Recording Voices and Documenting Memories in New York City, January 2012

Recording Voices & Documenting Memories staff have been gathering interviews in New York City and environs over the past two weeks. Here are but a few of the nicest materials gathered:


Joseph Ben-David feeding pigeons in Prague, circa 1933

Joseph Ben-David (born Josef Polák) was raised in a Jewish family in Prague until the outbreak of WWII in 1939, when he fled to Palestine.


Photo of Joseph on ship to Palestine, October 1939

Joseph came to the United States in 1954, where he worked at first as a printing ink maker (a trade he had inherited from his father in Czechoslovakia). In 1973, he founded the Church of Humanism, in which he remains active to this day.


Portrait of Joseph Ben-David in New York City, January 2012

Otto Ulc (also known as Ota Ulč), meanwhile, came to the United States in 1960, after working as a judge in Czechoslovakia. He is the author of numerous books, including The Judge in a Communist State: A View from Within.


Selection of books by Ota Ulč released by 68 Publishers

One of Otto’s first jobs in New York City was at (the now defunct) Vašata Czech Restaurant on East 75th Street.


Otto in uniform at Vašata Restaurant, 1960s


Business card from Vašata, courtesy of Otto Ulč

Otto now lives in Binghamton, NY where he is retired following a career teaching political science at SUNY Binghamton.


Katerina Kyselica, New York City, January 2012

Katerina Kyselica came to the United States in 2001 after working as a lawyer (and, prior to that, a professional swimmer) in the Czech Republic. She settled in New York City two years ago, where she now heads the dob2010 initiative, promoting new Czech and Slovak design in the States.


Peter Sís DJing in Poland, 1960s

Peter Sís arrived in the United States in 1982 to make a film in Los Angeles. When he decided to remain in the country after his travel visa expired, his first offer of work came from Milos Forman, who asked Peter to design the poster for his Oscar-winning film Amadeus. Before settling in the United States, Peter had worked as a DJ (with his own show on Radio Prague) and had himself won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his animated short - Heads.


Portrait of Peter Sís in his studio, January 2012

Today, Peter lives in Connecticut and works in Manhattan. Watch out for clips from his and these other interviews on the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library’s web pages over the weeks to come.

A Tale of Two Transcripts

Two new oral history transcripts are now available online. Misha Griffith from George Mason University has been working on interviews with two émigré activists, Mila Rechcigl and Andrew Hudak. To read the full transcripts, visit Mila Rechcigl and Andrew Hudak’s profiles on our website, but here are excerpts from each interview in which both men talk about their activities in the Czech and Slovak communities respectively:


Photo of Mila Rechcigl, circa 1990

“Many people don’t realize why the SVU actually started and under what condition, and the reason was that at the time there were lots of political disputes in the Czechoslovak community and there were numerous organizations and clubs and what have you. And the politicians, if they belonged to one particular group, they wouldn’t talk to politicians in another group; they just wouldn’t talk to each other. And it was sometimes quite nasty, you might say. And, in this type of, at the same time the situation in Czechoslovakia was getting worse, from bad to worse. So this was the time when the intellectuals of Czech and Slovak descent or Czechoslovak intellectuals decided that enough is enough. Let’s focus on the positive. See what’s… Let’s decide on something which sort of unites us rather than divides us. And that was the society. They said that they will create a society where anybody can talk that wishes, where we can explore different issues and what have you. And, from the very beginning, it was meant to be a nonpolitical organization…”

In 1987, Mila was invited to speak at a conference in České Budějovice by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences:

“When the time came for my speech I started speaking in Czech, because the whole conference was in English. I started talking in Czech and I told them that I’m bringing greetings from Czechs and Slovaks abroad and then I told them that we have –I told them that Czechs have made a tremendous contribution to the United States and that they can be proud of what these people have done. It is a fantastic a sort of advertisement we are doing for the country. And then I told them about SVU and whatever else. And, I don’t know how I ended it, but when I finished this there was a dead silence. I really mean it, dead silence. In the back some young guy, some 25 year old, got up and started applauding then everybody started applauding. (Laughs) So, that was a really fantastic experience.”


Photo of Andrew Hudak, circa 1991 (by Olan Mills)

“I know that I cannot accomplish one tenth in Slovakia of what I accomplished in America. Because when I compare myself to my friends, same education - don’t forget it is a smaller country, smaller opportunity. This is a big country - as long as you have the guts and the know-how, you can move as far as you want in America. That’s a beautiful country - I love America and I never, you know…

“I had tremendous faith when Slovakia came up, and also I wanted to put the impression of Slovaks in America forward to help Slovakia, okay? [I wanted to] put the impression on American Slovak society to help Slovakia. We helped which was the number one thing. I tried to help them rebuild the Church. The same thing with the monastery. The same thing with the Society of the Divine Word Seminary when I went to Bethany. At the same time I encouraged Slovak organizations to give some money. And then I encouraged trade between Americans and Slovakia hoping to better itself… There’s a lot of money coming from America to Slovakia. A lot of pensions, a lot of estates, and things like this, you know? And so the money - American Slovaks help the Slovaks a lot.”

For full-length transcripts, visit http://www.ncsml.org/Content/Oral-Histories.aspx.