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.
]]>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.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
So what happened next?
“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.”
“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.”
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?
“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.”
Pavel says that after his Army service, he had to make a decision about pursuing the arts professionally or beginning his business career. He says that although the time period was excellent for getting into business, he enrolled at a small school in Canada to pursue a performing arts degree. After one year there, he transferred to the School for New Dance Development and finished his degree in Amsterdam. While in Amsterdam, Pavel applied for the U.S. green card lottery. Many months later, while he was completing an internship in Louisiana, Pavel was notified that he had been selected for an interview. As he was not able to return to Europe in time for the interview, he rescheduled the interview and finished his internship. In September 1999, Pavel moved to New York City. After unsuccessful pursuit of performing with established companies he started producing his own work instead. In 2004, Pavel formed his own company, Palissimo, and today continues to be the artistic director there. He lives in Manhattan.
]]>Pavel Zuštiak was born in Košice in eastern Slovakia in 1971. His father, Ján, was a director at a construction company while his mother, Zuzana, was a meteorologist for a TV station who did research and collected data. Pavel is the youngest of three boys and he recalls frequently visiting his grandparents who lived on a farm near the High Tatras. At age nine, Pavel was cast in a musical children’s television show called Zlatá brána [Golden Gate]. He also participated in a modern dance group and played piano. After high school, Pavel applied to JAMU (Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts) in Brno for theatre directing, but was advised to re-apply again since he was only 17 at the time. He instead began studying business at the University of Economics in Košice and, shortly after classes started, the Velvet Revolution occurred. Pavel says that he realized he was ‘witnessing a major moment in history.’ While studying business, Pavel took one year off to study at a performing arts school in Canada. He then returned to Slovakia, graduated university, and did one year of alternative Army service where he translated books from English to Slovak.
Pavel says that after his Army service, he had to make a decision about pursuing the arts professionally or beginning his business career. He says that although the time period was excellent for getting into business, he enrolled at a small school in Canada to pursue a performing arts degree. After one year there, he transferred to the School for New Dance Development and finished his degree in Amsterdam. While in Amsterdam, Pavel applied for the U.S. green card lottery. Many months later, while he was completing an internship in Louisiana, Pavel was notified that he had been selected for an interview. As he was not able to return to Europe in time for the interview, he rescheduled the interview and finished his internship. In September 1999, Pavel moved to New York City. After unsuccessful pursuit of performing with established companies he started producing his own work instead. In 2004, Pavel formed his own company, Palissimo, and today continues to be the artistic director there. He lives in Manhattan.
“My father saw an ad in the paper for an audition for the TV show, for the Golden Gate show.”
How old were you?
“I was nine. And it was a show that was broadcast in the whole Eastern European bloc and it was broadcast once a month and then there was one New Year’s Eve special edition. We would learn the songs, we would prepare for the show for about a month and then it ended with five days in the studio. I say coincidence because it was kind of surprising that it was my father who instigated me pursuing that. But then it was my mom who actually took me to the audition, and I remember my audition number was very high, so we were there most of the day and I think there was a point where my mom was trying to convince me just to leave because it was probably 10:00 in the evening and there was still a long line before us. But eventually we stayed and I remember I got a telegram at the time to come to the first rehearsal and I was very excited.”
“A schoolmate of mine wanted to go and audition for a folk dance company. It was very popular at the time and this was also the time when Flashdance came out, and so dancing was a big thing. This friend of mine wanted to go to an audition, but he didn’t want to go alone so he asked me if I’d go with him. I said ‘Sure,’ and once we got there we realized that he messed up the dates of the audition, and the day when we came it was actually a modern dance company audition. So we stayed and both of us got in, and he quit after a month and, for me, this whole new world was introduced and presented to me.”
“I remember activists who came from Prague right after the revolution, right after the demonstration in Prague, with video documentation. It was both at school and I know that through any underground Christian groups, they would be very present there. So all of us would watch the footage from the demonstration and at that point I really felt like there’s no way that this could turn backwards. And I don’t know how much that was just my naïveté at the time, but the power of that wave that was coming felt… And also understanding the opposition and what is going to play against it, at that point I felt like there is no way it would reverse. There were too many things leaning towards that system collapsing, I think.”
“I ended up graduating and getting my masters within a year after I got back; at the same time, I started to run my own dance company in Slovakia. Once I graduated, I actually did an alternative Army service. I was translating books from English to Slovak. After I finished that, I was at the point where I had to look for work. My desire to work in the arts and pursue arts was still very strong and, on the other hand, it was a very good time to find work with my business education. Many Western companies were opening affiliations in Eastern Europe, and I knew that if I take that route that it will be impossible for me to continue doing dance and arts on the side, because it’s pretty much an all-consuming career. So I decided at that point to go and get a degree in the arts and, at that point, kind of deciding and making decisions about the future.”
“My works are multidisciplinary in nature. Movement and dance is at the core of the work, but I am always bringing to every project a group of artists and designers. Even performers and dancers that I work with, I treat them as collaborators. Eventually each element of the show, from lighting, through set, through music, I see those elements as equal voices or equal elements in creating a work, creating an environment, creating a narrative. It usually starts with a theme or questions around a theme that we are discussing together and often I see myself an editor. All of us generate material that I start to sort through and edit through, and eventually create a world of images. Often I create a sequence of images that don’t connect in a linear way, but create a world, create an environment.
“Thematically, within the last several years, I was drawn a lot to themes and ideas that are themes of the narrative of my own life and questions of my own life: issues of identity; ideas of belonging; trying to find your place within a community; ideas of otherness or being the other, not fitting; how does the environment we are in define who we are. So these themes are kind of directly and indirectly flowing throughout my work.”
“The rest of the group is very diverse: Irish dancer, Italian dancer, Czech dancer, another Czech dancer; I’ve worked with Israeli dancers. So really this is truly a melting pot. But the nationality is not necessarily as important for me when I’m selecting people. It’s more their story and their personality and who they are as humans in their life, because that reflects to who they are on stage.”
Otto Zizak Jr. was born in Poprad, Slovakia, in 1976. Before immigrating, his father, Otto, worked as an engineer and on an agricultural cooperative while his mother, Božena, was an economist. Otto was a member of the Young Pioneer group and enjoyed sports and music. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Otto’s father left for the United States, and Otto and his mother joined him at the end of the school year. He says that although his first impressions of JFK Airport were ‘daunting,’ his impressions of life in the city improved significantly. The Žižáks settled in Brooklyn where Otto started high school. Otto attended the City University of New York (CUNY) and majored in psychology. He then began graduate classes in the same subject and worked for his parents while they were starting their own business. Otto was also interested in interior design and renovations and worked on several construction projects.
On one of his return trips to Slovakia, Otto reconnected with an old schoolmate, Maria. She moved to the United States in 2002 and the pair married shortly thereafter. Drawing on Maria’s background in the hospitality industry and Otto’s experience in construction, in 2007 they opened Korzo, a restaurant in Brooklyn which incorporates the flavors of Slovakia and other European countries with local, seasonal ingredients. They have since opened a second location. Otto occasionally writes and records music, both in English and Slovak, and has had the opportunity to perform with well-known Slovak artists. Otto and Maria have three children who speak fluent Slovak and enjoy visiting Slovakia. Today, Otto’s family lives in New York City.
