she calls ‘typical’ after-school activities such as swimming and theatre. In January 1968, Yvette’s father traveled to the United States for work; although his visa was valid until 1969, he returned for a brief period following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and made the decision for his family to join him in the United States. He then returned to the United States and Yvette’s mother went about securing passports for the family. In late December 1968, Yvette, her mother and sister left Czechoslovakia for England, where they stayed with a relative. After one month in England, Yvette’s father sent the family money for plane tickets, and they flew to Dallas, Texas.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The Kaisers lived in an apartment in the Highland Park area of Dallas. Yvette’s father worked in construction and her mother found employment as a maid. She began school in March 1969 without knowing how to speak English. Yvette says she learned quickly, thanks to help from her classmates and teachers. She says that although the family spoke Czech at home and her parents kept a Czech household, once she became fluent in English she ‘became American overnight.’ In 1990, she earned a degree in fine arts from Southern Methodist University and married her husband Tim. They moved to Chicago in 1991 and she enrolled in a masters program at the University of Chicago. After receiving her MFA, Yvette began her career as an artist. Although she started out as a sculptor, Yvette says that her first trip back to Prague in 1998 changed her direction as an artist and she now crochets fiberglass. In 1999, Yvette’s parents moved back to Prague to live and she often went to visit them. She says that she has retained a few Czech traditions at home, mainly celebrating Christmas on December 24 and making traditional foods on other holidays. Today, Yvette lives in Chicago with her husband and father.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609161810/http://www.kaisersmith.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Yvette’s web site</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968 emigrant/refugee
Americanization
Arts
Child emigre
English language
Kaiserova
Sense of identity
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aaca6a9eb4e7b7a3df7539e8a10b599e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rYJIiThjVh8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was nine at that time when the War ended and of course the Russian Army came to the great enthusiasm of the population. And well, the country was believed to be liberated. There was one little incident that I recall and that some people probably wouldn’t like to hear even today in the country: that was still in May ’45 and in the streets we saw a line of people being taken away by the so-called Revolutionary Guards. They were Germans who had been collected before being shipped away. Now, there was a long line of people, and there was an old lady there, who was carrying a little suitcase with all her belongings there. And one of our neighbors in the same building where we lived, a big guy, he ran to this lady and grabbed her suitcase. He took it away and said ‘You are not going to need that.’ So this patriot later became a leading figure in the Communist Party in the neighborhood.”</p><h4>Soviet Troops</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Yd72RVGTMk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Most people were enthusiastic about them, and so was I. Even my mother who was inherently a skeptic, much more so even than my father, as well as very well educated (including in history), she was enthusiastic as well and said ‘Well, now we’ll all have to start learning Russian.’ And indeed some timid attempts at that were made in the family. Well, the Soviet Union was seen widely as President Beneš at that time saw it – as a great friend – and Czechoslovakia as a bridge between East and West, a bridge slanted slightly to the East.”</p><h4>School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i8ObziKdjcU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was ugly, because it was a game – a ruthless game – played by the parents, by the teachers, by the students themselves trying to get to this selective school, but moreover to avoid something much worse. Now, some of them played the game in a very imaginative way. I recall one of my classmates who was seriously ill, I think he had leukemia, and his mother who was an ardent Communist, or at least pretended to be, she registered him, or he volunteered actually, to become a miner – a coalminer, whom of course was considered at the time to be a hero, the socialist hero. So this classmate of mine who had leukemia volunteered to be a miner, or rather was volunteered by his scheming mother, knowing full well of course that he would not be accepted, but that he would be rewarded for his readiness to be a miner by being allowed to study, which is exactly what happened.</p><p>“Well my parents, fortunately, were not quite such accomplished intriguers; they argued that since my record was very good in the school, maybe I deserved to continue to study. Well, the record was fully acknowledged and after endless interviews and whatnot, I was indeed accepted to the entering grade of that three-year program at the school at Malá Strana, and was delighted, was elated, so were my parents who said ‘Well, there is still justice, despite all that has been happening in this communist country.’ Well, their joy was premature. When I first turned up at the beginning of the school year, I was called to the director of the school and he said ‘Well, the National Committee made a decision, and as a result of the decision, you are really not starting here at the <em>gymnázium</em>, but you’ll be starting next week as a mechanic in a factory near where you live.”</p><h4>News</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i7w33BgbEzY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I lived in Prague, I didn’t listen to Radio Free Europe at all, not only because it was jammed, but because it had a very bad reputation, not only among the communists, needless to say, but also among their enemies, which was the majority of the population. The general attitude was ‘Well, what do these people, who were lucky enough to get out of the country… What are they going to tell us about what we should do?’ So once I learned English – and I was working really very hard with Aunt Paula, she was a very good teacher – I was able to listen to the Voice of America in English, rather than in Czech, and to the BBC also in English. Because I wanted to know what they were telling to people in general around the world, rather than what was tailored to the conditions in Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Charles University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nLQgaFqJ7hQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My interest was always in modern history and increasingly in contemporary affairs, in what we would call today contemporary history, because by that time I was following avidly what was happening in the world, and trying to look at it as a historian. So history was the field, but of course, at Charles University at that time, which prided itself on being the oldest university in Central Europe but was in fact an outfit run by current or former members of the secret services and similar institutions, history was not a field that anybody in his right mind would want to study – that is to say modern or contemporary history. That was politics; that was not any scholarship.</p><p>“The only part of history that could be studied seriously, although in a rather old-fashioned way, was medieval history. So that’s what I studied; I specialized in archival studies. It gave me what one would call a solid background, but it was a very old-fashioned background. It was the way history was studied back in the 19th century when what mattered was, well, as Ranke, the famous German historian said – <em>wie es eigentlich gewesen</em> – how really it was. But not what it meant, not why things happened the way they did, the emphasis was on the facts.</p><p>“So that was the kind of medieval history that I studied, and I think that it prepared me in some way for what I was to do later. Of course, in the Middle Ages, there was a very limited amount of written history, one had to do with fragments, and even what was produced at that time, very little of it has survived. And so I had to deal with fragmentary evidence. And later on when I tried to study contemporary history at the time when the archives were still closed, or most of them, and one had to do with the fragments, the methodology, I realized, was not all that different.”</p><h4>US Visa</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pltqGeRqZ9M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At Christmas time – or after Christmas actually – I decided while waiting for the visa to take another hitch-hiking trip and go down to the desert, all the way to the Sahara as far as I could get, together with the Slovak guy. So the two of us hitch-hiked, and he had the address of some priest at an oasis down in southern Tunisia. So it was quite an adventure and we both loved it, and got quite far south, as south as we could, when the message came faintly on the telephone in the priest’s house that the visa is here and that it really has to be picked up by the end of January if it is to be used this year – otherwise I would have to wait for another year. So I got a taste a little bit for the bureaucracy also, but I wanted to make sure that I would get back quickly.