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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>Boyhood Hobby</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r5eeQYFARqQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I spent most of my time, not in front of the computer because there were no publicly available computers in those days, but my hobby was to create small electronic devices – radios, blinking stuff, anything which would create a weird noise – little gizmos like that. Very interesting devices in those days, and very popular, were amplifiers, because every good musician needs amplifiers and boosters and all these kinds of devices. So I became famous for my electric guitar specialized devices among my friends.”</p><h4>Velvet Revolution</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DlfQ9LbF4sk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was in class when it happened. Suddenly everybody went out. Everybody spent a couple of days, a couple of nights, on the streets, and we knew it was over. You knew from the beginning it was over. There was a lot of excitement because now we recognize multiple parties, multiple goals and strategies for how to make people happy in politics. Those days there was only one option – them, Communists, or not them. So I guess it was kind of a surprise for everybody when we realized that we are suddenly free, ok, and what next? Nobody thought of ‘what next?’ means. In the moment we ran away from the school and spent the nights on the street.”</p><h4>Military Service</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rDGPsz5KgpM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was with the Ministry of Defense in Bratislava with an intelligence group, screening through all kinds of newspapers, media, TV shows, and my role was basically to capture any single news which was related to the Army. So my work day was starting at 4:00 a.m. and I was done about noon, and I had another eight hours to have a second job – which was out of the Army in a company named AXA. That’s how I started there. It was interesting in the terms that it was something ‘secret,’ so I felt important. Plus, I didn’t have to shovel roads and run in circles for ten hours and funny stuff like that. I was treated as a professional. So I wouldn’t say it was quite easy, but it was definitely easier than 99 percent of other guys serving in the Army.”</p><h4>Move to Canada</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1YHackubPOI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I landed in Toronto, and my first feeling when I was landing was ‘Oh my gosh. What did I do?’ I realized in that very moment ‘Yes, this is a remote country; yes, English is the language here; yes, I’m alone; yes, I don’t have a job; yes, I don’t know anybody.’ That was the feeling – frustrating.”</p><p><em>So what happened next?</em></p><p>“I never became homesick, that’s the first thing. Plus, I’m not a person who would sit home and wait for a miracle, so I got a job after two weeks. I worked in a warehouse picking fruits and vegetables, loading trucks. Of course I was looking for a job in my area, but I had to pay the bills. There was rent, there was everything else, so I had to make sure that I had income. So I spent nine months in that warehouse until I found a job.”</p><h4>Slovak Heritage</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ekvBdv3tY-4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It is a very easy question with a very easy answer. Our lives are like a moving window of 20, 30, 40 years? Nobody knows, right? When you’re gone, whatever you brought to this life is gone unless somebody saves it. Slovak people in Canada came a long, long time ago; they’re dying, everybody will pass away eventually, so if we don’t save what was valuable to them, what was valuable to the community, those days will be gone. There are plenty of historical documents dying in somebody’s basement being flooded, being lost, being thrown away, and the purpose of what we do is to save it. To save it not just for us, but for the future so we know that Slovaks were here, they were not an insignificant group, they did huge things and all these things will not be lost.”</p><p><em>Do you think sometimes that people who are expatriates or people who are abroad have a different relationship to their own cultural heritage than people who stay in their country?</em></p><p>“Absolutely, because staying in a country, you don’t feel the gravity of the situation. In the country, you still speak the same language, you see all those folk groups – professional ones – performing, and you don’t have a feeling that you’re losing something or that there is something that may be lost or forgotten. Away from home, you feel it. Because if a culture is not preserved, people assimilate with native people – which is normal – and after a couple generations there wouldn’t be any Slovaks here.”</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
Pavol Dzacko
