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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>Love of Music</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gmh8PvY4ZKE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My grandfather, Štefan Apalovič, he died years ago. My mom’s father – he was a very, very special man; he was a simple man, but he could do anything, he could do carpentry, he could do… Men came every Saturday, men came to their house when my mother was a little girl for haircuts. And my grandfather, he was reading American newspapers that he received from his three brothers who lived in New York, in New York State. And those men, they couldn’t even read, and my grandfather, he knew how to read, and – I’m talking about 1925 when my mother was little – he was reading the newspaper for them and they came for a haircut and things like that.</p><p>“He could do anything. Also, he played accordion. So all my uncles, my mother’s brothers, they knew how to play accordion. My oldest brother, Frank, he never went to school – music school – but just trying, and he played better than I play! This is in the family, actually, and my cousins play accordion and piano. Yeah.”</p><h4>Band Performs</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AXVYQSrjEHo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><h4>Collective Farms</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bZ97KyXzSGQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“First, people were unhappy. But I think later, I think later when I was a little bit older, they had relief. Some people had really relief. Like, we can’t even work, it’s so much work, and now they have tractors and they have equipment, machinery, and many people had relief, actually. But some of them, still they were sorry what happened and ‘oh, yeah, they took my field’ and whatever. So, it all depends.”</p><h4>Pedicurist</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dV8VtyTxBHQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was working in downtown, and that was the best! I was working in downtown Bratislava close to Prior and close to Manderla [department stores]. I have very good memories and I liked to do what I did, what I learned, and I liked my boss and the girls I was working with. It was great, working in downtown – much better than in some suburbs. We were always, always busy. No appointments, just walk-ins and, of gosh, no air conditioning – it was hot, hot, hot in summertime. People were waiting and waiting and waiting, like two, three hours, but they really, they really wanted to get their feet done, and we did more pedicures than manicures. But here in the United States, everybody goes for manicures; not many people maybe for pedicures because they don’t know much about that.”</p><h4>Emigrating Secret</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g_rrxAQTo2w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think I was just strong. I can’t tell anyone, I can’t tell anyone. And when I was working in Senec in a pedicure salon, my friend Eva, she called me – my very close friend, my best friend. She called me from Switzerland to my work. But I didn’t have a telephone there, they called me next door; they repaired some electronics and somebody came and said ‘Miss Monika, you have a phone call.’ And I just said ‘Yes, no, yes, uh-huh,’ something like that. That other lady, who was boss of those guys – she told me later after 13 years, when I came for my first visit to Slovakia, she said ‘My gosh, it’s so long, 13 years ago – Monika, I knew something is going on. You didn’t say anything, just “Yes, no, m-hmm, yes, no,” who called you?’ And at that time, I couldn’t say ‘My friend from Switzerland who just left the country, and they are there one week or two weeks.’ I couldn’t say that.”</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
Monika Smid
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Monika Smid was born in the village of Hájske, western Slovakia, in 1950. Her father, Vilém, spent the week in Bratislava where he worked in construction, while her mother, Maria, stayed at home raising Monika and her five siblings and tending to the family’s vineyards and fields. Monika attended school in Hájske and, for three years during her childhood, traveled to nearby Nitra to learn the accordion in the evenings. Upon graduation from high school, Monika moved to Bratislava where she worked for <em>komunálne služby mesta Bratislava</em> [communal (municipal) services of Bratislava] as a pedicurist. In 1970, Monika was sent for training in this field to Gottwaldov (now Zlín) in Moravia, which was also home to the shoe factory Bat’a.</p><p> </p><p>Monika says she loved her job at a salon right in the heart of Bratislava; she counted famous actors and ballerinas as her clients, and maintains friendships with some of her former colleagues. She left the salon in 1974 after marrying her husband, Mirek, and moving to Trnava, where the couple were guaranteed accommodation through his job at a local car factory. In 1975, their daughter Martina was born.</p><p> </p><p>Monika says it was her decision to leave Czechoslovakia four years later. She says she had a number of relatives already in the United States, and that a love of travel ran in her family. She traveled with her husband and daughter first to Austria, where the family spent seven months near Salzburg before gaining visas to travel to the U.S. Monika and Mirek’s son was born in America. The Smid family settled in Seven Hills, Ohio, where they now own several properties which they rent out. Monika plays an active role in the local Slovak community, particularly through her involvement in the trio Slovenské mamičky [The Slovak Mothers], who perform traditional Slovak folk songs as well as a few of Monika’s own compositions.</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