</p><p>“There was no way of flying, but there was one train on the one railroad line that cuts across the country. So I got on the train, not on the first class, not on the second class, not in the third class but in the fourth class on the train, which was sort of a cattle car where the locals were traveling with their chickens and other animals. So, it was another adventurous ride, 24 hours or so, to get to Tunis and pick up the visa.”</p><h4>Re-Entry Permit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pAjrALXd6OA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The only problem, but it really wasn’t a big one – it was more a nuisance than a problem – was that I was stateless, I didn’t have a passport. So when eventually I got fellowships for research abroad, and I was able to travel to Europe, I needed a document, and so what I was traveling on was a so-called re-entry permit, which looks like a passport, but all it says is that the United States allows me to return. Otherwise I had to have a visa for every single country I traveled to, and I also couldn’t afford to be away for too long, because as everybody knows, one had to have certain uninterrupted residence physically in the country before becoming a citizen. So all this had to be taken into account, but I was on course and that was the least thing that bothered me.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vojtech Mastny
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vojtech Mastny was born in Prague in 1936. His great uncle, also named Vojtěch Mastný, was one of the most important Czechoslovak diplomats of the interwar period. His father, Antonín, meanwhile, worked as a high-ranking official for the Ministry of Trade, while his mother, Jindřiška stayed at home raising Vojtech, who was an only child. Vojtech attended elementary school and the first years of secondary school in the Prague district of Letná, where the family lived, but was unable to pursue his education further the way that he had hoped because of his class background and school reforms in the early 1950s. Instead of being sent to <em>gymnázium</em> in Prague’s Malá Strana, Vojtech was sent for reeducation to work as a mechanic at the Elektrosignal factory not far from his home. On a part-time basis during this period, he attended Střední škola pro pracující [Workers’ Middle School] which, he says, was a good institution. At this time, Vojtech also became interested in learning English, and subsequently German, which he was taught by his great aunt Paula in her flat in Žižkov.</p><p> </p><p>After a time at Elektrosignal and a car parts factory, Vojtech was hired as an assistant archivist at the National Museum, which eventually wrote him a letter of recommendation, paving the way for him to study at Charles University. Despite becoming ever more interested in contemporary history, Vojtech says this was not an appealing field of study at Charles University, which he says was run by apparatchiks in the late 1950s, and so he opted for medieval history and archival studies instead. Vojtech’s graduation was postponed by one year when he was sent for further reeducation to work at a collective farm. He finally obtained his degree in 1962, which was the year that he left Czechoslovakia. He booked himself onto a Soviet cruise and, after some research, decided to split from the group during a stopover in Tunis. He applied for a U.S. visa immediately and received one after a couple of months. Vojtech first settled in New York City, where he worked at the municipal port and studied at Columbia University under the tutelage of Fritz Stern. He wrote his dissertation about Nazi rule in Bohemia and Moravia.</p><p> </p><p>Vojtech has taught history and international relations at Columbia University, the University of Illinois and the Naval War College, among other institutions. He is a senior research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Vojtech has written a number of award-winning books on the Cold War and heads the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Rebecca.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609134730/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.profile&person_id=73635" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A short biography of Vojtech Mastny on the Wilson Center’s website</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Education
English language
German language
Letna
Mala Strana
national
Politics
Russians
school
Stredni skola pro pacujici
Teachers
World War II
Zizkov
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e9a91dda631d5775683df4da4c4ebdd0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Egypt</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IAIQSbpnRy4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“At the age of 12, my father was there working as a military expert as a translator. There was massive military aid from Russians and the Czech Republic to the Nasser’s regime in ’66 and ’67. Actually, we were there during the Six-Day War which was quite an experience. My mother missed it and she thought, after the bombing was done, she said ‘I heard some noise and I thought somebody was dusting the carpets,’ because we were in the center and it was with a surgical precision; the military targets were on the outskirts, so nothing happened in the center.</p><p>“That was the beautiful time where it was the last weeks before you are distracted by women and you already have the capacity to understand what’s going on. So we had school activities close to the pyramids and there was an Egyptology institute of Prague university [Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University], which is quite famous, so we were, as pupils of a Czech school, taken there and we had these afterschool activities walking these mastabas and around pyramids. So it was a formative experience.”</p><p><em>So there were enough Czechs there to have a Czech school?</em></p><p>“My guess is about close to 10,000. We had our school there and a couple of houses, our own school bus. And the Russians – I think it was a military secret; I’m glad to reveal it now – about 50 or 60,000. Quite massive.”</p><h4>Teenager</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KBY9jFXaCmc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was an active part in the Jazzová sekce [Jazz section] and we helped to organize concerts in Lucerna. I was not at the headquarters; I just went there and helped with some manual work. It was the first experience for me to meet other people. Meet other people who I could identify with, and they were in the jazz culture and that’s for me what for the previous generation could be the tramping tradition, because the jazz music was something that I identified with American culture, and films as well.”</p><h4>Move in 2011</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K-6YQETivXg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“This is not an isolated world anymore; even if people think that it is, it’s not. And what’s happening in Europe will be here really, really soon. So we are in one world. That’s why I feel more like a citizen of the world, and I can imagine that I can live in some other place and it’s still one world. And that’s what I am enjoying most. I learned how to pack. First time in my life that was sincere packing, and I still did not unpack after the refurbishment. But once I’ve done that I can do that again. That’s one of the main differences. When I was in Europe I actually could not imagine ‘I am packing and there is flat which is empty,’ and I’m able to get all these formalities here, with the help of my wife, done. It’s nice because I felt stuck there and now I feel I can move.”</p><h4>Freedom</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XGcpTP-tBtQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I distinguish between internal freedom and the freedom of convenience – if you want to get a service or some good, you can find them easily and it works, which is what I would call an objective freedom, yes. If I want to have something done then I can find it. But the internal freedom… I’m not that really convinced that this is the case. It could be really easily confused that what I can buy, where I can go with what I can do. Now I realize that I enjoyed a substantial part of an internal freedom back in Europe. It’s kind of an open-ended issue for me.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vladimir Zeithaml
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vladimir Zeithaml was born in Hradec Králové, a city in Bohemia, in 1955. Both his parents were natives of Hradec Králové, and when they moved to Prague for their jobs, Vladimir stayed with his grandparents for several years. He joined his parents in Prague at the age of six. Vladimir’s father was a military doctor while his mother was a nurse who later worked in the Ministry of Health. In the mid-1960s, Vladimir moved with his family to Egpyt where his father was working as a military translator. Vladimir says the several years that he spent there were ‘formative’ and ‘beautiful’ times.</p><p> </p><p>At his school in Prague, Vladimir studied English, which was unusual at the time. In high school he started working as a tour guide for foreign tourists and also became involved in Jazzová sekce, a state-sponsored cultural organization that was able to promote jazz and other Western-style music, mostly through the efforts of young people and jazz enthusiasts among higher-ups. Vladimir’s family owned a cottage in the Krkonoše mountains where he enjoyed cross-country skiing.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir attended law school at Charles University and then spent one year performing mandatory military service. Following his military service, Vladimir started working for a law firm in Benešov. Living in Prague at the time of the Velvet Revolution, Vladimir witnessed first-hand the fall of communism, and worked as a guide and translator for an American reporter during that time. After living in London for under one year, Vladimir returned to Prague and continued to practice law. He also developed a hydroelectric plant with a partner, which is still a successful enterprise today.</p><p> </p><p>In 2002, Vladimir visited the United States for the first time. He moved to Washington state in 2011 following his marriage to his Czech-American wife. Vladimir says that he enjoys a certain freedom moving to the United States has given him, which is the feeling of being a citizen of the world and being able to move around freely.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Benesov