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Otto Zizak Jr. was born in Poprad, Slovakia, in 1976. Before immigrating, his father, Otto, worked as an engineer and on an agricultural cooperative while his mother, Božena, was an economist. Otto was a member of the Young Pioneer group and enjoyed sports and music. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Otto’s father left for the United States, and Otto and his mother joined him at the end of the school year. He says that although his first impressions of JFK Airport were ‘daunting,’ his impressions of life in the city improved significantly. The Žižáks settled in Brooklyn where Otto started high school. Otto attended the City University of New York (CUNY) and majored in psychology. He then began graduate classes in the same subject and worked for his parents while they were starting their own business. Otto was also interested in interior design and renovations and worked on several construction projects.
On one of his return trips to Slovakia, Otto reconnected with an old schoolmate, Maria. She moved to the United States in 2002 and the pair married shortly thereafter. Drawing on Maria’s background in the hospitality industry and Otto’s experience in construction, in 2007 they opened Korzo, a restaurant in Brooklyn which incorporates the flavors of Slovakia and other European countries with local, seasonal ingredients. They have since opened a second location. Otto occasionally writes and records music, both in English and Slovak, and has had the opportunity to perform with well-known Slovak artists. Otto and Maria have three children who speak fluent Slovak and enjoy visiting Slovakia. Today, Otto’s family lives in New York City.
“As a young child, I was into the domestic things that were available so it was fine. I didn’t feel deprived. But in the later years, in seventh, eighth grade, I was getting into bands from abroad and different styles of rock music and whatnot, and that was not available at all. We had to go Poland and buy bootlegged tapes and that sort of thing. I remember in seventh or eighth grade, when we would go on trips to Poland, I would buy certain tapes and then trade them with classmates in school, so we did do a lot of that.”
“[My] first impression when I flew in was a little daunting and scary. At JFK Airport, the path through immigration at that time – I don’t know what it’s like these days – it was in the basement, underground, with literally thousands of people standing in line, and, after having traveled for basically two days straight, I was tired. Everything was dark and people were tense and tired around me. So those were the very first impressions.”
And when you saw New York City?
“When I got out of the airport, things very quickly got much better. We saw the sun, and we had pizza the first day in Brooklyn, which was quite delicious; right off the bat I was a fan. It was great. The first days, weeks, were sparkly and magical.”
“My love of food, having been brought up in a setting where a meal was always a cultural experience, both in my grandmother’s house and my parents’ apartment; my mom and dad were great cooks and there was a passion for cooking. Throughout graduate studies and thereafter, my other hobby or passion was design, interior design. I did some major apartment designs and renovations and actually built a house from scratch that I initially lived in, and then it became a bit of a business, so that was the other side of me doing things with my hands and loving to cook. So when the time was right, I did have, I guess, an epiphany that joined those two things, in my head at the time at least, and I decided that I will open a restaurant one day, when the time is right.
“She [Maria] had, aside from being an amazing cook and baker, run a hotel and restaurant in Slovakia after having graduated from college, so she was always in the hospitality business. After I finished my graduate school stuff and we were debating which direction to take our careers in, we very much wanted to start our own business. She had a degree in economics in Slovakia and when debating whether to get a job or do our own thing, we definitely wanted to do our own thing, so she pursued her hospitality studies further. She went to the Institute of Culinary Education where she got a diploma both as a chef and a restaurant manager. I designed my restaurants hands on and we collaborate on the menus, we run it, we don’t have managers; this is what we do. I think it was a very organic transition from doing what we love and having had experience in difference facets of it and doing it.”
“I’d like to say that, as not the youngest person at the moment, but I consider myself an active adult, I’m always pleased when I see barriers being broken down between being Slovak and being American as well. I’m continuously proud when I encounter people who are from Slovakia and the region who get it. Who don’t base their entire existence on the fact that they are Slovak. Who live their lives as good people and are respectful of their background, their heritage, but get with the program of what it means to be an American. I think that’s the fine balance of investing your energy into things that are useful for people, for you, and that’s what I’m trying to do. Do good, concrete things, such as food, such as music, that may or may not be remembered, but I’m trying to contribute. Any time I can make a reference to the old world, I am very proud of doing it. And I’m very proud of living in a country that allows me to do it, and gives me the freedom and is not judgmental of any of it.”
Otto’s first job was as a government clerk in charge of administering an energy program. Five years later, he was offered a job with an agriculture construction company. In 1974, Otto married his wife, Božena, and the couple lived in an apartment in Poprad. Their son, Otto Jr., was born in 1976. In 1983, Otto visited his aunt in the United States for three weeks. He returned for another visit in 1986, this time for three months. Otto says that, during this trip, he had the intention of finding a business or company who would offer him a job and sponsor his immigration. When he returned to Slovakia with a letter of sponsorship and attempted to immigrate legally, he was fired from his job. Otto says that he had trouble finding employment until a friend gave him a job working with an agricultural cooperative.
In January 1990, only a few months after the Velvet Revolution, Otto moved to the United States. His wife and son followed at the end of the school year. Otto’s first job was as a metal factory worker in Brooklyn. He then worked as a ship electrician and, five years later, started his own electrical contracting company. Otto is also the owner of Zizak Premium Spirits in Slovakia, which uses a natural, clean distilling process to produce traditional fruit brandies. Today, Otto is a real estate investor and electrical consultant. He lives in New York City with his wife.
]]>Otto Zizak Sr. was born in Bodružal in northeastern Slovakia in 1950. Otto’s grandfather had moved to the United States in the early 1900s to earn some money; he then returned to Slovakia, bought properties and started a distillery. Otto’s father was an elementary school teacher in Nižný Orlík, the village where Otto and his two younger siblings grew up. Because of his job, Otto’s father was a member of the Communist Party. Otto attended high school in Svidník; he says this was the time when he realized ‘something was not right’ with the communist system. Otto began university immediately after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968. He studied electrical engineering and, after graduating, completed his mandatory one year Army service.
Otto’s first job was as a government clerk in charge of administering an energy program. Five years later, he was offered a job with an agriculture construction company. In 1974, Otto married his wife, Božena, and the couple lived in an apartment in Poprad. Their son, Otto Jr., was born in 1976. In 1983, Otto visited his aunt in the United States for three weeks. He returned for another visit in 1986, this time for three months. Otto says that, during this trip, he had the intention of finding a business or company who would offer him a job and sponsor his immigration. When he returned to Slovakia with a letter of sponsorship and attempted to immigrate legally, he was fired from his job. Otto says that he had trouble finding employment until a friend gave him a job working with an agricultural cooperative.
In January 1990, only a few months after the Velvet Revolution, Otto moved to the United States. His wife and son followed at the end of the school year. Otto’s first job was as a metal factory worker in Brooklyn. He then worked as a ship electrician and, five years later, started his own electrical contracting company. Otto is also the owner of Zizak Premium Spirits in Slovakia, which uses a natural, clean distilling process to produce traditional fruit brandies. Today, Otto is a real estate investor and electrical consultant. He lives in New York City with his wife.
