Pursuing praxis

The family reunion email that I received the other day reminded me that this year is the 100th anniversary of my paternal great-grandparents’ arrival in the US from Czechoslovakia, from a tiny (and still tiny) rural community on the Morava River near present-day Slovakia.

They came here for their honeymoon. If I remember correctly, they came back in 1911, with nine dollars and my Great Uncle Tony in tow, registered at Ellis Island, and never went back. They set up a family farm in Michigan, and many of their eventual 11 children worked in or for the factories in Detroit. My grandpa met Grandma in college, got a Masters in history at Michigan State, and worked in labor relations for GE. I don’t think either of my great-grandparents had a college education.

One of my great-grandpa’s brother’s stayed behind, one immigrated to Chile, and their sister died in childbirth. In 30 years’ time, friends and family were in concentration camps, and then the Iron Curtain descended for nearly 50 years. When I traveled to the Czech Republic in 2004 to locate or discover relatives I had read about, they discovered me: none of them had the faintest idea there were any relatives in America, much less 100+ of us. In fact, to my knowledge, there are easily 2-3 times as many people in America with my (very unusual Czech) last name, than there are in the Czech Republic. It appears that having 11 kids in a communist country either isn’t a terribly popular idea, or death rates kept population strongly checked, or both.

So, although the rest of their version of family tree was quite complete, evidently all knowledge of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother evaporated sometime in the last 100 years. It only occurs to me now that perhaps that wasn’t accidental. Having relatives in the West was a considerable liability under communist rule, for both the citizens and the government. Your kids can’t know about people you never mention, and certain governmental agencies are only too adept at destroying or "improving" historical records.

I met two Czech-Canadian couples while traveling in China last spring - two brothers and their wives. The younger brother escaped Czechoslovakia to Canada in the ’70s, with his wife pregnant and seventeen dollars to their name. Although the second brother tried to escape twice, he was unable to because the authorities kept a very close eye on him because of his brother’s escape. He and his wife didn’t leave the CR until 1991, after the wall fell. His wife described the conditions of her childhood to me the day we took a boat down the Li River in Guilin. I kid you not, the pioneers of the 1840s had it easier than these people in 20th century Europe. They were destitute. And now they’re an engineer, an architect, a dental hygenist and a teacher, who make enough and save enough and want to live and see their world enough to travel for 2-4 weeks a year together.

I’m glad they had the ambition to come here, and the sense to stay. Both my great-grandparents and the Czech-Canadians.