English language
Hradec Kralove
Jazzova
Post-1989 emigrant
Sense of identity
Western/Pop culture
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Refusing to Vote</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LfzKdCLHjSI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“There was one moment when there were elections and I refused to vote, which was tantamount to voting no for the Party. She [my mother] was very scared about that and she was trying to convince me to go and vote. But I didn’t.”</p><p><em>What was the voting age?</em></p><p>“Eighteen.”</p><p><em>You didn’t go and vote?</em></p><p>“I didn’t go and vote, I was actually… I was on purpose not at home on the day of the voting, on the election day. Because I knew, somehow I knew that they might come to – the election committee might come and invite me to vote. And they did in my absence.”</p><h4>Acting</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fTtHxCKIHfg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Talking about the politics, it was very tightly controlled by the government, by the Communist Party. You were told what plays you could produce and what you could not stage. You also had to produce a Soviet play, and a play that was so-called ‘progressive’ – that was a political propaganda play. I was fortunate that actually I didn’t have to play, for the year that I was in this theatre, I didn’t have to play in any of those propaganda pieces. I even got to play in an American play. It was controlled, you were only allowed a certain percentage of Western plays, so I was in that ten percent of Western plays we were allowed to play. The theatre had altogether ten plays in a year. We would split the company and stage ten plays, of which I was in five.”</p><h4>Charter 77</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eCML_74gbaw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She once, during Charter 77, she – there was a meeting at her school and the Communist Party chief was talking against Charter 77 and she asked her, my mother asked her, “Well, have you read it?” And the communist said “No,” and my mother pulled out Charter 77, a copy, and handed it to her. That was definitely the wrong thing to do. Fortunately they kind of hush-hushed it, she just had to move, she couldn’t teach in that particular part of Prague anymore and eventually she stopped teaching altogether and became a dorm supervisor for high school kids, which she liked better anyway. I remember that moment when… She actually had a nervous breakdown when this happened to her, and I remember us children telling her “How could you do that? This is just something that’s not done!” And then I realized the absurdity of it, that she was doing something that was right, but of course, under that current regime, it was suicidal to do anything like that.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qNTa0PNIuu0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was scared of the United States before coming here. I knew… I guess there were still some remnants of the communist propaganda in me about America. There was what I knew from novels about crime in the United States and I was expecting that I would immediately be meetings gangsters at the airport. But that did not happen. I was met by a friend, because already in Prague we – there were three of us at [Charles University’s] Department of Philosophy that decided we would leave, and we planned together and all managed to leave at around the same time, and they already were in the United States, so I stayed with them in Queens for a little while. But my first impression: I didn’t quite meet the gangsters, but my first impression was that New York was tremendously dirty.”</p><h4>Marionette Theatre</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xiq6y2RuN8I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1984, while I was with the black light theatre [<em>Ta Fantastika</em>], I did a storytelling performance at Jan Hus Church with my three marionettes. And they told me, “We used to have a puppet theatre here.” So I kept asking what happened to the puppets until they let me go to the attic and there, in an old chest, were 24 marionettes – 24 large marionettes – between 18 and 26 inches.”</p><p><em>… The dimensions of the ones…</em></p><p>“No, these are 48 inches. These are much bigger. Maybe we can pan later on across some of those puppets here. So, I did two shows at Jan Hus Church and the second one, the next week after the discovery, I brought out a king and a <em>vodník</em> (a water spirit) and did a story with <em>vodník </em>and a story with the king. And then kind of kept thinking about them. And when I quit the black light theatre I put together with another friend, Jan Unger, who studied puppetry at the puppetry school in Prague – the Academy of Musical Arts [DAMU] had a puppetry department – so with him I put together a puppet company.</p><p>“My own training in puppetry really goes to childhood when I played with my mother’s toy puppet theatre from the 1920s and, together with my brother and sister, we put on shows. Fairy tales, mostly.”</p><h4>New York</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DZhSVrgwvvw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was really determined not to be closed in a Czech community. So I met some Czechs, but I was trying to totally live in an American circle, in American circles, and I purposely avoided Czechs. And despite that I met some Czechs who are good friends, but it took quite a while before I joined some Czech organizations, and that was after I started our theatre company. And surprisingly enough – that is contradicting everything I was saying, but I was trying not to meet Czechs, but I was telling Czech stories and started a Czech puppet theatre company.”</p><h4>Daughter</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3Qk_IG_S6L0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At one point I tried, I was reading to my daughter in Czech when she was really small, and at some point she started refusing it, at a point where she recognized that she didn’t understand, she suddenly started refusing reading in Czech. And I gave up too easily, I guess, because years later she complained that I never taught her Czech.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vit Horejs
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vit Horejs was born in Prague in 1950. His father, Jaromír, was a teacher and author (who published over 50 books), while his mother, Věra, taught gym and Czech. Vit was the youngest of three siblings. Growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, he says he ‘believed in the system’ and even became Young Pioneer of the Year when he was around ten years old. Vit says he became disillusioned following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. That same year, he made his first trip to France. It was at this time that Vit began studying French, philosophy and theatre at Charles University in Prague. He returned to France in 1969, having faked an invitation to secure himself an exit permit. Also during his studies, Vit visited England which, he says, made him ‘fall in love with English’ and consider a life abroad. He stayed in the United Kingdom for longer than his exit permit allowed and so had his passport confiscated upon his return to Czechoslovakia.</p><p> </p><p>Vit graduated from university in 1975 and went to the Moravian town of Šumperk to take an acting job in the municipal theatre. He left the theatre after one year so as to move back to Prague, where he worked as a freelance actor and developed plans to leave the country. The chance came in 1978 when Vit was translating Primo Levy’s <em>Il Sistema Periodico</em>; he says he managed to procure an invitation from the author to consult with him on the translation in Italy. Vit left Czechoslovakia in March 1978. He did travel to Italy, but continued on to France, where he spent one year in Paris, studying mime and waiting for either the United Kingdom or the United States to process his visa request. He arrived in New York City in February 1979, sponsored by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Vit settled briefly in Queens, working first as a bike messenger and then a cab driver. He subsequently moved to Manhattan and became involved in the Czech-American black light theatre company <em>Divadlo Ta Fantastika</em>. He stayed with <em>Ta Fantastika</em> for a number of years, moving to Florida in the mid-1980s with the company. Towards the end of the 1980s, however, Vit embarked upon his own venture, the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre – using (among other props) puppets unearthed in the attic of New York City’s Jan Hus Presbyterian Church.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vit has toured the United States with the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre on several occasions, often performing his adaptations of traditional Czech fairytales (such as Rusalka and Jenůfa) in American schools. He serves on the board of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association and lives in Manhattan with his wife Bonnie. The couple have one daughter, Sarazina, who is currently in the Czech Republic on a scholarship learning Czech.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Alternative culture