“It was the classroom, a small library, and an apartment or the rooms we lived in. I was four and five and my mother was probably wanting to get rid of me, so she sent me to school with my father. So I was sitting in the first row; I was four, five, six and, finally, when I was seven I was an official first grader. I already knew how to read, I already knew mathematics in the second, third and fourth grades, but it was a big moment. I was an official student.”
Do you remember your first backpack?
“Actually I didn’t have one, because I was just walked through one hallway and I was sitting in my classroom. So it was beautiful. Every lunchtime we took a break and, instead of having a sandwich or something, we just went into the kitchen and had hot soup and a real meal. I had a very beautiful time.”
“My aunt, my mother’s sister, was in America since WWII, because she married an American citizen, but an American citizen living in Czechoslovakia. His father, like my grandfather, was in America in the 1920s. There were no jobs; there was a big depression, so he came back to Czechoslovakia and he brought two young [sons]. Actually, John was an American citizen with a Slovak father and he came when he was maybe 13 years old. So she married him in Slovakia and after WWII they just went back to America. So I had this aunt and, actually, that’s the basic factor. She affected our life because she came to visit us, so she brought us our first Walkman, she brought us jeans, she brought us our first colored pictures and she told us what the life is like.”
“I came back to Prague with a paper saying I can come back to America as an expert. They’re going to take me to work. I came like a big man with a smile – I know how naïve I was; I know it today and I knew it later – I took the paper, I took vacation the next two weeks, I spent my money because I was happy, happy, happy [thinking] I’m going to America, right? So I came to Poprad. After a week, I came to my company and the guy at the gate said ‘You cannot go in,’ and I had a good reputation and a good position in this company and I said ‘Why?’ ‘Because I have an order. The director said you cannot go in. You have to go and see him.’ I said ‘Ok’ and I came back and said ‘What’s going on? Hi, how are you?’ and he said ‘Otto, I have to tell you the truth. I have to fire you because they took me to the Communist Party central [committee] and they said ‘If you don’t fire this guy, we’ll fire you.’’ He said this in a friendly way and said ‘What can I do? I cannot fight them, you cannot fight them, so you’re fired.’”
Was it a shock for you?
“I think it was a shock. The shock for me was, I would say, the next year. The shock was that everybody knew in the city, except me, what’s going on here, because people were talking. And I was walking on the sidewalk and a guy who knew me and saw me a hundred meters away, he turned and he was going the other way to not meet me. So I was a black sheep.”
“If you didn’t have a job for six weeks or something, they put you in jail. So I started to go after my friends. I had many friends; I was a successful man, right? And everybody said ‘No problem, of course we’ll take you to work.’ I came to work in the personnel department, those narrow-minded stupid communists’ kádrovanie [background checking] – and after I turned in the application, they said ‘No. No. No. No.’ So then in the next district I had a friend in the agricultural cooperative so he took me to work and he put me with four other workers to build certain buildings. Actually, I was the boss for these four guys with the shovels, so I didn’t have to have a shovel, but I had to get the materials and organize them.
“This was the worst time of my life, because at this time it was ’87, ’88 and the communist system was cruel and stupid. They were like wild animals. They put people into jail, they didn’t understand and I had to survive. This was very bad. Not only this, I had to travel over there [for work] and the guys said ‘How do you manage all this stuff because you have to spend more money on gas than you make?’ The basic thing was there was not a light at the end of the tunnel. For one or two years there was not a light. I always believed in myself; I knew that something had to happen, that I had to go and find this light. But this certain time was dark. So I said ‘Survive.’ Times like this you had no chance to do something.”
“I started my new career. Nobody welcomed me – it was actually not a good time in America because in the ‘90s the market was going down and everything; it was maybe worse than now – and they hired me in 16th Street over here as a metal factory worker. So I had to work bending metals, making those window guards and carrying metal gates. Actually, on this very sidewalk, every Friday they gave me a paycheck and here on the corner is an Atlas bank. It was the only bank who gave an account by the passport, so all of us immigrants opened accounts here. I had a 30-minute break – it was strict – and I had 30 minutes to run over here, to stand in the line and deposit my check, and run back and be back to work, all to have money in my account, so I didn’t have a chance eat every Friday. So that was my first [job, on this] sidewalk, and those are things I like, unpredictable, that now we have here a pretty good restaurant and we invested a lot of money into it, but I have a free beer for the rest of my life and free food.”
It’s a sweet poetic justice to be on the same sidewalk.
“Yes.”
“I found a job as an electrician, but I had good luck. It was the marine industry; I was working on vessels, on the big boats, cargo boats, Navy boats. And after five years, I became a good and valuable electrician in this field, so I opened my own company in this field and I started to work as a subcontractor for my mother company, and I started to get my own contracts. I had contracts with the city – I built a lot of projects in the city – and I got a contract with the Army Corps of Engineers which are something like Army, but they are Army civilians. They are federal agents; they have boats watching the harbors, so I was rebuilding boats; I was going on the water on small boats to fix stuff on the big boats. Actually, I was working in this harbor here, in front of the Statue of Liberty, [near the] Verrazano Bridge [New York Harbor], and this was like my water, my harbor, for years. I was working hard on those boats. And now my son bought a house on Staten Island, on this side of the water, and he has a window in his dining room which looks straight to the same water. If I’m over there sometimes and talking to his kids, I’ll say ‘You see guys, 15 or 20 years ago, I was working on all of those boats over there and now I am sitting here with you and looking at them.’ So that’s two things that are emotionally fantastic.”
Ondrej says that a lack of career opportunities for scientists in the Czech Republic led him to study medicine at Charles University. After graduating, he worked as a pediatrician at Motol Hospital (FN Motole) for a short time before beginning a doctoral program in biology – also at Charles University. In 2003, Ondrej was offered a cancer research fellowship at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and moved to Ohio. After his four-year fellowship, Ondrej accepted the position of research fellow in a joint program with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. Although he is happy in the United States, Ondrej says that his plan was never to settle here and, in fact, he had only planned on being in the U.S. for one year. He says that in the future he will go wherever his research takes him and is always eager to experience different places. Ondrej returns to the Czech Republic several times a year to visit his family and currently lives in Quincy, Massachusetts.
]]>Ondrej Krejci was born in Prague in 1974 and grew up in the Smíchov district of the city. His father was a scientist while his mother worked in the accounting department of a Prague hospital. Ondrej was the oldest of two boys. While growing up, frequent trips to an airfield with his father (who flew gliders) inspired him to take up flying; he received his pilot’s license when he was 14 years old. He was also interested in science and belonged to a biology club that was part of the Pioneer youth organization. Ondrej says that while growing up he had trouble deciding whether to become a scientist or a pilot and, though he ultimately chose science, flying has remained a passion of his. Ondrej was 15 when the Velvet Revolution took place; he remembers following the events of the Revolution and participating in a student strike at his high school. One year later, he had his first introduction to the United States when his family traveled to DeKalb, Illinois, to visit his father who had found work there.
