Where is My Home: Slovak Immigration to North America (1870-2010) by M. Mark Stolarik (review)

The author of this volume, M. Mark Stolarik, was born in Slovakia and arrived in Canada as a seven-year-old child in 1951. The young Stolarik was to follow a career trajectory not uncommon for the few hundred-thousand refugees from central and eastern Europe, who arrived in the United States and Canada under the rubric of displaced persons (DPs) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These were people in the professions (lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists) and holders of civil service posts—Stolarik’s father headed a local tax office in independent Slovakia during World War II—who were forced to flee because they were opposed to the Soviet-oriented Communist regimes established in their homelands after 1945.

Imbued by his parents with a love of ancestral Slovakia, yet at the same time realizing that success in the New World depended on a solid education, the young Stolarik was sent to an English-language school in Ottawa, then to the University of Ottawa where he majored in history (B. A., 1965, M. A., 1967), and from there to the University of Minnesota in the United States where he earned a Ph.D. in 1974. Trained as a specialist in immigration history, his research topics were, not surprisingly, the Slovak immigration to North America. After a teaching job at Cleveland State University (1972-1976) and a brief return to Canada to work as a researcher at the Canada’s National Museum of Man in Ottawa (currently Canada’s National Museum of Civilization), in late 1978 Stolarik was appointed director of the Balch Institute for the study of immigration in Philadelphia, where for over a dozen years he honed his skills as an academic administrator and fund-raiser. In 1991, he was invited back to Canada to take up what for him was the ultimate position: an endowed tenured professorship in the newly established Chair of Slovak History at his alma mater, the University of Ottawa. Successfully ensconced in his Canadian hometown, Stolarik holds the Slovak history chair to this day.

It may seem strange to start a review with a brief biography of the author. The relevance of such an approach is related to the somewhat unorthodox format of Stolarik’s book, Where is My Home? He has decided to tell the story of Slovak immigration during the period, 1870 to 2010, through the prism of the careers of three generations of Stolariks: his grandfather Imrich, his father Imrich Jr., and himself Mark. At the very outset the author us why he did this: “whenever I approached the subject matter in the traditional fashion by looking at the Old World background, the causes of emigration, the transatlantic voyage settling in the New World and so on, I was thoroughly bored and feared that my audience would be too.” (p. xvi). To be sure, biographies and autobiographies are genres of great interest in and of themselves. But does not a relatively under-researched topic like the history of Slovaks in North America require as a first step, so to speak, a standard research narrative of the kind Stolarik feared writing because it would bore him and his readers?

In fact, the author has done both. Each of his ten chapters begins with the life story of one of the Stolariks: the pre-World War I sojourner US immigrant grandfather who returned home permanently; the Slovak civil servant turned DP father who becomes a Slovak national activist in Canada; and the scholar son who has successfully promoted the history and culture of his ancestral homeland to generations of students and readers in North America. While the lives of the three Stolariks and their spouses and relatives are in and of themselves fascinating, they function here as prototypes to represent the three stages of North American immigration from central and eastern Europe.

But this is not all. After the family history is told, the rest of each chapter...