Americanization
Arts
Charter 77
Czech language
English language
school
Sumperk
Teachers
Vodnik
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Opportunities</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LAuVtJ37uVY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was a straight-A student, and at that time I was 14 and I was firmly decided that I wanted to go and study medicine, I wanted to go to medical school. Then it suddenly became a problem that my father and mother were not members of the Communist Party. Actually, my father hated the regime back then and he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut, so all of that was already part of my secret profile, that I was coming from a family that were not loyal communists. That meant the schools of my choice were closed to me, same like to my husband. In Czechoslovakia there was no tendency at the time just to be pretty and marry some guy who has a good profession, [and] he’ll take care of you. Over there, both needed to have an income and career, even women. So it was necessary that I would have any education possible, doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. So the opportunity arose that medical school was closed for me. I would not be accepted even though I had good grades.</p><p>“We had to select a school where I would have a chance to get in to, and at that time there was a tendency in technical schools to want more girls. There was this construction school, architectural school which had two parts – architectural part and plumbing part, like piping in the buildings, heating systems, water supply, sewage and all that. So my parents convince me. They said ‘You have no other choice, you need to go to this school,’ and I didn’t like it. My father played on that I liked to design and said ‘Well, you’ll be designing lobbies, interiors of buildings,’ and that sounded nice to me, so I said ok. So I did tests, I was accepted, I passed the tests. I wanted to be in the architectural class; of course I ended up in the plumbing class. There were two plumbing classes and one architectural. Again, the architectural class was for special people, people which had green at the time. So I got these mechanics and physics, all these technical books, brought it home, realized what I was up to and I cried. And my father said ‘Well, you have to have a maturita exam, you have to have any possible education because you have to have some profession, and you have to fight. You are a good student.’ So I did.”</p><h4>Happy Life</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QLsbXldfH-I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We would do lots of trips, short trips, because in Czechoslovakia at the time, normal people didn’t have a car. Gasoline was very expensive and it simply didn’t fit your budget to have a car. You had to live within a smaller scale, with biking distance. So the boys had small bikes, we had bikes, we used to do bike trips. We used to go to the woods and do bonfires and fry the sausages, so as far as that, the childhood the boys had was very nice. Also, when they were older, they would go out and for a half day I wouldn’t know where they were. They would just come for dinner, and I would have a peaceful time to make dinner for them. In a way, we lived through very simple and happy socialistic years. We didn’t have all these luxuries young people and everybody has here, but you really don’t need them for a normal, happy life. You can do with less and still be happy.”</p><h4>Clothes</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hzqoFAo32HQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You could buy material cheaper at the time, and if you made stuff yourself, you could do something modern, something upgraded, very nice, special, nobody else had it. So that’s how I used to dress because I had a knitting machine and a sewing machine, and I was dressing up myself and my family, too. It was funny, my husband would bring me from the factory these pieces of cloth, like squarish cloth in pieces. A couple of them were the same color, so I sewed a shirt for my boys, and I decorated it a little bit and they had a free shirt. It was free material, right. It was stolen in socialism in the factory. Also, I could go to a secondhand shop and bought fabric which couldn’t be cheaper, or pieces of fabric, but you could put them together and do nice designs and I used to sew jackets. Actually, I have a few things here just for memory, just for nostalgia.”</p><p><em>If you were making things that were different than anybody else, that was important to you.</em></p><p>“It was because I was a woman who took after my mother, I liked to dress nicely. If I had something done myself and I wore it and somebody said ‘Oh this is nice, where did you get it?’ I could say ‘Well, I did it myself.’ It was something extra, it had more value, I was more proud of it.”</p><h4>Child Care</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eefMdpyMQT4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The problem was still that we both had to work and we couldn’t get kindergarten. So we had to change the shifts. And one of us would be with the kids in the morning, then would bring the kids to the factory entry, waiting when the other one was coming out, he would grab the kids, the other one would go to work. And that’s how we lived for two years. We were still trying hard to get kindergarten. I think after two years or two and a half years we finally got it, but that was a very, very difficult life.”</p><h4>Leaving Plans</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Cp4eqAgS1I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Me, as a young girl, I went to visit my uncle in West Germany with my father. So I was aware about how it looked outside. I was not fooled by socialistic propaganda, that things in the west are bad, because that was not true. They lived much happier and easier lives than we were. So I knew I would love to go out, but I didn’t realize when Bob was studying English that maybe he was already planning something like that, because I thought he was studying English because he loved all these folk songs, you know, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, and he was always in contact with the western side through music. So when he told me that we got tickets to Yugoslavia, and then we will not go back, I instantly agreed.”</p><h4>Refugees</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JIVIAT9vxH8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We went to that office without the kids and they always asked us ‘Do you have money?’ We said ‘Yes;’ they said ‘Come tomorrow.’ We came tomorrow, and the same thing. Then I realized it led nowhere and meanwhile, some other people were accepted. So I said to my husband, ‘Hey, we’ll take the boys, baggage, everything what we have, we’ll stay in that waiting room, we won’t leave until they take us.’ So that’s what we did, and they threatened us. They said ‘We will call the Czech embassy,’ and I started to cry. I run into the office and I was crying, and Bob ran after me and he was saying that we were persecuted, so then finally they gave us the interview. Both of us had to write reasons [why we should be accepted as refugees]. We didn’t write some horrific reasons, we wrote reasons why we escaped – all those reasons that I told you – these little ones, one after another one, but in a row, and added up, your life becomes impossible there. And you realized, ok we suffered because of our parents, because our parents were not politically correct, they were not communists. But I don’t want my sons, my bright kids to work for communists. They would not go to school like we could not. So, we were accepted.”</p><h4>Czech Hobby</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Krf6zglKA3o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Until we left, everywhere I went on the bike, in a skirt, no hardhats, never fell, never had an accident, all these years, all the time on a bike, my kids, my husband. Here when I see those bikers, I just have to laugh. All these helmets, all these special clothing for hundreds of dollars, and then in order to bike, you have to put your bike on the car, drive somewhere that you do biking just for the sake of biking. For me, biking was a way of life. I went to the market with my bike, I went with my boys on my bike when they were little, later on they had their bikes. So, that’s the one thing which I miss here, the biking.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vilma Rychlik