Ondrej says that a lack of career opportunities for scientists in the Czech Republic led him to study medicine at Charles University. After graduating, he worked as a pediatrician at Motol Hospital (FN Motole) for a short time before beginning a doctoral program in biology – also at Charles University. In 2003, Ondrej was offered a cancer research fellowship at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and moved to Ohio. After his four-year fellowship, Ondrej accepted the position of research fellow in a joint program with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. Although he is happy in the United States, Ondrej says that his plan was never to settle here and, in fact, he had only planned on being in the U.S. for one year. He says that in the future he will go wherever his research takes him and is always eager to experience different places. Ondrej returns to the Czech Republic several times a year to visit his family and currently lives in Quincy, Massachusetts.
“I was born in 1974, so it was like the heavy, heavy communism. Not as cruel and not as raw or tough as in the 1950s, but it was still the deep normalization era, and being born as a child of that time, you actually don’t notice. Of course you get from your parents that things are not really okay, or ‘Yeah, it’s different in the West,’ but as a child, I think you are flexible; your mind is very flexible, unfortunately. So I guess I didn’t really mind. There are things you don’t like, but you don’t have the experience from the other side, so I could say I didn’t really mind.
“Speaking about the Pioneer movement, everybody speaks of the Pioneer movement as being very bad and influential, and definitely the idea behind it and the politics behind it was of course planned by the communists. But at the same time, I would say I think it’s a great idea – not a great idea, don’t get me wrong – but the attention the kids got was quite good. I was in a Pioneer biology club and the leader, I’m not sure if she was communist or not, but she didn’t really enforce any communist ideas. We were basically learning biology and she was very keen. She was showing us nature. She was showing us microscopes, how the cells look under microscopes. We were doing some fun experiments with chemistry, and so I actually did like this part of how, as kids, we had a chance to do something more than just go home.”
“I have fun recalling how my person was sucked into the anti-communist changes. So the student demonstration was on Friday, November 17, 1989 and the strike of the students was supposed to start on Monday. However, we had an early-bird class at 7:00 so we came to school – I was a sophomore in high school at the time – we came to school and we were sitting near the lockers. Actually, we didn’t know what was going on, so we were preparing for our classes and suddenly one of my colleagues came and she said ‘Ok guys, stay here. Don’t go anywhere. We are on strike.’ And we thought ‘Ok, is she joking? What’s going on?’ We had no clue. So we stayed at the lockers and we actually started debating and discussing what happened and what are the possibilities. At that time, we didn’t believe anything would happen to the Communists. We just thought it would be another strike and probably nothing would happen, but we didn’t go to class and our teacher didn’t know what was going on, but she didn’t force us to go to class, so we stayed at the lockers all day, talking and debating, and then all the changes slowly unfolded over the course of the week when there was a strike in the theatre and universities and high schools, and finally all over Prague and the surrounding areas and the whole Czech Republic and Slovakia started the movement against communism.”
“I came to the U.S. for the first time for a visit with my father – actually the whole family. My dad was a scientist and he was working west of Chicago in the small town of DeKalb. I remember more of how we left the Czech Republic. We took our luggage, we took the subway to a bus station, and from the bus station we took a bus to Munich, Germany, and then from Munich we flew to Chicago. The first time I came here, it was very different, I have to say. Coming from Prague, which is a big and busy city, to the small city of DeKalb, where the houses are small and made out of wood and there was so much field. Our first meal was in a gas station because it was Sunday morning and we didn’t know where the shops were so we just went to a gas station to buy some chocolate and crackers.
“It was of course a big difference between the Czech Republic and the U.S., but as a kid – I was a junior in high school – I was quite flexible and I think I blended with the American kids very well, and this made my second trip to the U.S. much, much easier. So when I came to Cincinnati, I knew what to expect, I knew about the mentality of the people and it wasn’t such a huge cultural shock, I guess, compared many other people who had to leave and had no chance to prepare and not an exact idea of what to expect.”
“When I first saw the lab, I wouldn’t say that it was really that different. The equipment in the labs in the U.S. and in the Czech Republic is surprisingly quite comparable. We are always whining that we don’t have enough money in the Czech Republic; we are always whining that we have no good equipment, but that’s not true. I think we do have definitely comparable equipment and we do have money to work. Sometimes what we are lacking is the drive. The motivation to work hard, to find new things. I hope it’s not true anymore, because always when people ask me what the difference is between work in the U.S. and work in academia in Czech Republic, I start to talk about these differences and then I stop myself and say ‘Hey, but my experience from Czech Republic is from eight years ago’ and I bet and I hope that it’s not true anymore. So I think the differences are probably more subtle than what I recall and now many people who did research in the U.S. are going back to the Czech Republic. I think the differences are kind of more and more subtle than what I would say.”
“Flying is our family hobby. As many people know, Czech Republic is, together with Poland and Germany, very well known for flying gliders – the airplanes with no engines – and it always has been supported by the government. So there are many fields in the Czech Republic and many of the kids, like me, went to the airport when they were two or three years old with their father, and then hang around for another 12 years. When I was 14, I got my pilot’s license and I started flying gliders and I’ve stuck with that basically until now, and I think it always helped me simply because it’s a great way to relax – it’s a great hobby – but also for making contacts. For example, when I came to Cincinnati, I didn’t have any friends and I just knew the people in the lab, but you don’t always stay with your co-workers all the time, so the first thing I did was I went to the local soaring club. I remember the first day I went there and I saw all those people. I didn’t know any of them but I heard them talking about flying, and talking about flying is like a different language, which I do understand well, so we started chatting and within a few minutes I was hooked up with them and I became a member of the Caesar Creek Soaring Club in close-by Dayton, Ohio. And I would say my best friends in Ohio were from the soaring club.”
Marek Soltis was born in Prešov in eastern Slovakia in 1969. He grew up with his parents, Ondrej and Maria, and his younger brother and sister. Marek and his family lived with his maternal grandparents in Rokycany for several years while his parents were building a house. Marek says that he dreamed of being a musician from an early age, and he learned to play the accordion and the guitar. Beginning in early high school, Marek joined a band which played gigs around the city. He attended a technical high school and then studied physics at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Prešov with the intention of becoming a university professor. Marek was a university student when the Velvet Revolution occurred in November 1989. He says that students at his school were particularly active during this time, and he distributed newspapers and traveled to factories. Marek calls this time ‘indescribable.’ After graduating, he began playing music professionally and played in a theatre orchestra.
In 1996, Marek traveled to the United States to visit a friend. He says that corruption in the newly-democratic Slovakia combined with professional opportunities in the United States led to his decision to stay permanently. He settled in the New York City area and, although he says his first months were difficult, he quickly became involved in the music and Slovak communities. Marek took classes at Hunter College and joined a band. Today, Marek owns a music and entertainment company which, among other things, helps to bring Slovak music to the United States. He is also the sound engineer at the Bohemian National Hall in Manhattan. Marek and his wife, also a Slovak émigré, have a young daughter and son to whom they speak Slovak. Today he lives with his family in Greenwich, Connecticut.
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Marek Soltis was born in Prešov in eastern Slovakia in 1969. He grew up with his parents, Ondrej and Maria, and his younger brother and sister. Marek and his family lived with his maternal grandparents in Rokycany for several years while his parents were building a house. Marek says that he dreamed of being a musician from an early age, and he learned to play the accordion and the guitar. Beginning in early high school, Marek joined a band which played gigs around the city. He attended a technical high school and then studied physics at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Prešov with the intention of becoming a university professor. Marek was a university student when the Velvet Revolution occurred in November 1989. He says that students at his school were particularly active during this time, and he distributed newspapers and traveled to factories. Marek calls this time ‘indescribable.’ After graduating, he began playing music professionally and played in a theatre orchestra.