Cambalikova
Community Life
Family life
Hajske
marriage
Slovenske mamicky
Women workers
Zlin
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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>Grandmother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HxtZRnvWFLs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was very close to my maternal grandparents. They died a few months after I left Slovakia, and I really loved them. At one point, we lived across from my maternal grandparents, so I was very close to them; I always sat in their house. And my grandmother was very religious, she would go every night with a candle to pray in the church. Of course, the church was closed, but she would stay, you know, outside the church, by the door with the candle praying every evening. And sometimes I would go to church with her too and she had all kinds of holy books and she had all kinds of mission magazines that were like illegal in Slovakia. And I would just read them, you know, I just loved to read and I was there all the time and reading, and I loved to be there with my grandmother, so…”</p><h4>Kolackov</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w9M7t4j5i0M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p><span style="line-height:1.5;">“They didn’t say too much, they just said it was bad, you know, and they were saying about the Jewish people… and there was a cemetery, a Jewish cemetery, behind the little river in our village. And I never met a Jewish person until I came to America. I never knew there were any Jewish people alive in Slovakia. I never knew, but there was so… Apparently there were some Jewish people, but I never met anybody, until I came here.” </span></p><p></p><h4>Work Brigades</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OTOsuLyN6sM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p><span style="line-height:1.5;">“When I was going to school in Stará Ľubovňa, and when we were, when I was, learning my trade, they would take us, and we had to go to Hniezdne, that was like a city next to Stará Ľubovňa, and mostly in the fall we would go and pick up potatoes – yeah. Which was a lot of fun because we were happy to be outside, instead of being, sitting, in the classroom or stuff like that, and they gave us food so we ate, and you know it was like… it was fun.”</span></p><p></p><h4>Unsure</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v95Z2ojNRfQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It just, you know, I saw that life was a lot easier over here, that you could get money faster than there. You have to, you have to work, you know, but it’s like it seems to be easier than in Slovakia. And, I really missed my family – the first two years I would cry every weekend. I missed my, you know, everybody, and then later on I met some young people that came from Slovakia and we made a… we started singing and performing and dancing and stuff like that, which was a lot easier and I felt like I was at home, you know, not in America, but like I was in Slovakia. And we also made a play, you know, we had a play also in Slovak over here so… And I was, actually, I played the same part in the play that I played in Slovakia as I did in America, in the same, same play.”</p><h4>Little English</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AIOeDftflow?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The first two years I worked in Joseph & Feiss, which was a factory making men’s suits. Now it’s called Hugo Boss. And mostly European people worked there. Mostly they were from Eastern Europe, like Slovaks and Czechs and Ukrainians and Polish. And how it happened? One lady from our village, she worked there, she was like a supervisor there, and that’s why she got me a job there. And so what happened was that I got a Ukrainian boss. So, the first two years, I didn’t speak any English, because I spoke Slovak and he spoke Ukrainian and we understood each other, with everybody else I could speak, so I didn’t learn any English, I understood everything. My cousin was telling me ‘Speak English, speak English,’ and I said ‘No, you’re going to laugh at me if I say something in English because I’m not going to say it right.’ So, he was always telling me, and his wife was Polish</p><p>– my cousin’s wife was Polish – so, I spoke with my dialect with her. So I didn’t have to learn any English.</p><p>“But after being here two years, when I moved to Lakewood, I started working somewhere else, and there were mostly who didn’t speak, you know, European, they used to speak English. And there were two Puerto-Rican sisters, and they had been here for like 20 years. And when I heard them, how they speak English, I’m thinking ‘Why should I be ashamed? I mean, they have been here for 20 years, I have been here for a few years, if they have an accent, why should I be afraid?’ And so I just started speaking and that’s how I speak!”</p><h4>Return to Slovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/C7KriyHHrOw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well, when the changes first started in 1989, my favorite store was K-Mart. And then they opened a K-Mart in Slovakia. So I said ‘I don’t want to go to Slovakia, because they don’t have a K-Mart over there.’ And so there, when they opened a K-Mart, so they said ‘Okay, so now they have K-Mart over there, so you can, you know, live there!’ And for some reason, I still feel like, I don’t know, it’s still not, you know, I’m so used to being like… I lived one-third of my life there, and I have lived two-thirds of my life here, so, I’m so used to it, I feel like my home is over here. I mean I still love my country, I still love my heritage, that’s what I try pushing onto my kids, which they appreciate, they really love it. Like [my daughter] Anita went to an American wedding, and she… you know, at a Slovak wedding, you would come home at 1:00 in the morning, or until they let you, how long they let you stay in the hall.</p><p>She came home at 10:00. It was her friend from grade school who was getting married. And she comes home and she says ‘Mum, I am so happy to be a Slovak.’ We’ve got so much more, a lot more fun than those people over there. She said ‘I didn’t like the music, I didn’t like anything over there. I liked the food, but I didn’t like the music, that’s why I came home. Because we have a lot more fun, we like… you know, that’s why I’m happy to be Slovak.’ So you know probably a lot of different nationalities feel the same way, you know, but that’s what she said, that’s what she told me, so…”</p><h4>Easter Traditions</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s87qZVPVHJo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In Slovakia, they bless the baskets on Sunday morning, over here in America, they bless on Saturday afternoon. And, when we first got married, I would not let my husband eat the food on Saturday until the Sunday. So he would wait until midnight, and after midnight, he would start eating. But later on I gave up and I just let him, so ever since then, after we bless the food on Saturdays, since Lent is gone, he still fasts in the morning on Saturday and then after I bless the food, he comes home in the afternoon, and we make this huge platter of klobásy [sausage] and eggs and cheese and this stuffing I make, and ham and all the traditional stuff. And the beets, the beets with horseradish. And I make everything homemade; I make the homemade bread, the pascha bread, with raisins and all the other stuff so… And the cheese, I make the cheese and the stuffing with eggs and bread and ham and bacon in it, and I bake it in the oven.”</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
Ludmila Anderko
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2287" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609091403im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Ludmila-Anderko-235x300.png" alt="Ludmila Anderko Oral History" width="235" height="300" /></p><p>Ludmila Anderko was born in the small mountain town of Kolačkov, northeastern Slovakia, in 1949. Her mother stayed at home and raised Ludmila and her three sisters, while her father worked in a textile factory in nearby Kežmarok during the week, coming home to visit the family on weekends. According to Ludmila, who had to help out with farm work from an early age, the hilly ground around Kolačkov was hard to farm, so no attempts to collectivize agriculture were ever made in the village.</p><p> </p><p>Ludmila’s aunt Alžbeta had left Kolačkov in the 1920s and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1966, she made a visit back to Slovakia and met Ludmila and her sisters for the first time. Following this visit, Ludmila maintained contact with her aunt, and was invited to come and stay with her in Cleveland in 1969. By this time, Ludmila had already finished her training to be a shop clerk and was working in the local store in Kolačkov. She decided to visit Cleveland and make a decision about whether to stay or not once she had spent some time in the city.</p><p> </p><p>Ludmila did decide to stay, living first with her aunt Alžbeta in Maple Heights, an eastern suburb. After two years, she moved by herself to Lakewood, renting a property just opposite what was then a Slovak Church – Sts. Cyril & Methodius (now known as Transfiguration Parish). It was here that Ludmila says she became much more involved in the Slovak community, frequenting Slovak dances, starring in Slovak Dramatic Club plays and attending the local Slovak Civic Club in Lakewood. It was at a dance at Česká síň Sokol on Clark Street that Ludmila met her husband Frank. The pair were married in 1973 and have four children. Ludmila encouraged all of her children to participate in the local Slovak dance troupe Lucina and, as a consequence, several of them traveled to Slovakia to perform with the group at a folk festival in Detva in 2008. In recent years, Ludmila has been making a number of public appearances as one third of the trio Slovenské mamičky [The Slovak Mothers], performing traditional Slovak folk songs as well as original works written by accordion player <a href="/web/20170609091403/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/monika-smid/">Monika Smid</a>. Ludmila lives not far from her sister Marie, who came to the United States in 1980.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609091403/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXVYQSrjEHo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">An NCSML recording of Ludmila performing with the Slovenské mamičky in Cleveland in May 2010</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Ceska sin Sokol
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Education
Jews
Kezmarok
Kolackov
Religion
Slovak Language
Slovenske mamicky
Stara Lubovna