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vilma Rychlik was born in Zubří, Moravia in 1952. She grew up in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm with her father, Vilém, an electrician, her mother, Zdeňka, and her brother, Tomáš. When she was six years old, Vilma’s father was sent by his employer to China for one year. The rest of the family joined him for six months; however, Vilma says she did not get to enjoy China because she was hospitalized for most of the trip. She remembers her childhood as very free and simple. Vilma says that once a week, she would help her grandmother in Zubří, from whom she learned to bake, sew, and knit. At school, she was a good student and enjoyed most subjects, but she was especially fond of chemistry, as she loved her teacher. When it was time for Vilma to go to high school, she hoped to attend medical school, but realized she would not be accepted. Instead, her parents convinced her to attend a technical school focused on construction. Although she wanted to be in the architecture program, she was placed in the plumbing and piping program and eventually graduated with honors.</p><p> </p><p>Upon graduating, Vilma had difficulty finding a job in her field and settled for working at TESLA as an elementary draftsman. Also at this time, Vilma married her husband, <a href="/web/20170710094927/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/bohuslav-rychlik/">Bob Rychlik</a>. They had two sons, Mark in 1972 and Bobby in 1974. Vilma recalls that the first few years with their sons were difficult, as they both were working and did not have child care. Vilma was also unhappy with her job, as it was very easy and she was not working in the field she had studied. She tried many times to secure a better position, but says that she was not successful because of her undesirable political background. Vilma was finally given a position as a materials accountant in the construction department of TESLA and was able to work her way up as a utility pipe designer, eventually becoming a specialist on reverse osmosis systems. Although she was frustrated with the obstacles in her professional life, Vilma recalls day-to-day life being very pleasant in Czechoslovakia. Her sons took music and art lessons and the family regularly went on camping and biking trips. Vilma says that she had to be resourceful and learn to make the best out of what was available.</p><p> </p><p>In August 1983, Bob was able to secure travel visas to Yugoslavia for the whole family. Once there, the Rychliks made their way to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office in Belgrade. After an interview and a six-week wait, Vilma and her family were given papers allowing them to leave Yugoslavia and enter Austria. They spent about seven months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Ramsau; in Ramsau they lived in a guesthouse (with a number of other refugee families) and both Vilma and Bob found jobs. Although Bob received asylum status and they could have stayed in Austria, they decided to go to the United States. The family arrived in Baltimore on May 17, 1984, and Vilma found a job shortly after as a sprinkler system designer. Even though she took English classes at a community college, she says that it was difficult for her to learn English, as the family spoke Czech at home so that the boys would not forget the language. Vilma says that she was very proud when they received American citizenship in 1990 and does not regret their decision to leave. Today, she lives with Bob in Mount Airy, Maryland.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Bauerova
Education
English language
Family life
Fashion
marriage
Refugee camp
Roznov pod Radhostem
Women workers
Zubri
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Border Town</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gVpo0WhTnbM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I lived close to Liberec. It’s 20 kilometers, 12 or 13 miles from Liberec. The city name is Hrádek nad Nisou. It’s close to the border – Poland and German, so if I had a choice, I’d go to Germany. If I want, I’d go to Poland; that’s very close. But before the communists broke, we couldn’t go anywhere, we could just go to East Germany. Before the communists [broke] there was border control. He checked everything. So if you wanted to go out, he checked a case, the suitcase, and a package, and whatever you got. He checked everything.”</p><h4>Started a Business</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oTDKF26o5fE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Everybody had a big vision to work for themselves, because before everybody worked for the company, the state was the owner, and now everybody wants to be free and work for themselves and make a profit for myself. But nothing was too easy, everything was hard. Somebody is thinking everything is very easy, but no. First thing, it’s bureaucratic because if you want to do some paperwork or something it’s not very easy to do it because everybody needed money and it’s working slow, and I didn’t like it.”</p><h4>Work Travel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Pnp0SwVoKwc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“After a few months, I got a big job with Chuck E. Cheese. I started to build Chuck E. Cheese [restaurants] around the United States. The first year, I visited 21 states and we were living in a hotel, and in Chicago. I had two houses, one in Chicago, one on the strip. We built Chuck E. Cheese almost everywhere, in every big city. New York, Minnesota, Florida, and Texas – that’s beautiful. It’s a big job, but the first three months, it’s very hard. I think Texas is beautiful. I liked the whole country; it’s very nice. Every place is different. So Florida is different, Georgia is different, Kentucky is different. Every place is different.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Tomas Votocek
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Tomas Votocek was born in Liberec, northern Bohemia in 1968. He grew up with his parents and sister in Hrádek nad Nisou, a town on the border of East Germany and Poland. His father Milan worked in a bakery and his mother Karla was a pediatric nurse. As a child, Tomas occasionally helped out at the bakery. He says that people in his town often crossed the border into East Germany and Poland to buy goods, especially food and electronics. Tomas attended school in Liberec, and because of his interest in wood-working, went to a trade school to learn carpentry. Upon finishing his studies in 1987, Tomas says that many of his friends left the country; however, he was unable to do so himself. Tomas remembers joining the protests during the Velvet Revolution in 1989 because he was excited about the changes, including the opening of the borders. Following the fall of communism, Tomas traveled throughout Europe, visiting places such as Austria, Switzerland, Spain, and France. In 1997, his started his own construction company with two acquaintances. He says that although the process was frustrating, the freedom of owning his own business was worth it.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In 2001, Tomas traveled to the United States. He visited California, where his cousin lived, and New York before settling in Chicago. Tomas says that because he did not know any English, he was drawn to the large Czech and Polish population in Chicago. His first job was cleaning up construction sites, but after a few months he found employment building new Chuck E. Cheese restaurants which saw him on the road for two or three weeks at a time. Tomas says that his co-workers – along with closed-captioning on TV – helped him improve his language skills. In 2007, he bought what had up to then been a Polish grocery store and began selling imported Czech and Slovak food and other goods, such as books and videos. Tomas’s store, Vltava, has also worked to promote cultural events with several Czech organizations in Chicago in the past. Today, Tomas lives with his Czech wife in Chicago.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170612094215/http://recordingvoices.blogspot.com/2011/10/vltava-czech-slovak-grocery-chicago.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A blog post about Tomas’s store</a><br /><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170612094215/http://www.vltava.us/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Vltava’s web site</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Community Life
Education
English language
Hradek nad Nisou
Post-1989 emigrant
Privatization
Velvet Revolution