In 1996, Marek traveled to the United States to visit a friend. He says that corruption in the newly-democratic Slovakia combined with professional opportunities in the United States led to his decision to stay permanently. He settled in the New York City area and, although he says his first months were difficult, he quickly became involved in the music and Slovak communities. Marek took classes at Hunter College and joined a band. Today, Marek owns a music and entertainment company which, among other things, helps to bring Slovak music to the United States. He is also the sound engineer at the Bohemian National Hall in Manhattan. Marek and his wife, also a Slovak émigré, have a young daughter and son to whom they speak Slovak. Today he lives with his family in Greenwich, Connecticut.
“I know that our school, in the eastern part of Slovakia, took a leading role, and so did I. I was just so involved in the revolution, and I didn’t see my parents back then for almost two months. I didn’t go those 11 kilometers because we were so busy. We started releasing our newspaper – it was probably the only one. Later on in Kosice there was one called Premeny. So our first job was to go in the streets, and I was actually writing some articles, and then we were giving these newspapers to people. That time is just indescribable. The joy of the people; we were being given free food. I’m almost having tears in my eyes because that time is indescribable. It’s still the communist era and you go to a store and you ask for some soup or something and [they’d say] ‘Just don’t pay, guys.’ We had tricolors on and we were kind of known from the college. We got like ‘Strike Committee’ [patches] and all that. So they knew us. Taxi drivers gave us rides, even to Svidník. It was just ‘Guys, don’t even think about it.’ So we had taxi drivers waiting for us and we were going from factory to factory. Our role was, those first days we knew one thing – the economy cannot collapse. And what happened, in those factories, on every level people started to fight. Personal crap on the leaders, on the Communist Party, and our role was to keep the economy and factories going, because they were like ‘Oh, we’re not working!’ and we had to go there and were telling them and – this is great – they respected us. I don’t know why. We were not the police; we were not authority, but we came and we actually had the director of the factory and ordinary workers sitting and we had them communicate. So that was my role.”
“I want them to speak Slovak. Children pick up English in schools like that, and the only time – I knew one thing – the only time I can give them the language is from the time they were born until they go to school. So even if he talks to me in English, I answer him in Slovak, and I know it’s the only time. I still wish we could have some different programs, some schools where they can use it. I’m so thankful for the school in Bohemian Hall in Queens, Astoria. We used to have better support [from Slovakia]. I’m not the guy who cries out, ‘Oh, the government has to take care of it in Slovakia,’ but it’s a fact that we are Slovakians and we have our children and we want to give them that education. The level of grammar is not just something you can give to them like that or once a week. So I wish we can do something about that. And there are a lot of children right now.”
“I was always kind of growing or living with the music community, and it was not just the band. It was folk music, folk ensembles, dancers, theatre. So I got to know a lot of people, and also that community was what I always loved. The musical or artistic group of people, we always said that we are different. We have a big love for it. It helped me in my business, too. I forget many times about money; my thing is to satisfy people. In the end, they have to be happy. If they’re happy then I’m happy. And if you have money at the end of it, that’s the greatest thing in the world. But I’m helping a lot of musicians, a lot of bands, have a chance to come here and actually play a little bit on American soil. Many of them present it as ‘Oh, we are playing to American audiences,’ but of course they are not playing for the American public; they are playing for Slovakian immigrants, which, in many cases, these people cannot have another chance to see groups or artists because they cannot leave this country because they are illegal. But we have to consider as a fact that they are Slovaks and they are existing, they’re living, they’re humans. To see the joy of those groups of people if you bring something to them, it’s priceless.”
In 1994, one of Ludmila’s friends helped her to get a job as an au pair outside London. After one year in Britain, Ludmila applied to an agency that staffed foreign students at camps in the United States. She was placed at a camp in Connecticut and, in May 1995, flew to New York City. Following her stint at camp, Ludmila moved to Brooklyn where she first worked in a restaurant. After a few jobs as an au pair in Connecticut and New Jersey, she returned to New York and worked as a seamstress in a fashion studio in the garment district of Manhattan. Ludmila then moved to Florida where she took classes at a local community college and worked for a country club. She returned to Slovakia for a visit in 2000. In 2003, Ludmila moved to the Washington, D.C. area where she continued to take classes in interior design and began working at the Container Store. Today, she works in sales and visual merchandising for the company. Ludmila received her American citizenship in 2006, an event which she says was ‘a very big deal.’ That same year, she began a social meet-up group to connect with her fellow Slovaks; she says that through this group she has created her ‘own little family…in D.C.’ Ludmila lives in Germantown, Maryland.
]]>Ludmila Sujanova was born in Košice in eastern Slovakia in 1972. Her mother, Zlata, worked for a steel company and her father, Vilém, was a manager of manufacturing equipment at a food production company. She has one younger sister. Some of Ludmila’s earliest and strongest memories center around food – she recalls living above a market and standing in line for certain goods like milk and fruit. She also has fond memories of gardening at her family’s chata [summer cottage] outside of Košice where they grew much of their own food. Ludmila says that she was interested in dressmaking from a young age and, after eighth grade, enrolled in a high school in Svidník that focused on fashion design where she lived in a dorm. After graduating in 1991, Ludmila worked at a ski resort for a few months before landing a job as a salesperson in a shop that sold sewing goods and accessories. She worked there for over two years and says that the private business did well in those years following the fall of communism. She also took English lessons at this time and was hoping to travel to the West – something that she had been looking forward to since the Velvet Revolution.
In 1994, one of Ludmila’s friends helped her to get a job as an au pair outside London. After one year in Britain, Ludmila applied to an agency that staffed foreign students at camps in the United States. She was placed at a camp in Connecticut and, in May 1995, flew to New York City. Following her stint at camp, Ludmila moved to Brooklyn where she first worked in a restaurant. After a few jobs as an au pair in Connecticut and New Jersey, she returned to New York and worked as a seamstress in a fashion studio in the garment district of Manhattan. Ludmila then moved to Florida where she took classes at a local community college and worked for a country club. She returned to Slovakia for a visit in 2000. In 2003, Ludmila moved to the Washington, D.C. area where she continued to take classes in interior design and began working at the Container Store. Today, she works in sales and visual merchandising for the company. Ludmila received her American citizenship in 2006, an event which she says was ‘a very big deal.’ That same year, she began a social meet-up group to connect with her fellow Slovaks; she says that through this group she has created her ‘own little family…in D.C.’ Ludmila lives in Germantown, Maryland.
“I was young. I was probably ten or even less, and times sometimes were really tough. And I remember there were days, for example, there was a real shortage of milk and then when milk arrived, the kids would run in front of the block and they would yell ‘Mom, milk arrived!’ and everybody kind of looked and then everybody just grabbed the reusable shopping bag and all went down and stood in line for milk. It was the same thing for oil, like cooking oil, or butter, I remember, or there was the winter season before Christmas and it was any tropical fruit like bananas and oranges or, my goodness, if there was a pineapple, it was like ‘Wow!’ So as a child, I pretty much used to stand in line for food, which I really dislike. If there’s anything going on, like a picnic, and there’s food involved, I really refuse to stand in line for food.”
