How can personal stories add to our understanding of immigration? This is one of the questions being posed on Tuesday, April 24 at Drake Community Library as part of On the Record: Oral Histories at Iowa Institutions. The National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library (NCSML) has been considering this very subject for more than two years now, through its oral history project Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans.
For the project, NCSML staff have interviewed over 200 Czechs and Slovaks who immigrated to the United States during the Cold War era. Interviews have taken place from Chicago to Cleveland, from upstate New York to downtown San Francisco.
Throughout these interviews, perhaps the most important question asked is ‘Why?’ Why would someone choose to leave their homeland and set up a new life halfway around the world? For the overwhelming majority during the Communist period in Czechoslovakia, it was not a question of trying one’s luck in the United States and returning home should things go wrong. Emigration was, in most cases, considered a form of treason by the Communist government and those who left illegally, or overstayed their visas abroad, were often sentenced to prison terms in absentia.
But it would be too simple to say that those the NCSML has spoken to left Czechoslovakia to escape communism. Of course, this was a major factor in many people’s decisions - Jan Kocvara describes his family’s tipping point coming when he and his wife took a walk down the street with his young son: “There was a big poster of Lenin and he said ‘Look Mommy - Comrade Lenin!’ My wife said ‘I don’t want this anymore. They put this into the children. We have to go.’”
Peter Vodenka dressed as a Native American on horseback, Czechoslovakia, 1970s
There were other reasons to emigrate too. In his interview, Peter Vodenka discussed his fascination with America growing up in the heart of Europe: “I was always dreaming about being a cowboy. And I wanted to be in America.” And John Kyncl referred to the professional opportunities the United States offered him: “I was born and I knew that I was going to the United States. I went to be able to continue with my own work. I had to be in those institutions doing those experiments.”
Announcement of Zdenka and Bruno Necasek's wedding
Eva Derman says her family left on account of being Jewish: “we felt we don’t belong to that part of the world anymore.” Zdenka Necasek, meanwhile, fell in love with an American: “I went to the Embassy and they said ‘If you love him, stick to it… There are many girls coming here just to marry foreigners and get out, and they don’t make it.”
Both Necasek and Derman’s stories are intensely personal. The NCSML is honored that they shared such details of their relationship and faith. Peter Vodenka spoke to us of his dreams, and John Kyncl of his ambitions. Jan Kocvara’s story reflects his concerns as a parent. Altogether, these stories present a complex tableau of why one might chose to leave one’s country – and this is only one of the dozens of questions that the NCSML has been asking Czechs and Slovaks who settled around the United States. Hopefully this article opens the discussion on how personal stories add to our understanding of immigration; the panel and audience at Drake Community Library on Tuesday will contribute more to this topic.
Rosie Johnston is one of four panelists speaking at On the Record: Oral Histories at Iowa Institutions on Tuesday, April 24 at 7:00pm.
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