Recording Voices & Documenting Memories in the San Francisco Bay Area

The NCSML’s recent trip to California uncovered all sorts of particularly interesting historical documents and stories. Here are some of the highlights from Recording Voices & Documenting Memories most recent material-gathering expedition:



Georgina Teyrovsky’s father was a member of the Czechoslovak Legions in Russia. In this photo from 1918 he is at work as a telegraphist (sitting in the bottom row, second from left).



George Malek originally immigrated to Canada before coming to the United States to work in what was a fledgling Silicon Valley. During his interview with Recording Voices & Documenting Memories, he shared this picture with us: the photo shows his mother, who was a member of a Sokol dance troupe in Czechoslovakia prior to WWII. She is the dancer in the front row furthest to the right.



Two images of Prague during the Warsaw Pact Invasion, 1968

George Skoda left Czechoslovakia in 1948. He subsequently settled in the Bay Area and worked on the Stanford Two-Mile Accelerator. He says that he was sent the photos above by a friend in Prague following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.



Peter and Hana Palecek arrived in the Bay Area in the late 1960s. Although they were married at the time, the pair arrived in the United States separately, and in totally different ways. The Paleceks both shared their stories with Recording Voices & Documenting Memories.

Excerpts from all of these interviews, and more from the NCSML’s recording trip to the Bay Area, will appear on the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library’s oral history web pages over the weeks and months to come.

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.

The case for oral history, as made by Leo Tolstoy

Monica Rokus and friends at school in Košice, 1967

Two things that I have been reading recently have caught my eye and shaped the way I think about some of the materials being gathered as part of Recording Voices & Documenting Memories. The first is an extract from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. On the capture of Moscow by Napoleonic troops in 1812 Tolstoy writes:

“The stories and descriptions of that time all speak without exception of self-sacrifice… despair, grief and heroism… In reality, it was not like that. It seems so to us only because all we see in the past is the general historical interest of the time, and we do not see all those personal, human interests that the people of that time had. And yet in reality the personal interests of the day are so much more significant than the general interests that as a result the general interests are never felt (or even noticed at all). The majority of the people of that time paid no attention to the general course of things, but were guided only by the personal interests of the day. And those people were the most useful figures of that time.”

Of course Tolstoy is not discussing oral histories and the benefits of interviewing eyewitnesses in this paragraph, but the extract does remind me of another quotation, which is about oral histories in particular, and which conveys something rather similar. In an article entitled Talking about War, historian Edward Coffman writes:

“Meeting and talking with [interviewees] provides a human touch and a richness that one cannot get from paper documents and, in many instances, one can get information that is not available elsewhere.”

One of my favorite clips from all of the oral histories gathered to date is that of Melania Rakytiak recalling the Warsaw Pact invasion as she experienced it in Bratislava in August 1968. I think I find it so interesting because she contrasts information about “the general course of things” – panic buying, queues in shops, food shortages and the requirement of a birth certificate to buy baby milk – with her own “personal interests” throughout the invasion:



In the paragraph I cited above, Leo Tolstoy was not talking about oral history (which was not even a concept until after his death). But he does express one of the strengths of oral history particularly well. It seems to me that speaking to people who witnessed historic events in Czechoslovakia and the United States during the 20th century provides information on both the “general course of things” and “the personal interests of the day.”

-posted by Rosie Johnston