After graduating from high school in 1998, Marek knew that he did not want to attend college; instead, he had a desire to travel and explore his different philosophical and spiritual interests. He volunteered at a holistic community for several months in Devon, England, before moving to Prague in the spring of 1999. Marek lived with his grandmother and uncle in the city’s Prosek district, where he devoted one month to relearning the Czech language. In addition to producing multimedia events focused on ‘sound art,’ Marek began tutoring students in English. Six years ago, two people approached him almost simultaneously about joining the teaching staff of The Waldorf School in Jinonice. Marek says the alternative educational philosophy and his ‘inclination towards taking care of children’ convinced him to become an English teacher at the school. Marek has been back to the United States twice since he left and says he has no intention of resettling in America, as Prague now ‘feels like home.’
Marek Eisler was born in Prague in 1980. His father, John, was an architect who worked at SIAL studios while his mother, Eva, was a designer who came to be known for her jewelry in particular. Marek was raised alongside his older brother in the city’s Podolí district. In 1983, his father was offered a job at Richard Meier & Partners Architects, and so the Eislers moved to New York City. They settled in Jamaica, Queens – which, according to Marek, was a very diverse neighborhood and full of first-generation immigrants. Marek says that although his mother was determined to keep Czech traditions and customs in their home, he was not very connected with his Czech heritage and even made a concerted effort to forget the Czech language. In 1993, the Eislers moved to Manhattan, and Marek’s parents often hosted brunches, dinner parties, and gallery installments that drew artists, architects, and designers to their home; Marek says these events and people had a lasting influence on him. As a teenager, he became interested in the hip-hop and electronic music scenes.
After graduating from high school in 1998, Marek knew that he did not want to attend college; instead, he had a desire to travel and explore his different philosophical and spiritual interests. He volunteered at a holistic community for several months in Devon, England, before moving to Prague in the spring of 1999. Marek lived with his grandmother and uncle in the city’s Prosek district, where he devoted one month to relearning the Czech language. In addition to producing multimedia events focused on ‘sound art,’ Marek began tutoring students in English. Six years ago, two people approached him almost simultaneously about joining the teaching staff of The Waldorf School in Jinonice. Marek says the alternative educational philosophy and his ‘inclination towards taking care of children’ convinced him to become an English teacher at the school. Marek has been back to the United States twice since he left and says he has no intention of resettling in America, as Prague now ‘feels like home.’
“Supposedly it was a very wild time. I have photographs of myself being a year and half sitting my dad’s lap and his hair is a big curly afro and drinking beer in pubs. I understand that at that time pub life was very much the center of social life where people were able to vent their opinions and be in maybe safer company. We were in company of all kinds of artists in Prague, and that’s also what I’ve come to understand, that then, even more so that now, there was one group of underground art people, and I’m proud to be in the lineage of that.”
“I went to a wonderful elementary school, and I like to say that our class photos were just a rainbow. All my classmates were mostly first generation immigrants from China, from Israel, from India. A very good cultural education, learning how to say all those different names, and just as six, seven year olds getting together and realizing that there’s no difference between us. So that was a brilliant way to start.”
“My mom very consciously maintained Czech culture, in terms of kitchen, even the style of furniture. She was very alternative when she was here, but if we look at photographs we can see that there was definitely no Americanization. There was no sofa, there was no microwave. I remember especially the dinners, they looked just like what you get now [in Prague]. Of course, me and my brother were kind of against it. We wanted the McDonald’s and the hamburgers and stuff, but my parents were very consciously and very open about ‘No, we’re not giving into that and we are proud of our culture and we are going to maintain it.’ What is funny is all my classmates did the same in their houses. If you went to their house, it would be like little China and they would have real Chinese food for dinner, and then the Indians, so each home was like a little oasis of that culture.”
Why did they keep it so Czech in the middle of New York?