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Pavol Dzacko was born in 1974 in Bratislava. Before the Velvet Revolution, Pavol’s father, Štefan, worked in an agricultural processing center; following the Revolution, he took a job providing IT services for a bank. Pavol’s mother, Dagmar, was a teacher who, following the Revolution, began teaching French at a small college. Pavol grew up the oldest of five siblings. When he was two, the family moved to Košice for his father’s job. As a boy, Pavol was interested in electronics and heavy metal music; he says his two hobbies intersected when he created homemade amplifiers and other devices for his friends. Pavol says that although his day-to-day life did not immediately change after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he remembers the time to be one of ‘excitement.’ He attended technical high school and studied computer programming at the Technical University of Košice. Upon his graduation in 1997, Pavol moved to Bratislava where he served one year in the military and simultaneously worked as a janitor at the financial and insurance firm AXA. At AXA (which was contracting for CitiBank), Pavol moved into IT development and, later, became a manager.</p><p> </p><p>In 2002, two of Pavol’s friends who had plans to move to Canada convinced Pavol to join them; Pavol says that he had always thought of Canada as a place of freedom and nature, but that he hadn’t given much prior thought to moving there. He applied for a permanent resident visa which he received less than two months later; he says this was an unusually short waiting period. He and his wife arrived in Toronto where Pavol quickly found a job in a warehouse. After nine months of applying for jobs in his field, he began working for the Bank of Montreal in 2003 and has remained there ever since. Pavol is active in the Slovak community in Toronto, serving on the boards of several organizations including the Slovak House in Toronto and the Canadian Slovak Institute. He is the founder of Canada SK Entertainment, an organization which brings Slovak groups to perform in Canada and the United States. A dual citizen of Canada and Slovakia, Pavol speaks Slovak at home with his wife and keeps Slovak holiday traditions. He lives in Toronto.</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
Kosice
Military service
Pop culture
Post-1989 emigrant
Sense of identity
Velvet Revolution
Western
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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>Marek's Parents</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PkKdrebUGEs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Supposedly it was a very wild time. I have photographs of myself being a year and half sitting my dad’s lap and his hair is a big curly afro and drinking beer in pubs. I understand that at that time pub life was very much the center of social life where people were able to vent their opinions and be in maybe safer company. We were in company of all kinds of artists in Prague, and that’s also what I’ve come to understand, that then, even more so that now, there was one group of underground art people, and I’m proud to be in the lineage of that.”</p><h4>New York</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2xBdanMllH0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to a wonderful elementary school, and I like to say that our class photos were just a rainbow. All my classmates were mostly first generation immigrants from China, from Israel, from India. A very good cultural education, learning how to say all those different names, and just as six, seven year olds getting together and realizing that there’s no difference between us. So that was a brilliant way to start.”</p><h4>Czech Culture</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VofyMtElG6o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mom very consciously maintained Czech culture, in terms of kitchen, even the style of furniture. She was very alternative when she was here, but if we look at photographs we can see that there was definitely no Americanization. There was no sofa, there was no microwave. I remember especially the dinners, they looked just like what you get now [in Prague]. Of course, me and my brother were kind of against it. We wanted the McDonald’s and the hamburgers and stuff, but my parents were very consciously and very open about ‘No, we’re not giving into that and we are proud of our culture and we are going to maintain it.’ What is funny is all my classmates did the same in their houses. If you went to their house, it would be like little China and they would have real Chinese food for dinner, and then the Indians, so each home was like a little oasis of that culture.”</p><p><em>Why did they keep it so Czech in the middle of New York?</em></p><p>“I guess we could see it from a few different perspectives. One is that that would just be the honest thing to do, to be true to one’s culture. I think that one of the fundamental values in our household was to be aware, to be educated, and to be broad-minded and multicultural, and I think that Prague, I see it more and more over the years that it’s the heart of Europe, and I’ve thought very often why that is, and if you look on the map you see it basically as the crossroads of all these different routes. I think that the Czech history and nationality is very educated, very world-conscious, and I think that the fear was that the Americans, how they’re isolated by the seas, there was this fear that we would become small-minded, and therefore we should actively maintain our broad awareness.”