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII Memories</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vNbHAz2Ymh8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I remember the War. Where we lived, the Americans used to fly over and drop their bombs on Plzeň, the Škoda factories, and they were flying right over us. I remember one New Year’s Eve, my parents were somewhere and they were coming back, and I think he [a military pilot] was shot or something, so he unloaded his bombs right in the forest by us, there was a big bang. My parents came running home; they thought we got bombed and all that, but no, they dumped them in the forest there.”</p><h4>Escape Arrest</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/T6jDSpNs-K0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In the winter time when there wasn’t that much work on the farm, we took the horses to Železná Ruda, right on the border, to work in the woods, to pull the logs. My father was there with two pairs of horses, and they came to arrest him – the Communists took over and they were going to arrest him. But this friend of his got on his motorcycle, went to Železná Ruda, and told him ‘Don’t come home, because they’re waiting for you. Don’t come home.’ So he took a pair of horses and went to Germany. Nobody touched him or anything, everybody thought he was coming home from the fields. So he made it all the way to Munich, and then he had to sell the horses because he couldn’t feed them. And me and my brother and my mother stayed behind, and later on he sent for us.”</p><h4>Refugee Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2sZOSD5NGiw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were a lot of people, a lot of friends. We had a Boy Scout troop and a Boy Scout camp. This was in the mountains, in the Alps and we used to go hiking in the Alps and we had a lot of fun. There wasn’t a whole lot of food, but there was enough to keep you going. I thought I had a good time there. I made a lot of good friends there.”</p><h4>Farming</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rMEJXIK4rbA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In the late ‘50s my parents bought a farm in Michigan. My father had to have a farm because that’s what he left and he wanted to have a farm. So as soon as he had some money, he bought a farm in Michigan, and he was farming on the weekends until he retired and then they moved out there. First there was corn, which was something new. Then he decided to start an orchard, apple orchard. So he stopped doing the corn and put the apple orchard in, which was a lot less work.”</p><p><em>And why did he want to farm here?</em></p><p>“Because he was a farmer. They took his farm, the Communists took his farm and he’s going to get one again.”</p><h4>Visiting Czech Republic</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4H89Nr8YspY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“People are not used to the idea that this is a free country. Americans know this is a free country, I’m going to do what I want, nobody’s going to tell me what to do. They’re not used to it yet. They have to dress the same, they’re not used to the idea that it’s a free country. I’m going down Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square in Prague] and two people stop me and talk German to me. And I said to my cousin, ‘How do they know I don’t belong here?’ He said, ‘Because you’re dressed differently, you’ve got a different shirt than they have.’ I said, ‘Well, this a free country, if I want to dress this way, don’t want to dress, that’s the way it is.’”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Rudy Solfronk
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Rudy Solfronk was born in Žinkovy in southern Bohemia in 1935. He lived with his parents and his brother, Václav, in a house on the edge of town until his father bought a farm elsewhere in the same region. Rudy attended school in Hartmanice. He has early memories of WWII, in particular, of American planes flying over the region and, towards the end of the War, interacting with American and Czech soldiers. In December 1948, officials arrived at Rudy’s house to arrest his father who, Rudy says, was reluctant to give up his farm. Rudy’s father was in the woods near the border, and after being warned by a friend not to return home, he crossed into Germany and made his way to Murnau refugee camp. The following summer, Rudy and his mother and brother also joined him there. Rudy remembers having ‘a lot of fun’ in the camp, as he joined a Boy Scout troop and made a lot of friends. Although most children at the camp were taught by Czech and Slovak teachers, Rudy’s father insisted upon him attending a German school to learn the language.</p><p> </p><p>In January 1951, Rudy and his family arrived at Ellis Island. Although they had been sponsored by a Catholic convent in Pennsylvania, Rudy says his family was released from their obligation to the convent and stayed in New York City. His father began working in a sausage factory and his mother found work as a seamstress, while Rudy and his brother attended school. He remembers receiving help from a German teacher, as he did not know English very well. After about six months, Rudy’s father was offered a job in Cicero, Illinois, maintaining a building owned by the CSA (Czechoslovak Society of America). They moved into an apartment in this building, which also had a movie theater, shops, offices, and a meeting hall. Rudy finished high school in Cicero and went to community college for one year before starting a career in printing. He worked in a print shop part-time for the last two years of school and, because of this experience, was able to secure an apprenticeship. After working at several different places, he got a job at the <em>Chicago Sun-Times</em>, where became a foreman in the print shop; he stayed there for over 30 years. Rudy also served for eight years in the Army Reserves and received U.S. citizenship through this service.</p><p> </p><p>Rudy and his wife are active in the Czech community around Chicago, regularly attending events, picnics, and dances. He has been back to the Czech Republic several times. Today, he lives in Downers Grove, Illinois.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Community Life
English language
German language
Military service
Rural life
World War II
Zincovy
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2ec8fa4a22fc601b82a3fce19ae77871
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Earliest Memories</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nX2nYy5Cz_k?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We grew up in Africa, and Tunisia was blue sky, beautiful weather; we lived in a beautiful town called Monastir. It was right by the water. So my memories are of the beach and sun and all that, and my father was building a textile company, so he was in charge of a lot and meeting with the president of Tunisia and he had a pretty high position, and from there he did a lot of traveling back to Western Europe to buy the machinery from the Belgians, French, English, so he was all over Europe. My memories of childhood are what I can remember from there and any memory of Czechoslovakia was that we would basically we would go vacation there once a year, and I hated every minute of it, because it was gray, rainy, cold. As a kid, I would cry and say ‘I want to go home to the nice place,’ and it just kind of stayed with me so I never liked the place from day one, to be honest. Never liked it, and as soon as one comes to a certain age where you start thinking a little bit outside of the kid’s mind, I basically said ‘I’m leaving the second I can.’”</p><h4>Moving Reasons</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lCwH6zbZjck?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The United States has the most friends of the countries which are supposedly the enemies, so the communist world was supposedly the enemy of the U.S.; therefore the people loved everything about the U.S., because we obviously hated the Russians and anything with it. So then you kind of glamorize the other side and you believe every single word of it and you start paying attention and it was this huge attraction. Then you buy books and you read about it and we would listen to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. I never had any idea or tendency to go Germany or Austria; it just wasn’t tempting whatsoever, but the U.S. was like this different planet – it kind of is.”</p><h4>Refugee Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KgHzaE3VHr0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was a mess. For my brother, it was harder because he was the older one so he felt responsibility. For me, it was this great adventure so you don’t much care about anything. But there was a lot of pretty nasty people there. [It was] very corrupt, so all the money, which was – later on you learn was donated by the U.S. government for these camps, most of it was stolen. You get a mattress on the floor and the bathroom isn’t a bathroom. There is a hole in the wall and water is spraying out of it, and that’s what it is. They feed you, but the living conditions are absolutely atrocious. We and the two brothers wanted to be in one room, so you get four mattresses and you stay there, and you make your own weapons and you block your doors at night because it gets very dangerous. Very dangerous. Back then they were saying – I don’t know if it was true – Romanians would empty their prisons and just bus them to the border and send them to Italy. And these types of people would end up in these camps. It was not pleasant. It was a lot of tough people.”</p><p><em>Did you ever need to use your homemade weapons?</em></p><p>“We never had to use it, but a lot of people would get stabbed and shot, even, at night. You couldn’t walk around the camp alone at night; you were crazy if you did that. You had to go with a lot of people together. I guess that’s what happens in these situations, very separated by nationality.”</p><p><em>Were you able to go freely to and from the camp?</em></p><p>“Absolutely. You could do anything you wanted. There were public busses, so you would always looks for work. Stand on the corner of the road, and there are fields and agriculture and people take you, so you make a little money; it’s illegal work basically, but that’s how it was so you would make a little money occasionally. You don’t need to buy clothing. You have food in the camp, so you just go out, take a bus and go to the beach. The public bus was cheap. So you could anything. We would actually take little trips around old, small towns in the mountains and hills there. It’s actually pretty beautiful there.”