“Yes, we did have a chata, or summer home, or záhrada [garden] and we pretty much spend almost the entire summer there. There was always something to do. My dad was very much an avid gardener and we grew everything. I didn’t know such a thing as to go to a store and purchase potatoes or carrots or even things like jam or ketchup or anything. My mom pretty much made everything from scratch at home and in our apartment building, downstairs, there was a place where everybody had a teeny storage space. We called it a pivničný priestor or pivnica, and everybody just had this little nook with a door and you open it and it looked like a pantry. It was a pantry of everything like a large bag of potatoes, sauerkraut that was made in this huge barrel, jams, and syrups, and preserved fruit. I mean, it was just like living goodness down there. I very much clearly remember Sundays mom would make traditionally rezne, or schnitzels, with potatoes and then would say ‘Oh we are out of pickled cucumbers,’ or she said ‘What do you want? Do you want cucumbers or peaches in syrup?’ And when we were out of it at home, we had to take the elevator all the way downstairs. Sometimes we were really lazy and we’d just say ‘I’ll just stick with pickles,’ because I was just too lazy to go down and get it.”
“My dad was the person who had a lot of friends. He was very outgoing and he knew a lot of people. I remember one day he came home with this huge suitcase and it was quite late in the evening and he said ‘Ok, are you up for it?’ and I said ‘Dad, what are you talking about?’ and he opened this suitcase and it was filled with these LPs of all these Western artists. So I remember holding the Madonna LP in my hand, Material Girl. I would read it and I had no idea what it meant, but I was just so excited. I said ‘Dad, where did you get this?’ He said ‘Don’t ask any questions. We have until morning to go through all these LPs and to record them on cassettes. So whatever you want, just go for it, girl.’ I was up with my dad listening to all these LPs and I remember Falco; I remember Nana, Bananarama, Rick Astley, Aha – all these bands from the ‘80s. Later on I learned that dad had to schmooze up this local DJ to be able to bring these LPs home, and it was literally just for several hours we had them and then he had to return it.”
“I remember my very first trip when I was ten. My sister and my grandmother, we traveled to Bulgaria. We were very excited because we were finally going to see the Black Sea. So traveling, it was quite a journey. It took us pretty much two and a half days on the bus, and I remember clearly crossing the borders. It was terrifying. It was standing in a long line, being afraid that they might send you back for whatever reason. There were policemen or soldiers with guns. There were dogs. There was nowhere to go; there were no restrooms at all, so you had to really hold or just go out there wherever. It was usually just a field, like open fields. Yeah, it was kind of terrifying for us as kids. We didn’t know what’s going to happen, and we could just see all the adults, the way they reacted to it, and that was terrifying because, as a child, you depend on the adult being able to help you.
“The Romanian border was probably the worst. There were a lot of small Gypsy children that would come and be knocking on the bus and they would be asking for anything, money or candy. There were so many of them and they would be looking so poor. Sometimes they were not even dressed; dirty little kids. So that was kind of hard to see. But then when we arrived in Bulgaria, we were like ‘Wow!’ It was just like a different world, being able to see the Black Sea and eating different foods and people speaking different languages. That was really nice.”
“I was looking forward to seeing something different and pretty much when they were saying that we are opening borders, all I could think of was ‘Wow, we can actually just go somewhere else than Bulgaria?’ So that was my first thought in my head: travel. Travel and see the world. I don’t know if the seed of coming to America was planted back then, but it might have. I really just wanted to know where the beautiful napkin with Strawberry Shortcake came from. It was something that I think a lot of people my age wanted to do. They wanted to go out West – not necessarily to the United States – but just experience and learn.”
“There were definitely a lot of things happening in Košice. For example, the Východoslovenské železiarne [Eastern Slovakia Iron Works], where my mom worked for many years, all of the sudden they have a new owner. U.S. Steel, from Pennsylvania is coming and taking over. So that was huge. This is a company that has years of history in the metallurgical industry. The import/export business has always been there – and heavy. We’re talking, this company employed thousands and thousands of people, so that was the very, very strong talk.
“My mom stayed in her current job but then changed positions, and with the U.S. Steel coming as part of the new wave, there were a lot of changes that even for my mom were hard to digest. Because people lived this life day by day for so many years and not everybody is very good with change, and this was very strong. This was very strong. I remember my mom, so many times she would come home really exhausted and she was like ‘You know what these Americans have come up with again?!’ I can’t remember quite exactly what, but she was in charge of – U.S. Steel had internal dry cleaning/laundry because there were a lot of workers who had uniforms and those were the people that the service was for, but then my mom also had clients like local hotels or motels and accommodations for the workers, and so there were a lot of changes in the technology of how the business was run. [It was] much more strict. Not too many coffee breaks; not too much smoking cigarettes and a lot of people didn’t like that. So the capitalism was definitely, slowly but surely, getting in, and a lot of people lost jobs because they were not flexible enough, I would say.”
“This social group was created purely out of my own curiosity and maybe a little homesickness. I kind of wanted to create a sense of community of Slovaks in this area, to learn who is out there, who may be interested to get together and talk about our upbringing and culture, eat the food and just have a simply good time. And slowly but surely, since 2006 when I started this group, the meet-up has over 230 members. Not everybody is active, which is fine with me, but we do a lot of different things and I have met so many wonderful, wonderful friends through this meet-up. Great friendships; we help each other if we can. So it is almost like my own little family that I have here in D.C.”
After high school, Lubos studied economics at Comenius University in Bratislava. In the newly-formed College of Management, Lubos says that much of the curriculum was not only American-based, but also taught in English. In 1994, Lubos traveled to Kansas for a study-abroad program at Wichita State University. He decided to finish his undergraduate education there and, one year later, began a doctoral program in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Upon receiving his doctorate, Lubos accepted a position at the University of Chicago, where today he is a professor of finance at the Booth School of Business.
In 1996, Lubos’s future wife, Sonia, arrived in the United States. The pair had met at university in Bratislava. They married and, today, have three children. Lubos says that the family speaks Slovak at home, and they return to Slovakia each summer to visit family. Today, Lubos lives in Chicago with his family.
]]>Lubos Pastor was born in Košice, a city in eastern Slovakia, in 1974. His parents, Marie and František, were both math teachers – his mother taught at the high school while his father also taught computer science at the local university. As a student, Lubos’s hobbies included computers, chess, math, and athletics. He competed in chess tournaments and participated in math competitions and camps. He also often joined his parents and younger sister for hikes and gardening. Lubos attended a math-oriented gymnázium for high school. He was in his second year there when the Velvet Revolution occurred. Lubos recalls crowds and protests in Košice and says that the fall of communism changed his life as he saw that ‘anything was possible.’
After high school, Lubos studied economics at Comenius University in Bratislava. In the newly-formed College of Management, Lubos says that much of the curriculum was not only American-based, but also taught in English. In 1994, Lubos traveled to Kansas for a study-abroad program at Wichita State University. He decided to finish his undergraduate education there and, one year later, began a doctoral program in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Upon receiving his doctorate, Lubos accepted a position at the University of Chicago, where today he is a professor of finance at the Booth School of Business.
