The Slovak Canadian Heritage Museum in Oshawa, November 2011

The Slovak Canadian Heritage Museum (SCHM) opened in Oshawa in 2010 with the aim of making audiences ‘aware of Slovak heritage in Canada through the exhibition of heritage artifacts.’ The museum (which had previously been located in Markham, a town to the West of Toronto with a long history of Slovak settlement) opened in Oshawa in a former furniture store, originally belonging to a Mr Michna, a Slovak immigrant who came to Canada in 1924. Of the new location (about 30 minutes to the East of Toronto), museum director Margaret Dvorsky says “it’s a good place to start, the city fathers are happy we are here.”


Museum president Margaret Dvorsky and Jaromir Lukac at the SCHM



Visitors to the museum can try their hand at weaving and a number of other traditional needle crafts. On display are items of bobbin lace, embroidered folk costumes (kroje) and fabrics which have been traditionally printed using wax and indigo dye.


Some of the textiles on display at the SCHM

As well as running the museum itself, Margaret, Jaromir, and other members of the SCHM committee organize an annual Slovak Heritage Festival. They packed Recording Voices & Documenting Memories off with a copy of the very first program for the Slovak Heritage Festival in 2004, which included a bilingual Slovak-English map of the festival site in Markham, ON:


Extracts from the first Slovak Heritage Festival program, 2004

More information about the Slovak Canadian Heritage Museum (including a number of particularly lovely photo galleries) can be found on the organization’s website, at http://www.schm.ca/. The museum is staffed by a corps of volunteers and open from Tuesday through Sunday at 485 Ritson Road, Oshawa, Ontario L1H 5K1.

Recording Voices and Documenting Memories in New York City, November 2011

The National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library’s oral history project is coming to New York City. Over the next two years, the NCSML will record the oral histories of 50 Czech & Slovak Cold War-era émigrés, and 25 newer immigrants from the Czech and Slovak Republics who settled in New York after 1989.

The NCSML made a first recording trip to New York City this November. As ever, watch our website for biographical profiles and video clips over the weeks to come. Here though, is a preview of some of the materials we gathered:


Ivana Edwards in her home in New York City, November 2011

Ivana Edwards left Czechoslovakia with her family in 1948. She settled first in Israel and then Canada before coming to the United States to study. This is a snapshot from her first visit back to Prague in the 1960s. Ivana says that she had her hair done specially for the occasion, which is evidenced by this photo:


A well-coiffed Ivana Edwards with her grandmother in Prague

Gabriel Levicky came to New York City from Bratislava in 1979. This was the second time he had left Czechoslovakia, having emigrated to Israel following the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968 (he then decided to return to Czechoslovakia as part of an amnesty one year later).


Gabriel Levicky, New York City, 2011

Today, Gabriel works as a translator, tour guide and cartoonist. A book of his work, entitled Pardon Me, Which Way to Heaven or Hell; Whatever? was published by the New York Chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) in 2010.


Cartoon drawn by Gabriel Levicky in Prague, 1990

Tomas Hadl arrived in the United States more than a decade after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. He lived first in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a life-guard, before moving to New York City and starting out as a waiter. Today, he is the manager of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA), which is based in New York’s Bohemian National Hall.


Tomas Hadl at the Bohemian National Hall, New York City, 2011

Watch our web pages for excerpts from these interviews (and more) over the weeks to come.