</p><h4>Languages</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z9tsWCzGP_M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When we were singing the national anthem and things like that at school, I remember for years and years and years, I didn’t know what I was saying. The words didn’t stand out to me as individual words, it was just kind of a mishmash of syllables. I really, not until I was about 12 or 13 did I actually hear it and say ‘Oh right, that means something.’ That was kind of the first experience of me encountering English, just seeing it as a curtain of sound.</p><p>“I remember that when I was eight and he [his brother] was ten, there was a point where I decided that I’m no longer going to speak Czech and that I’m going to even make an effort not to understand it. Now with my work with children, I’ve learned that there’s a special age around that time where the kids discover the tendency to rebel and be naughty, as opposed to before doing everything that their parents say, and now they discover, wow they can really go against the rules, and I think that’s what that was. My dad explains it to me that if I would say to my mom ‘I don’t understand,’ that’s kind of giving me the go-ahead to do things she’s telling me not to do. It’s pretty smart. Pretty useful. In monolingual households, you can’t use that excuse, so it was a good excuse. From that time, it really went downhill. By the time we were 12, I actually didn’t understand.”</p><h4>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZjY66IbRTag?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My first visit was 1992. [It was] me and my brother doing all the classic tourist stuff, going to the castle and going to other castles outside of Prague. But, being young teenagers, very often bored and complaining and stuff. But visiting my extended family, my cousins, my uncles. So that was probably my introduction to ‘Aha, we have actually family here.’ I remember coming to visit the flat that I live in now and we approached the building, probably by taxi and parked in basically rubble, cement. It looked like pictures that we see now from Afghanistan. I remember thinking ‘Wow, this is serious.’ It was totally fresh. There was none of this renovation boom having started yet. It really felt as if it was just after a war. I liked the hominess of the public venues, like restaurants and things. That resonated, and obviously, maybe I had still unconscious memories of smells and things, that when we came into, not necessarily a city pub, but a country pub, I would feel like ‘Oh, that’s good.’ And I recognized all the food, obviously. I think there’s another important thing is that I knew people were looking at us as Americans. The way that we dressed, our hairstyles and things like that. The fact that we didn’t speak Czech. That was a big one.</p><p>“When I was 16, it was with a girlfriend I had at the time. We decided to come to Prague in the summer. You could say that my trip here when I was 12 definitely didn’t inspire me to acknowledge my roots, my Bohemian roots, but the trip in ’96 I think did. It reminded me that there is this very rich cultural place that I come from, and that trip to Prague, I was really impressed.”</p><h4>Return to Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JZmT0DqI9tU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Coming back here, I definitely felt I had made a step in the right direction to a simplified life, to a life more connected with its lineage. Especially the fact that this culture had just overcome the foreign element and now had the opportunity to really be itself and really finally embrace its roots. I think that I felt here a very fresh impulse to discovering the identity of the nation. Having had this political-economic force rid of, now the people were free to determine their own fate, which I felt New York and America didn’t have. I felt there was, if anything, a force growing in power which determined the fate of the culture.”</p><h4>Decision to Leave</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GXD5gjfyN_I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I come here, and almost everyone who I meet, when they find out about my story, they say ‘Why? You can live in America and you’ve chosen to come back here? Why?’ And so some people get the long, some people get the short answer, or they say ‘Is it better here? Is it better here or better there?’ And I always say that it’s totally subjective. It’s subjective. When I’m here, I feel – because I like physics – so I imagine it as if you have a bowl and you take a marble and you drop it at any point, it’s going to roll around a bit, but it’s always going to end up at the bottom. So that’s how I feel when I’m here, when I’m in Prague, and especially because of Prague, the way it’s a valley so it’s got all these different ridges around the edge, but then when you’re in the center, at the National Theatre, you’re actually at the bottom. So when I stand there on the corner, I feel like this is home.”</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
Marek Eisler