“I guess we could see it from a few different perspectives. One is that that would just be the honest thing to do, to be true to one’s culture. I think that one of the fundamental values in our household was to be aware, to be educated, and to be broad-minded and multicultural, and I think that Prague, I see it more and more over the years that it’s the heart of Europe, and I’ve thought very often why that is, and if you look on the map you see it basically as the crossroads of all these different routes. I think that the Czech history and nationality is very educated, very world-conscious, and I think that the fear was that the Americans, how they’re isolated by the seas, there was this fear that we would become small-minded, and therefore we should actively maintain our broad awareness.”
“When we were singing the national anthem and things like that at school, I remember for years and years and years, I didn’t know what I was saying. The words didn’t stand out to me as individual words, it was just kind of a mishmash of syllables. I really, not until I was about 12 or 13 did I actually hear it and say ‘Oh right, that means something.’ That was kind of the first experience of me encountering English, just seeing it as a curtain of sound.
“I remember that when I was eight and he [his brother] was ten, there was a point where I decided that I’m no longer going to speak Czech and that I’m going to even make an effort not to understand it. Now with my work with children, I’ve learned that there’s a special age around that time where the kids discover the tendency to rebel and be naughty, as opposed to before doing everything that their parents say, and now they discover, wow they can really go against the rules, and I think that’s what that was. My dad explains it to me that if I would say to my mom ‘I don’t understand,’ that’s kind of giving me the go-ahead to do things she’s telling me not to do. It’s pretty smart. Pretty useful. In monolingual households, you can’t use that excuse, so it was a good excuse. From that time, it really went downhill. By the time we were 12, I actually didn’t understand.”
“My first visit was 1992. [It was] me and my brother doing all the classic tourist stuff, going to the castle and going to other castles outside of Prague. But, being young teenagers, very often bored and complaining and stuff. But visiting my extended family, my cousins, my uncles. So that was probably my introduction to ‘Aha, we have actually family here.’ I remember coming to visit the flat that I live in now and we approached the building, probably by taxi and parked in basically rubble, cement. It looked like pictures that we see now from Afghanistan. I remember thinking ‘Wow, this is serious.’ It was totally fresh. There was none of this renovation boom having started yet. It really felt as if it was just after a war. I liked the hominess of the public venues, like restaurants and things. That resonated, and obviously, maybe I had still unconscious memories of smells and things, that when we came into, not necessarily a city pub, but a country pub, I would feel like ‘Oh, that’s good.’ And I recognized all the food, obviously. I think there’s another important thing is that I knew people were looking at us as Americans. The way that we dressed, our hairstyles and things like that. The fact that we didn’t speak Czech. That was a big one.
“When I was 16, it was with a girlfriend I had at the time. We decided to come to Prague in the summer. You could say that my trip here when I was 12 definitely didn’t inspire me to acknowledge my roots, my Bohemian roots, but the trip in ’96 I think did. It reminded me that there is this very rich cultural place that I come from, and that trip to Prague, I was really impressed.”
“Coming back here, I definitely felt I had made a step in the right direction to a simplified life, to a life more connected with its lineage. Especially the fact that this culture had just overcome the foreign element and now had the opportunity to really be itself and really finally embrace its roots. I think that I felt here a very fresh impulse to discovering the identity of the nation. Having had this political-economic force rid of, now the people were free to determine their own fate, which I felt New York and America didn’t have. I felt there was, if anything, a force growing in power which determined the fate of the culture.”
“I come here, and almost everyone who I meet, when they find out about my story, they say ‘Why? You can live in America and you’ve chosen to come back here? Why?’ And so some people get the long, some people get the short answer, or they say ‘Is it better here? Is it better here or better there?’ And I always say that it’s totally subjective. It’s subjective. When I’m here, I feel – because I like physics – so I imagine it as if you have a bowl and you take a marble and you drop it at any point, it’s going to roll around a bit, but it’s always going to end up at the bottom. So that’s how I feel when I’m here, when I’m in Prague, and especially because of Prague, the way it’s a valley so it’s got all these different ridges around the edge, but then when you’re in the center, at the National Theatre, you’re actually at the bottom. So when I stand there on the corner, I feel like this is home.”
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.”