Prague-nosis

When my mother died at 100, eight years ago, I wrote her biography and called it Mater Gladiatrix. That title spoke to me because of my four years of Latin (which she strongly encouraged me to take) and the strength and resilience that she exhibited fearlessly throughout her life, both in her personal and professional demeanor. As a courtesy to my two older sisters, I sent them a semi-final draft of the book and the cover I had chosen, which was a sort of Joan of Arc picture I had found, that reminded me of the image I had of my mother. My sisters had no problem with any of my prose or recollections of our childhood, but they did take exception to the cover art because they did not relate to that image of my mother. In deference to them (did I mention they are my older sisters?), I changed the cover art and decided to go with a collection of 27 antique foreign coins from 21 different countries, ranging in age from 1736 to 1955. The coins had all come from an old cigar box that my mother had recovered from the garage junk of my grandfather after he had died. He had owned a gas station and roadhouse (about as gritty as that term sounds, I might add) and had kept this cigar box to collect interesting or old coins that somehow or another passed through his retail purveyor hands. I connected those coins to my mother because when I was nine, she gave me that cigar box and encouraged me to put together a coin collection with those as the foundation. Strangely enough, of all those coins and all those countries (there were many more that I didn’t incorporate into the cover art), there were none that were from my mother’s native land of Czechoslovakia.

My grandfather, born John Uhrovcik in Malzenice (a Czechoslovakian town just northeast of Bratislava) in 1887 to a hard-working, but dirt poor farming couple, was more Slovak than Czech. Czechoslovakia was actually an artificially merged country where the haves were generally Czech and the drones were all Slavic. John was a smart boy who instinctively knew that his younger brother Joseph was right when he whispered at night in their loft room with the hay-filled “mattress” that they needed to leave Malzenice. While the Gay Nineties roared on in parts of the world, in places like Bratislava, the life of local farmers was as depressed as any time anyone could remember. People today generally know about the Irish potato famine, but few are aware that the same sort of blight devastated Slovakia and neighboring Slovenia in the late 19th century. The Czechs saw this as the problem of their poor country cousins and not something to take the edge off the good times to be had in lovely Prague. So, to no one’s surprise, Joseph and John hightailed it through Trieste to America. They were part of the first European mass exodus to America and did what all immigrants did, which was process through Ellis Island. Joseph gave his name as Uhrovcik, John volunteered his newly-minted name as Uher, which struck him as less Old World (what did he know of Old versus New just yet?), and certainly easier to spell (he was 11 years old going on 12 after all and saving four letters seemed like a stroke of brilliance to him). They found their way upstate to a salt mine where Slavs were the preferred mules and began his American life with a decided cultural bias for the ways of the Old Country.

In that little town on the banks of Lake Cayuga, he met Catherine Mikinic, whose family had come to America the same year as he and Joseph had come. The Mikinics had come from the town of Binovce, just south of his town of Malzenice. Go figure…but such were the ways of the immigrant first generation that they might meet their life partner in America from a pool of similar immigrants from their very own old country neighborhood.

I lied. John did not come from Czechoslovakia …. he came from Slovakia. Czechoslovakia had a relatively brief but significant history as an independent state, existing for most of the 20th century before peacefully splitting into two nations. Czechoslovakia was created in October 1918 from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I. The new state united the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia) with Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia (known as Ukraine these days). Tomáš Masaryk became the first president, with Edvard Beneš as foreign minister. The country was envisioned as a democratic state for the Czechoslovak people, though in reality it was ethnically diverse, with substantial German, Hungarian, Polish, and Ruthenian minorities. The interwar period saw Czechoslovakia emerge as one of the most stable and prosperous democracies in Central Europe. It had a strong industrial base, particularly in Bohemia, and maintained democratic institutions while much of Europe turned to authoritarianism. However, ethnic tensions simmered, particularly among the Sudeten Germans in the borderlands. In 1938, Nazi Germany demanded the Sudetenland, the German-speaking border regions. The Munich Agreement, signed by Britain, France, Germany, and Italy without Czechoslovak participation, forced the country to cede these territories. This betrayal left Czechoslovakia defenseless, and in March 1939, Germany occupied the remaining Czech lands, creating the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia became a nominally independent Nazi puppet state. During the war, Czechoslovaks mounted resistance efforts both at home and abroad. The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 by Czech paratroopers led to brutal Nazi reprisals, including the destruction of the village of Lidice. The country was liberated in 1945 by Soviet and American forces.

After a brief post-war period of restored democracy, communists took power in a coup in February 1948, establishing a Soviet-aligned regime. The country became isolated behind the Iron Curtain, with political repression, show trials, and forced collectivization. The most significant challenge to communist rule came in 1968 during the Prague Spring, when reformist leader Alexander Dubček attempted to create “socialism with a human face,” introducing political liberalization and economic reforms. This alarmed Soviet leadership, and in August 1968, Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the reforms. The subsequent period of “normalization” brought renewed repression. When communism began collapsing across Eastern Europe in 1989 (I first visited Prague in 1988), Czechoslovakia experienced the peaceful Velvet Revolution in November, with massive demonstrations leading to the end of communist rule. Havel became president in December 1989.

The transition to democracy revealed growing tensions between Czechs and Slovaks over the country’s political and economic direction. Slovaks sought greater autonomy, while economic reforms hit Slovakia’s industrial regions harder. After negotiations failed to preserve the federation, leaders agreed to a peaceful dissolution. On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in what became known as the Velvet Divorce, a remarkably amicable end compared to the violent breakups elsewhere in post-communist Europe. Both successor states have since joined NATO and the European Union, maintaining close cultural and economic ties while pursuing their own paths as independent nations.

My mother, in her later years, reconnected to her roots in Czechoslovakia. While living in Rome, she visited her parents old home towns several times and tried to tell me all about it despite my lack of enthusiasm. It doesn’t take very many generations to disconnect entirely, and I believe I have largely disconnected from Czechoslovakia. That doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy coming back here for a visit… quite the contrary. So here we are in Prague for a visit, ostensibly for the Christmas Market, which is magical. My Prague-nosis? I can’t promise that I will suddenly feel my roots calling for me, but I think it’s fair to say that I’m ready to Czech it out.