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Marek Eisler was born in Prague in 1980. His father, John, was an architect who worked at SIAL studios while his mother, <a href="/web/20170709111743/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/eva-eisler/">Eva</a>, was a designer who came to be known for her jewelry in particular. Marek was raised alongside his older brother in the city’s Podolí district. In 1983, his father was offered a job at Richard Meier & Partners Architects, and so the Eislers moved to New York City. They settled in Jamaica, Queens – which, according to Marek, was a very diverse neighborhood and full of first-generation immigrants. Marek says that although his mother was determined to keep Czech traditions and customs in their home, he was not very connected with his Czech heritage and even made a concerted effort to forget the Czech language. In 1993, the Eislers moved to Manhattan, and Marek’s parents often hosted brunches, dinner parties, and gallery installments that drew artists, architects, and designers to their home; Marek says these events and people had a lasting influence on him. As a teenager, he became interested in the hip-hop and electronic music scenes.</p><p> </p><p>After graduating from high school in 1998, Marek knew that he did not want to attend college; instead, he had a desire to travel and explore his different philosophical and spiritual interests. He volunteered at a holistic community for several months in Devon, England, before moving to Prague in the spring of 1999. Marek lived with his grandmother and uncle in the city’s Prosek district, where he devoted one month to relearning the Czech language. In addition to producing multimedia events focused on ‘sound art,’ Marek began tutoring students in English. Six years ago, two people approached him almost simultaneously about joining the teaching staff of The Waldorf School in Jinonice. Marek says the alternative educational philosophy and his ‘inclination towards taking care of children’ convinced him to become an English teacher at the school. Marek has been back to the United States twice since he left and says he has no intention of resettling in America, as Prague now ‘feels like home.’<br /></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
Arts
Child emigre
Cultural Traditions
Czech language
English language
Podoli
Pop culture
Teachers
Western
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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
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<h4>1st Hearing About U.S.</h4>
<p>States back in the ‘20s. He spent nine or ten years in the coal mines in Pennsylvania and he was trying to get my grandmother to come to America, but she was afraid to make the journey, so he came back. He would speak in Slovak and he would use English words; you know, you spend time in America, you kind of get confused. So he would tell me ‘Syn moj, Ty ked vyrasties len chod do Ameriky, keby si vedel ake tam maju velke buildingy.’ I’d say, ‘Ok, but what is buildingy?’ I had no clue as a child. So he explained what a building is. He just said ‘When you grow, my son, don’t stay here, just go to America. If you only saw what big buildings they have!’ Or another sentence that puzzled me was ‘If you go to America…’ Obviously he was speaking in Slovak: ‘Keby si vedel ake tam maju velke cary.’ I said ‘What the hell is cary?’ Well, he was referring to cars. So that was the idea that stuck in my mind and he kind of injected the temptation in my head. So I was growing up and I was thinking always ‘One day I am going to go there and see what America is all about.”</p>
<h4>Slovakia Farm</h4>
<p>“As a child growing up in a small village, life was very happy, merry. The only thing we had to play with was outside, not like the children of today [with] computers and all that stuff. So we’d run with the ball, we’d play soccer and all kind of playing that kids would do outside as all kinds of after-school activities.”</p>
<p>Did you grow up in a house or an apartment?</p>
<p>“My grandfather, rest in peace, he returned from America as a rich man so he bought a lot of land. He was a big farmer; he had six horses, four cows… It was like owning a Mercedes at the time. He built a house that is still on the same property, which I fixed as a memory to him. Nobody lives there, but my sister spends summers over there and that house is a memory to all of us. I have three siblings, a brother and two sisters, so whenever I come to Slovakia we always gather there and we pull out pictures of our childhood and we’re laughing our tails off.”</p>
<h4>Catholic vs. Communist</h4>
<p>“When I finished my school and started working the state-run construction industry, okresný štátny podnik as they called it. The vice-president comes to me one day and says to me ‘You are a young prospective talent; we want you in the Party,’ and I said ‘I go to church.’ And he’s like ‘So?’ ‘Well, I go to church, so I can’t serve two masters. I believe in God, so I cannot believe in Lenin or whatever.’ He had a smirk on his face. He wouldn’t bother me; he saw that he wouldn’t get me there.”</p>
<p>Weren’t you afraid?</p>