In 1996, Lubos’s future wife, Sonia, arrived in the United States. The pair had met at university in Bratislava. They married and, today, have three children. Lubos says that the family speaks Slovak at home, and they return to Slovakia each summer to visit family. Today, Lubos lives in Chicago with his family.
“We had a little Sinclair computer at home when I was growing up. Back then I was probably 12 or so when he bought a little Sinclair for me. It was just a few kilobytes of memory, but I was able to do a little coding in Basic. I even programmed my own little game – this little ghost moving around and collecting some goodies. Similar to one of the games at the time. But computing was certainly in its diapers. It’s come a long ways since then.”
“They would call them seminars. So what would happen is that high school kids would get a set of math problems, say eight problems, once a month, and they were not easy problems – some of the were, but not too easy – and you were supposed to solve them, write them up, [and] send them in. Once a month you would do that and then, every three months or so, the top thirty kids would be selected and invited to a weeklong camp, which was a combination of math lectures and a lot of fun in the afternoon and evening. So I did at least a dozen of those, both in Košice and in Bratislava and even outside Slovakia, maybe a couple in the Czech Republic. I got a lot of math, and especially a lot of friends, that way.
“Some other extracurricular activities… Well, I used to play a lot of chess as a kid. Starting maybe in fourth grade I played in a lot of tournaments. My father taught me how to play chess and then I had a coach, who was actually Czech but lived in Košice – Václav Bednář. He gave me a lot. He was a great guy – still is, I think – I hope. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. There are some really good chess players back there in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Many of the kids I used to play with and battle with are now Grand Masters. Mostly in the Czech in Republic; some in Slovakia. So I did math and chess. I did some athletics as well. Only locally, so I would run distances like the 800 meters and 1500 meters. Those were my favorites.”
“I was just a bit too young to appreciate what was going on, I think. I didn’t feel at age 14 or 15 that I was being oppressed. I did things that I enjoyed doing. I enjoyed doing things like sports and math and chess and I liked school; you could do all of those things without any restrictions so, at the time, I didn’t really understand the big picture. When I was 14 and 15 I did not really understand how oppressive that system was to adults. I think maybe two or three years later it would have started oppressing me. So I got really lucky.”
“The big thing that I think was stamped on me for the rest of my life was that I saw as a kid… At ages 15, 16, 17, you build your views about how the society works, whether you would like your society to look like this or that, and at that time what my generation saw was that the whole society can be changed. So when you see that, when you see that the whole political system in which you lived can be replaced, anything becomes possible. Anything becomes possible. And many of my peers from my cohort, plus or minus one year, have become very successful later on. And I wonder whether this mentality was acquired back then. That they saw that anything was possible and that sort of made their lives more open, and that perhaps pushed them to work harder and in pursuit of their dreams. That was the main thing. That’s still with me.”
“So we speak mostly Slovak at home. They grew up here, they go to school here, which means that English is their first language and I don’t think we can change that. But we do speak mostly Slovak at home. They understand Slovak; they can speak it. You can tell they are not native, but they can speak it. In addition to speaking it at home, we take them to Slovakia every summer where they get to meet their grandparents and their numerous cousins. So they always pick up a lot of Slovak there. At the end of each summer their Slovak is a lot better than at the beginning of each summer.”
In 1993, Luboš’s mother moved to the United States on the advice of a friend. One year later, Luboš (who had been staying with his grandmother as his parents were divorced) joined her. He arrived in the Washington, D.C. area where his mother had first worked as a nanny and tutor, but when she found a new job, they moved to a suburb of Chicago. Two months later, they returned to D.C. and settled in Alexandria, Virginia, where Luboš started ninth grade. He says that because he was ahead of his classmates in most subjects, he was able to concentrate on improving his English. After high school, he attended Florida Institute of Technology for two years before transferring to Virginia Tech, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering. Luboš lived in California for three years where he joined the Sierra Club and enjoyed hiking and climbing. He returned to Northern Virginia in 2008 to pursue his doctorate at George Washington University. Today Luboš works for NASA as an engineer and also runs his own computing consulting company. He is the creator of the web site SlovakCooking.com which shares traditional Slovak recipes. Luboš received his American citizenship in 2004, but says that he does not rule out the possibility of returning to live in Europe. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, with his wife Sandra.
]]>Luboš Brieda was born in Brezno in central Slovakia in 1980 and grew up in nearby Banská Bystrica. His mother Katarina worked in the local dom kultury [House of Culture] as an event organizer and his father Peter was an economist who worked as a restaurant inspector. Following the fall of communism, Luboš’s father opened his own restaurant. Luboš’s family owned a chata, or cottage, in a village outside Banská Bystrica, and he has fond memories of spending weekends gardening and hiking. In 1989, Luboš recalls traveling to Prague with his father to witness the speeches and happenings of the Velvet Revolution. Luboš joined the Boy Scouts and attended a language-focused school where he studied English and German.
In 1993, Luboš’s mother moved to the United States on the advice of a friend. One year later, Luboš (who had been staying with his grandmother as his parents were divorced) joined her. He arrived in the Washington, D.C. area where his mother had first worked as a nanny and tutor, but when she found a new job, they moved to a suburb of Chicago. Two months later, they returned to D.C. and settled in Alexandria, Virginia, where Luboš started ninth grade. He says that because he was ahead of his classmates in most subjects, he was able to concentrate on improving his English. After high school, he attended Florida Institute of Technology for two years before transferring to Virginia Tech, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering. Luboš lived in California for three years where he joined the Sierra Club and enjoyed hiking and climbing. He returned to Northern Virginia in 2008 to pursue his doctorate at George Washington University. Today Luboš works for NASA as an engineer and also runs his own computing consulting company. He is the creator of the web site SlovakCooking.com which shares traditional Slovak recipes. Luboš received his American citizenship in 2004, but says that he does not rule out the possibility of returning to live in Europe. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, with his wife Sandra.
“Since a lot of Slovaks live in apartments, the chata serves a lot of the purpose that, for Americans, a house serves. We have a garden, so you go there a do some gardening. You have some trees. But it’s really just to get away from the city, just to go and relax in the countryside. Slovaks love nature; we love to go hiking. I think that’s the most popular activity in Slovakia, just to go for a hike. We have these awesome mountains and people love to go hiking, skiing or mushroom picking. So it’s very popular to go out for the weekend to the countryside.
“So this place is pretty old. There’s actually a beam that’s in the new section of this chata that has carved on it, with some fire or whatever, 1891. So that’s when the new section of the house was built. The older part is much older than this. It’s from the 1800s sometime. There’s running water now. I think there was always running water. There was a studňa, a little pump, but I think now that is actually hooked up to the village water system. But we never had canalization, so we didn’t have a toilet, so there was just a little outhouse on the outside that you’d go to. It gets cold there in the winter; I remember going there in the winter. It takes these houses a long time to warm up, and then they stay warm. Once they warm up, they stay warm, but it takes a long time for them to actually warm up. And the water freezes in the winter, so you have to make sure to turn the water off.”