</p><h4>Immigrate</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/P2FxhHJBcQw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They have a process there and you actually go to the consulate in Rome and they talk to you and ask you questions. It’s supposed to be a long process of questions of why and what. I was a 20 year old and had long hair and we thought it was very modern and American, except here they look at you like you are a lazy hippie – which we didn’t know – so they asked you ‘Which would you prefer, long hair or work?’ which I thought was the strangest question because, again, I didn’t know that’s how it was, so I said ‘Obviously work,’ because that’s all you want to do. Then the next question was ‘If there’s a war with the Russians, would you go and fight them?’ and I said ‘Sure, gladly,’ and they said ‘Welcome to the United States.’ It took three minutes.”</p><h4>American Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/l7LpcB39w1U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Never read a Czech newspaper; never read one more book. I had no interest whatsoever, because right from day one you want to improve your language and everything about it. You want to understand everything, so from day one I started buying a newspaper. I didn’t understand a word of it, but it’s just that looking into it, that habit, turning on the TV. You just immerse yourself in the country and the culture and the language and that’s what helps you, and you get to the point where, like I said, I get a headache; I can’t read a page of a Czech newspaper because you lose interest, it doesn’t go anywhere; it becomes hard.”</p><h4>Travel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PwCRZJEoZjs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“As a kid growing up in a place where they tell you that you can’t travel, you kind of always want to see the world, and this enabled us to see the world, and a nice part of the world as well, because the travel is paid for by the company and you stay in player hotels, which are usually four- or five-star hotels, and you go to phenomenal tennis places. So if you like tennis and you go to Wimbledon and Roland Garros and Aussie Open and on and on, it’s pretty amazing. Then traveling with the U.S. Davis Cup team, you stay in nice places; you go to the U.S. consulate and you are chauffeured around in Mercedes. It’s just a great experience. Phenomenal experience. You see the world. I’ve been to probably 65 countries, many of them 20 times or 100 times.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Roman Prokes
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Roman Prokes was born in Svitavy, a city in central Czechoslovakia, in 1960. Roman’s mother and father met after they both moved to the city following WWII, when it had been annexed by Nazi Germany as part of the Sudetenland. At the age of three, Roman moved to Monastir, Tunisia, with his parents and older brother, as his father, the director of a textile company, was tasked with opening a factory there. Roman’s earliest memories are of the Mediterranean setting and his reluctance to travel back to Czechoslovakia. After four years in Tunisia, Roman’s family returned to Svitavy and Roman started school. He recalls his father being quite outspoken against the communist government, especially following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, and subsequently losing his job. Roman says that because of his father’s standing, ‘going to high school was very difficult’ and he and his brother were not able to attend university. Roman’s high school education focused on food service and, as part of his studies, he worked in a grocery store and trained to be a manager.</p><p> </p><p>Following high school, Roman and his brother decided to leave the country. They took a bus tour to Yugoslavia and, on the island of Korčula, left the group and hitchhiked to the Italian border. After crossing the border into Trieste on foot, they were sent to Latina, a refugee camp near Rome. Roman says that although he saw the experience as a ‘great adventure,’ the camp was rather dangerous. After two months in Latina, Roman and his brother were given permission to immigrate to the United States. They arrived in New York in September 1981 and settled in Astoria, Queens. Roman’s first impressions of the city? ‘I loved New York from the first minute we landed.’ While Roman’s brother quickly found work in a hotel restaurant, it took Roman longer to find a job. He worked in a church thrift shop and odd jobs in construction. He then started driving a cab – a job he held for three years.</p><p> </p><p>Roman next found a job stringing rackets at a Czech-owned tennis club. He grew his business and, today, owns one of the premier pro shops in New York. Roman toured with Andre Agassi for 16 years and includes several other high profile tennis players as his customers. Because of his work, Roman has traveled extensively, which he says is ‘amazing’ after growing up in communist Czechoslovakia with few options to travel. He became an American citizen in 1986 and calls New York his ‘home from the day [he] landed.’ Today, Roman lives in Queens with his wife and children.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Americanization
Education
English language
Korcula
Refugee camp
school
Sports
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5ab68b8bbc3e1c670e59726e00d4087f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Emigration Problems</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WbBPxYhcXZs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“You know, there was an issue, why you want to leave, how, why did you come here, what was the situation, you know? We were approached by a lot of different agencies trying to find out what the problem was, why we came, why we decided to leave the country and stuff like that. But it wasn’t really like serious issues, but the problem was the language. We did not speak any English at the time we came over so obviously it became really hard to deal with these issues because of the language.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PtLVR6IrnWk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We did have to pay some money to people there to give us the… At that time, you had to have a visa to the United States and all that stuff that comes with it. And fortunately enough I had somebody who was willing to take some money and give me the permission to go. And so that’s how we actually ended up leaving – the whole family – because at that time, they did not like to let a family leave as a whole family, for this particular reason, because people did not want to come back. And because I was working at the restaurant as well, you know, there were a lot of people; they were coming in and so I did find somebody who was willing to take the money and get me the permissions and let me go.”</p><h4>Pilsner Restaurant</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ofhyKbJbIss?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The favorite dish was the pork tenderloin. Roast pork, dumplings and sauerkraut, as well as breaded pork tenderloin as well as potato salad and stuff. Obviously roast duck, no one can go wrong with roast duck, and goulash. So the typical Czechoslovakian dishes. But out of all, the roast pork and pork tenderloin were the biggest seller. And we baked our own bakery items, everything was made on the premises where we baked the bread. And so it was kind of emotional when we got to the point where we were closing the door. We had tons of daily customers, they literally were going to the restaurant every day for lunch.”</p><h4>Grandchildren</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bD9cZC0GX7w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It’s very, very funny, because Andrea was born in the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia at that time, and she was seven years old when we moved here. I don’t know why the kids didn’t want to speak Czech – once they started learning English, they didn’t want to speak Czech. And we were sending them to Czechoslovakia every summer for like two or three months for the language and just to see where their parents came from. And so she learned how to speak Czech, she can read a little bit (Andrea) but she can’t write, right – or she does a funny way. Tina, on the other hand, Tina was born here. And she can speak, she can read and write in Czech. So she’s… And I say ‘Guys, if you want to talk to grandma, she doesn’t speak English, it’s the only way to communicate with her.’ So that works out well. We have a little issue with the grandkids, because my daughter’s husband is American and they speak English at home. So it’s kind of harder for us to force them to speak Czech, but we will get there, we will make sure they can speak Czech.”</p><h4>More Czech than American</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FxXntLeRgv8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was 28 years old [when I left] so obviously I am going to feel more Czech than American because I grew up under different circumstances. My kids, Andrea, I would say 50-50. The grandkids obviously, you know, they’re American. But there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m just trying to keep them aware of where mommy came from and where their grandmother and grandfather and all that stuff so that they understand that. But as far as feeling American or Czech? I would say 60-40 Czech. And, you know, like I said, most of our friends… we have a lot of American friends as well, but most of our friends are Czechs and, like I said before, we are getting together as much as we can, just to get together, you know.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Robert Dobson