<p>“No. It was my persuasion; it was my belief. I had my education, I had my work, I wasn’t afraid of being in jail because I wasn’t a rebel, I was part of the masses that were part of the regime or ruling party, so I told them straight ‘No. Don’t even bother coming back because I’m not signing. I have no reason.’ There were cases, I know, where there were guys in the Communist Party and they were part of the church as well. So I was laughing. How can you be sitting on two chairs? I didn’t like the idea of somebody forces you into something and watching behind their back. It was just no. My answer was no.”</p>
<h4>Leaving Father</h4>
<p>“I told him ‘I’m not going to settle down here because I know Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, is no place for me,’ and he was kind of upset about it because he saw other guys, 28 years old, settling down. I had a big place to build a house on and I said ‘I’m not going to waste my money and build a house because I don’t fit in here.’ As I said, that injection from my grandfather was always in the back of my mind. I want to see the world, I want to see America, and I came, I saw the light – it wasn’t easy at the beginning, but I saw the light at the end of the tunnel – and thank God I’m here, and I cannot even picture my life over there.”</p>
<h4>Language Barrier</h4>
<p>“We wanted to go to the store and buy blue jeans. So I picked up the phone and I said ‘Hi Pam. Winter is coming; it’s cold outside. Could you come over and pick us up? We would like to buy a Rifle.’ Now, just to get you in the picture, Rifle was a brand of blue jeans in Slovakia and I didn’t know that blue jeans are blue jeans [in the U.S.]. It was a common thing to call blue jeans Rifles. So Pam says ‘What?’ ‘You know, it’s cold outside, we need to go out and we need to buy a Rifle.’ She says ‘Jozef, I don’t think so. It’s Sunday afternoon. I don’t think you can get a license to get a rifle.’ I said ‘A license to get a Rifle?’ She says ‘Jozef, this is America. You have to have a license to get a rifle.’ So I didn’t argue. I hung up and I tell my friend, ‘Listen, either Pam is crazy or I’m crazy. She says we need to get a license to get a Rifle.’ My friend says ‘She’s nuts. Let me see.’ So he looks up the dictionary and he says ‘Rifle. Blue jeans. Oh my God.’ So I’m calling back, ‘Pam, listen. We need to clarify something. Rifle is a brand of blue jeans in Czechoslovakia.’ We had a couple of them: Wildcat, Rifle… And she started cracking up: ‘What kind of language do you guys use in Czechoslovakia that you call blue jeans rifles?’ So whenever I pick up the phone and call her office [she says] ‘Jozef, you want to buy a rifle?’ So the language barrier and all that stuff, we’ve all been through and sometimes it’s funny how people confuse things.”</p>
<h4>Where is Home?</h4>
<p>“Well, they say home is where your heart is and I believe my heart is in America. What proves that is when I’m coming back from Slovakia or travels, on my way from JFK, sitting in a taxi, I feel I am coming home. So I guess my home is here and I feel more Slovak-American because you still have feelings for the country you came from. But this country gave me the opportunity to live a better life and, yes, I’m calling it my home.”</p>
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Title
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Jozef Bil
Description
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<p>Jozef Bil was born in Bartošovce in eastern Slovakia in 1961. He grew up with his grandparents, parents, two older sisters and an older brother. Jozef’s grandfather lived in the United States during the 1920s for about ten years and worked in the coal mines in Pennsylvania. He returned to Slovakia where he bought land and built a large farm. Jozef says that his grandfather’s stories about the United States planted a seed of emigration that stayed with him until he left Czechoslovakia in 1990. Jozef played guitar in a band for many years and says that he and his band mates often played English-language songs, even though they didn’t understand the lyrics. He attended a construction industry high school and served in the military for two years before beginning his career in construction. In 1990, shortly after the Velvet Revolution, Jozef immigrated to the United States with a friend. He lived in Pittsburgh for several years and worked in construction before moving to New York City. He became a construction supervisor and now owns a general contracting company.</p>
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<p>Jozef continues to write and play music; he recently put out a CD of Slovak songs and has performed at festivals. He is active in the Slovak community in New York and especially enjoys the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens. When Jozef travels back to Slovakia, he often meets with his siblings in the house their grandfather built and which Jozef has renovated. He became an American citizen in 2008 and says that the United States is where his heart is. Today he lives in New York City.</p>
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Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Americanization
Arts
Bartosovce
Community Life
English language
Pop culture
Post-1989 emigrant
Religion
Rural life
Western culture