Books, Bibliographies, and Pugs: A Festschrift to Honor Murlin Croucher

The Slavic Diaspora Library: The Slovak-American Example

The Slavic Diaspora Library: The Slovak-American Example' Gregory C. Ference The inter-war period (1918-39) represents the "golden age" of nonacademic Slavic language libraries in the United States. Despite the immigration quotas adopted by the U.S. Congress in the 1920s, Slavic life in the United States flourished for millions of immigrants who arrived largely before the beginning of World War 1. Although these restrictions severely limited immigrants from East Central Europe, a small stream continued to enrich the established Slavic communities throughout the country. Wherever a sizable number of a particular Slavic group could be found, fraternal organizations, ethnic parishes, cultural activities, and vernacular newspapers and publishing houses abounded. Slavic-American immigrants and their offspring maintained close ties to their former homelands, keeping the cultures and languages alive usually, at least, by forcing first-generation offspring to attend classes in their parent's native tongue(s). World War II and the falling of the Iron Curtain effectively halted Slavic emigration, cutting a vital link for the continued growth and well-being of Slavic-American life. Some immigrants continued to arrive, especially after traumatic events, such as the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, but their numbers remained small, and these people added little to ethnic life in America. Although cultural exchanges between the two continents resumed after the war, Cold War political considerations and realities usually tainted such events, further causing Slavic life in America to stagnate. 1 This basis of this chapter arises from a paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) in Miami, Florida, in November 1991, on the panel, "The Historical Development of Slavic Libraries/Reading Rooms." The panel also included Murlin Croucher. Gregory C. Ference and Bradley L. Schaffner, eds. Books, Bibliographies, and Pugs. Bloomington, IN: Siavica, 2006, 73-85. (Indiana Slavic Studies, 16.) 74 GREGORY C. FERENCE The advent of suburbia and the posterity of the postwar era destroyed the "glue" of churches and fraternal organizations that held many Slavic ethnic neighborhoods together. By the mid-1960s, urban flight, a natural decline in the numbers of the original immigrants, and the unwillingness of Americanized second- and third-generation Slavic-Americans to maintain ethnic ties, especially with the stigma of communism attached to the homelands of their forefathers, rang the death-knell for many ethnic communities. When the Iron Curtain rose in the late 1980s, and thus permitted Slavic emigration to resume on a small scale, the newly arrived immigrants tended to avoid established ethnic organizations, finding them old-fashioned and quaint. The Slovak experience in America did not differ from this general trend. Thomas J. Shelley presents a good overview of the rise and fall of one such enclave in Slovaks on the Hudson: Most Holy Trinity Church, Yonkers, and the Slovak Catholics of the Archdiocese of N ew York, 1894-2000 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press, 2002). Very few Slovak-American communities survive today, despite the fact that after Poles, the Slovaks rank second numerically in immigration statistics among all Slavs arriving in the United States before 19192 Background to Emigration Due to the general repression of the Slovaks and other non-Magyar minorities in Austria-Hungary after 1867, it has been readily assumed that these people would seek a way to escape their oppression. Hence the large number of immigrants, especially to the United States. Actually , for the most part, official suppression had little to do with such emigration. Other factors, including overpopulation, a lack of good farmland, unemployment, and poverty overshadowed the policies of the Hungarian government. In a little over one and a half centuries prior to the mass migration of Slovaks, the population of Slovakia rose rapidly, from approx2 U.S. Department of Labor, Reports of the Department of Labor: 1919. Report of the Secretary of Labor and Reports of Bureaus (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920),369,487. THE SLAVIC DIASPORA LIBRARY 75 imately 700,000 in 17203 to around 2,500,000 by 1850. Over the next sixty years, it increased about sixteen percent to 3,000,000,4 with the Slovaks estimated to be one-fifth of the entire population of Hungary in 1910s This growth of the overwhelmingly agrarian Slovaks led to the subdivision of their peasant landholdings into smaller plots that eventually could no longer support subsistence farming. The largely mountainous topography of Slovakia worsened this condition, causing landless...