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Robert Dobson was born in Prague in 1956. He grew up in the Nové Město part of the city. His father Vilém worked in construction and died in a workplace accident when Robert was still a child. His mother Alena subsequently raised Robert on her own and worked as an office manager. Robert says his childhood in Czechoslovakia was extremely happy and, once his own family was settled in the United States, he sent his children back every summer to stay with their grandparents and ‘gain exposure to nature’ at summer camps.</p><p> </p><p>Robert studied to become a waiter at vocational school in Prague and then worked at Klášterní vinárna, near the city’s National Theatre, and Restaurace Beograd, a Yugoslav restaurant not far from Wenceslas Square. At this time, Robert also took part in cycling competitions and worked to earn some extra money as a hair model. In 1976, he met his wife Yvonne; the couple’s first daughter Andrea was born the following year.</p><p> </p><p>Robert’s sister-in-law had emigrated to Downers Grove, Illinois, in 1968. He and Yvonne decided that they too wanted to leave Czechoslovakia. After one failed attempt to emigrate to Switzerland (which resulted in Yvonne’s passport being confiscated), Robert found someone willing to accept a bribe and help them assemble the papers they needed. The family came to Downers Grove to stay in 1984. In America, the couple’s second daughter Tina was born.</p><p> </p><p>Robert’s first job was as a bartender at a hotel near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. He started working for a friend at Little Europe restaurant in Brookfield before he heard of a Czech restaurant coming up for sale in Berwyn. Robert bought Pilsner Restaurant in 1987 and ran the business with his family for the next 13 years. He says the family ‘loved’ running the restaurant, but that they sold the business as Czech custom in the neighborhood declined. Today, Robert runs a remodeling and construction firm based out of Bolingbrook, Illinois. He and his wife Yvonne enjoy spending time with their grandchildren and are determined, says Robert, to teach them to speak Czech.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Czech language
English language
Family business
Family life
hotel industry
Klasterni vinarna
marriage
Nove Mesto
Restaurant
Sense of identity
Sevcu
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fb671e0016b8d4fe6e9c7fbbafbb1093
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
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<h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/il6zYksHXXk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My father especially, was very careful not to – back then, you didn’t know who you could trust and if you mentioned something in front of your kids, then they go to school and they talk to their friends and you can get your parents in trouble that way – so he was very careful not to show his opinions one way or another, so I don’t know what his views were. But I can tell you he was one of the few people who transitioned successfully [following the Velvet Revolution], he remained in his position, actually improved. Not because he was a Communist, but because he was a very capable guy and fair to everybody and never really got involved with the Communists, so people weren’t after him trying to get his head. It worked out well for him, not expressing his opinions, publicly anyway.”</p><h4>Learning English</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8896_n7_zYQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At that point I got into music, and I was listening to a British heavy metal band, Iron Maiden – they were my gods – so what helped me was I wanted to know what they were singing about, so I translated all their lyrics, and that’s how I really got much better at English. They were using different words than you’d usually find in high school textbooks and my level of interest was obviously much higher, so that always came very easy.”</p><h4>Velvet Revolution</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HXiYffH9E_s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well, we were there almost every day, but I was just in the crowd. I didn’t want to get involved, and not because I was against or for any of it, but I really didn’t know what was going on, and I’m the type of person that I’m not going to get involved unless I know what’s going on because what I don’t want to do is cause harm to somebody not knowing why. So I knew that I didn’t like communism and we wanted to get rid of that, but beyond that point, I really wasn’t going to get involved on a larger scale and get into the frontline, because it was unclear what the intentions were. And a lot of shady people come to the surface when something like that happens, because they recognize the opportunity to be in the spotlight or to better themselves, and people can quickly switch sides, and that’s what happened in a lot of cases back then. So I was just basically there to support, but as part of the masses and not in any sort of leading position.”</p><h4>Impressions of America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/z6GiLUYl08I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Oh, I loved it right away. It’s one of those weird things I cannot explain. I felt like I was away from home for 27 years. Right away I liked it and I wanted to stay. I love Americans. They’re the most wonderful people in the world. They’re very friendly, funny, easy-going. I like them much more than Europeans, that’s why I would not go back. So, I liked it right away. When I came here, I knew I wanted to live here.”</p><h4>Slovak in the U.S.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/InvzoISJyNc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I always made a conscious effort to assimilate. I don’t want to stand out – it’s not that I don’t like to stand out – I don’t want to stand out as an immigrant. Because it always carries a little bit of a negative connotation, no matter what. You’re just not local, you’re not one of us, in a way. Although I’ve never felt that way, nobody ever made me feel that way. Americans are very open and liberal when it comes to that. After all, this country was established on those principles. I’m not afraid of telling people that I’m Slovak, it doesn’t bother me. But actually I feel much better when people tell me that ‘Oh you hardly have any accent.’ I like to hear that, not ‘Oh, are you from Slovakia? Where are you from?’ I don’t want people to pick up on that. Of course they do, but you know what I mean.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Rasto Gallo
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Rasto Gallo was born in Lučenec, Slovakia in 1970. His father, Zdenko, was a bank manager, and his mother, Eva (an ethnic Hungarian), was a teacher. When Rasto was four years old, his father received a promotion and the family moved to Banská Bystrica. The Gallos had a piano in their home that Rasto enjoyed playing; he later took music lessons. He remembers skiing and hiking in the nearby mountains. Rasto attended<em>gymnázium</em> in Banská Bystrica where he began learning English. He says that he became interested in popular Western music, and that the only way to listen was from bootlegged cassette tapes because records were not readily available in Czechoslovakia at the time. Following <em>gymnázium</em>, Rasto enrolled at Matej Bel University (which was then a teacher’s college) to study music education. His first year there was marked by the Velvet Revolution. Rasto says he was out in the streets “almost every day” during these protests. He also says that the revolution had a “huge effect” on his life, as he was able to start studying English at university and was influenced by the Western culture that subsequently crossed the border. At university, Rasto became interested in jazz music and began playing the saxophone. He was admitted to study music at the conservatory in Bratislava, where he subsequently won a scholarship to the United States.</p><p> </p><p>In March 1997, Rasto arrived in Cleveland where he studied for one year at Cuyahoga Community College. He then received a scholarship from Cleveland State University, from which he graduated with a masters degree in music. In Cleveland, Rasto became involved with the Slovak community. He translated Jan Pankuch’s <em>History of Slovaks in Cleveland and Lakewood</em> into English, and assisted with the creation a cataloging system at the Slovak Institute. In 2000, he decided to stop pursing a professional music career and found employment at a residential real estate firm. In September 2007, he moved to Chicago, where he found a job selling commercial real estate.</p><p> </p><p>Rasto knew as soon as he arrived in America that he did not want to return to Slovakia to live. He tried several approaches to gaining American citizenship. He says he was able to gain permanent resident status in Canada because his translating skills were considered valuable; however, in 2000, he also entered the U.S. green card lottery, which he won. In 2006, Rasto became an American citizen, an event he calls “one of the best days of his life.” He has been back to Slovakia several times to visit family and friends. Today, Rasto lives in Chicago.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Americanization
Banska Bystrica
Community Life
Education
English language
Lucenec
Post-1989 emigrant
Sense of identity
Translator/interpreter
Velvet Revolution
Western/Pop culture