Jakub Jan Ryba's Czech Christmas Mass in Chicago

On Saturday, December 17, Jakub Jan Ryba's Czech Christmas Mass was performed for the first time ever in Chicago.



The performance was organized by The Chicago Prague Sister Cities Committee, The Consulate General of the Czech Republic in Chicago and The First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple.

The choir singing the mass consisted of regular choristers from the Chicago Temple and individuals from Chicago's Czech community, with members of the city's United Moravian Societies particularly well represented.


United Moravians in kroj bring flowers to performers
Photo: Michal Tauvinkl

To hear how the mass sounded, and to find out more about how the audience reacted to the piece, click here to listen to a radio feature recorded at the Chicago Temple.

Oral History Transcripts Online

Stalin Monument in Letná park prior to its destruction in 1962

This fall semester, George Mason University History and New Media student Misha M. Griffith has been working to transcribe a number of the interviews gathered by Recording Voices & Documenting Memories so far. To mark the publication of the first interview transcript on Otomar Hájek's profile page, here is a previously unbroadcast snippet from his interview which caught our eye at the NCSML:

"I was a member of the first university workers’, no… students’ brigade to build the Stalin statue!"

You worked on building it?

"Well, yes. We went there and we played cards all day; we managed to do it. And when they were taking it down, I wanted to volunteer to be in the first students’ brigade to take down the statue, but my mother talked me out of it."

...The statue was built in ’52, wasn't it?

"I don't remember. My memory of the time is… I don’t remember... I was still at the university. I was at the university from ’49 until ’53. It must have been built in ’52, or begun to be built. It took a long time."

Could you describe for me the process? That’s such a monster statue. I’m just curious about what the whole engineering setup was like there, and how it was done. How was it organized?

"The statue itself was called the 'food line,' which looked as if a line of people - okay, I don’t have to describe that. The foundations were therefore elongated, and since it was supposed to be solid stone, the foundation had to be extremely solid. An extra railway line was built from the nearest spur to bring in these stones, [each] of a size roughly two yards cubic. And unloaded there and then transported. Some of the sculptural work was carried out in the original situation, and then some of it was finished here."

Was it a big group of people, or how many... Were there hundreds of people?

"There were hundreds of people. There were hundreds of people. The most interesting thing is that the builder, the artist who conceived it, committed suicide immediately afterwards."

Upon graduating from Charles University in 1953 (and waving goodbye to student labor brigades), Otomar worked in a range of research positions, including one at a computer science facility in Prague:



For Otomar Hájek's complete profile (and now the full transcript of his interview as well) visit the NCSML's oral history web pages.

Recording Voices & Documenting Memories in Toronto, November 2011

This November, the NCSML was invited to Toronto to present Recording Voices & Documenting Memories. Never ones to pass up on a good recording opportunity, we met a number of Czechs and Slovaks who immigrated to Canada over the past 60+ years whilst we were in town. As ever, look to our web pages for excerpts from the interviews over the next couple of weeks. Here is a fraction of the interesting photos and other archival documents which our interviewees shared with us when we visited their homes:


Czech ball, Montreal - photo courtesy of George Heller

George Heller came to Canada with his parents shortly after the Communist coup in 1948. The family settled in Montreal. The photo above shows George’s parents (on the far right) at the city's yearly Czech & Slovak ball, which he says was the émigré community’s annual social highlight.


Photo of George Heller's father, Havlickuv Brod, 1948

Prior to leaving Czechoslovakia, George’s father was a baker. In this photo from 1948, George’s father is shown taking part in a parade in Havlickuv Brod representing the bakery he worked for at the time, named Rozvoj (meaning progress or development in Czech). Along the side of the truck are both Czech and Soviet flags and a caption which reads “sixty-nine wagons of bread baked in 1947 – 4,650,000 bakery items.”


George (in the blue coat on the right) with Queen Elizabeth II, 1994

When George was 18, he answered an advert posted by the Hudson’s Bay Company recruiting fur traders to work in Canada’s Northern Territories. He enjoyed tremendous success at this job and, after a number of promotions and some time spent in other firms, rose to the position of president and CEO of The Bay. He took some time off from this job to organize the 1994 Commonwealth Games, which were held in Vancouver. In the photo above, George is watching the Games’ opening ceremony with Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh.


Dagmar Benedik with fellow members of the swim team, Kladno

Dagmar Benedik left Czechoslovakia with her family in 1968. Prior to emigration, she attended junior and senior high school in Kladno, where her father was coach of the junior hockey team, and enjoyed swimming competitively for the city, as evidenced by the photo above, in which Dagmar can be seen on the top left.


Envelope containing correspondence from Dagmar's pen pal

Following her interview with Recording Voices & Documenting Memories, Dagmar shared a number of interesting documents with the NCSML, including this envelope which she received from her pen pal in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Dagmar says that Czech and Slovak schoolchildren would often write to a peer in the Soviet Union as part of their Russian language training at this time. This particular letter came encased in an envelope commemorating February 23 - Soviet Army Day.


Milos Krajny upon arrival in Canada beside Professor Julius Axelrod (left)

Milos Krajny also came to Canada in 1968 to work in Quebec as a medical doctor. He subsequently moved to Toronto where he opened his own practice and, among other achievements, became the president of the Toronto Philharmonic. Dr. Krajny is extremely active in the Czech community in Toronto and organizes a series of classical music performances called Nocturnes in the City, about which more details can be found here.

Excerpts from all three of these interviews and more will be posted to www.ncsml.org over the weeks to come.