“Most of the demonstrations were in Prague and a little bit in Bratislava; there was really nothing at all in Banská Bystrica. But my dad, he saw the news, so he told me, ‘Luboš, this is a big event,’ so we got in the car and drove to Prague. We actually went over to Prague to check it out. We got there a little bit after the demonstration happened, but I remember going to the big outdoor pavilion in Prague and we went there and there was a speech there by Václav Havel. He was giving a speech there, and that was before he became the president, so it was in the transition era when the demonstrations have stopped, but the government was still in the transition to form this new post-communist government. But I remember going and I’m really grateful my dad took me there because it was such an important event, so it’s good to be part of that.”
“So when I came to the U.S., I found it ridiculous how far behind American schools were. I think in Slovakia we were maybe three years ahead of everybody here. When I came to the U.S., I had a really hard time with English, with the language, so it was a little bit difficult to go to school. But the upside was that all I had to concentrate on was the language because, the actual material, we already had covered that. In Slovakia, I left after the eighth grade, so in seventh and eighth grade we had one full year of organic chemistry, one full year of inorganic chemistry. We had a full year of biology, a full year of geology. We got up to trigonometry, so we covered all the basic algebra in the school and I remember coming here to the U.S. and we were just covering the Pythagorean theorem in the ninth grade, and we had this, I think, in the fifth grade in Slovakia. There was a lot of big differences in the speed with which you covered the material.”
“The web site was just kind of a way for me to collect my own recipes. I never expected it to be some kind of popular destination for people, and I was really surprised to find out just how many second-generation Slovaks there were in the U.S. that have interest in these forgotten recipes. I guess that is really who the site became for. A lot of people really appreciate it and I’m glad that they do. I constantly get these emails saying ‘I remember from my childhood my grandmother making some dish, but nobody ever wrote down the recipe and it has since been long forgotten and I thought I would never know this again and I found the recipe here on your site.’ So it helps a lot of people out in this sense.
“I would say the audience for this web site is really the American population, not really the Slovak population. Sometimes I get these emails from people in Slovakia and they’re writing ‘Why is this in English, not Slovak?’ and I’m like ‘Well, I’m not writing it for Slovak people.’ There are a million Slovak[-language] web sites out there. I’m really trying to show people not in Slovakia, people who are not already familiar with the Slovak cuisine, what Slovak cuisine is. Slovak cuisine is really unknown in the world. People don’t really know anything about it and part of the reason is simply because there’s such a lack of English-language literature, books, on Slovak cooking.”
Lubomir Ondrasek was born in Topoľčany in western Slovakia in December 1972. His father, Ľubomír, was a military officer and his mother, Elena, worked in various clerical positions. In the early years of his life, he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Anna Nemcová, who lived in the small village of Beckov and with whom he maintained a life-long close relationship. In 1976 he moved with his parents to Martin, a city in northern Slovakia, where he attended elementary school and started gymnázium. Later Lubomir attended gymnáziums in Topoľčany, Žilina, and Nové Mesto nad Váhom, where he earned his high school diploma. A junior in high school in 1989, Lubomir has strong memories of the events of the Velvet Revolution and the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia.
In 1995, Lubomir left Slovakia for the United States with the purpose of pursuing his theological education. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Zion Bible Institute in Barrington, Rhode Island, in 1999, Master of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston in 2003, and Master of Theology from Harvard University in 2005. While pursuing his theological education Lubomir worked several odd jobs and also served as a minister in two New England congregations.
Lubomir moved to Chicago in 2005 and is a doctoral student at the University of Chicago where he is concentrating on political, philosophical, and theological ethics as well as the ethics of war and peace. He is the president and co-founder of Acta Sanctorum – a Chicago non-profit founded with his wife in 2009 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution – and also is an adjunct professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston. Lubomir became a naturalized United States citizen in 2007. In the same year, he successfully fought a battle with cancer. Today he lives with his wife and daughter in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
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Lubomir Ondrasek was born in Topoľčany in western Slovakia in December 1972. His father, Ľubomír, was a military officer and his mother, Elena, worked in various clerical positions. In the early years of his life, he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Anna Nemcová, who lived in the small village of Beckov and with whom he maintained a life-long close relationship. In 1976 he moved with his parents to Martin, a city in northern Slovakia, where he attended elementary school and started gymnázium. Later Lubomir attended gymnáziums in Topoľčany, Žilina, and Nové Mesto nad Váhom, where he earned his high school diploma. A junior in high school in 1989, Lubomir has strong memories of the events of the Velvet Revolution and the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia.
In 1995, Lubomir left Slovakia for the United States with the purpose of pursuing his theological education. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Zion Bible Institute in Barrington, Rhode Island, in 1999, Master of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston in 2003, and Master of Theology from Harvard University in 2005. While pursuing his theological education Lubomir worked several odd jobs and also served as a minister in two New England congregations.
Lubomir moved to Chicago in 2005 and is a doctoral student at the University of Chicago where he is concentrating on political, philosophical, and theological ethics as well as the ethics of war and peace. He is the president and co-founder of Acta Sanctorum – a Chicago non-profit founded with his wife in 2009 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution – and also is an adjunct professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston. Lubomir became a naturalized United States citizen in 2007. In the same year, he successfully fought a battle with cancer. Today he lives with his wife and daughter in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
“I did not really like school too much at that particular time of my life. And part of the reason was that in our educational system, pupils were told what to think, what to say and how to say it – all in the atmosphere of fear, which, you can imagine, is quite detrimental to authentic learning. The teachers were, in my opinion and in the opinion of many, excessively authoritarian. Education served as a powerful instrument of oppression in the hands of those who, through the process of social engineering, wanted to bring ‘heaven to earth.’ Our individuality was suppressed; uniformity was expected. I think it was during these early years I subconsciously began to abhor all of forms of oppression and all kinds of domination and I began to rebel against the system.”
“When I grew up I thought I would never be able to visit non-socialist countries even though the Austrian border was not too far from where I used to live. But when I was a junior at high school, an unprecedented event took place in the world which directly impacted my future life. In 1989, as you know, communism collapsed and the Cold War ended, and I joined hands with thousands of other students in a peaceful march for freedom. And I especially and still quite vividly remember participating in the general strike that took place on November 27, 1989, in the city of Žilina, where I lived at that particular time.”
“I came with a single purpose in mind, namely, to learn and adequately prepare myself for what I believed was God’s call on my life. Ten years later, I received a post-graduate degree in theology from Harvard University. In order for me to pursue my education in the United States and at the same time provide for my family, I worked. And I worked as a librarian, landscaper, custodian, translator, security guard, teaching assistant, instructor and a minister in two churches in New England, and probably some other jobs I have done that I have forgotten. One can also think about the hundreds of hours I studied immigration law in order to find ways to remain in this country legally. I can think of traveling over six hundred times from Smithfield, Rhode Island, to Boston, Massachusetts, to pursue my education. One can speak about a battle with serious illness and various disappointments that I had to overcome on this rather adventurous journey. So it has not always been easy but I believe it has been a worthy endeavor, and I consider my decision to leave for the United States in 1995 to be one of the best and most important decisions of my life.”