8/2/2023 0 Comments Brave earth prologie![]() ![]() Most of them didn’t even want it.Ĭzechoslovakia was drawing to a close, and so was my childhood. The grand declaration must have seemed unconvincing at best. ![]() Bratislava would become a capital city again after all! But the crowds around her only paused on their way out of Dunaj and its nearly empty shelves to glance up and walk on, silent. On a July afternoon, strolling through Bratislava-long since demoted from its old glory as the coronation city of Hungarian royalty-she came to a halt in SNP Square just in time to observe a “Declaration of Sovereignty” by the Slovak National Council, broadcast live from Prague on a huge screen in front of a department store. ![]() Mom, an honorary Slovak by marriage and habit, had paid her first and only visit to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1992. My parents had no inkling, when the idea of moving abroad started to sprout, that a brand-new country was sprouting, too, or that they’d arrive in its very first year. Things had happened, unexpected things, unimaginable things. This move was going to be different, though. It was only in my mid-teens, just as I was allowing myself to relax into a sense of belonging, that the inevitable next move was announced. In our first year I set about writing memoirs of the places that came before, bestowing upon each work such a grandiose title as Sarah of Jersey City, according to the hallowed template of Anne of Green Gables. The result was that I distrusted our eventual stopping point of Delhi, New York, a pretentiously named but phonetically pronounced township at the north end of the Catskills, inhabited by artsy-fartsy refugees from the City and down-on-their-luck dairy farmers who declared the soil to boast “three rocks for every dirt.” I was nine when we got there and permanently puzzled as to what qualified as home. Louis, Long Island, Manhattan, Jersey City, Garfield. I liked to tot up all the places I’d called home since birth: St. We had never lived anywhere very long, of necessity trotting along after the zigzags in my dad’s education and then career, pastors being nearly as itinerant as lieutenants and captains. There was something else I knew, of which Czechoslovakia was but one of several echoes reverberating back to me from afar: I knew how always to be homesick for somewhere else. Whereas I knew that if sentimentality for the lost motherland gripped the church ladies in my grandfather’s Slovak congregation, the sure result was to be cabbage rolls, boiled with an inch of their lives. American citizenship was a mere epiphenomenon, a fact that my classmates, most of whom hadn’t the faintest idea of their own ethnic heritage, seemed unable to grasp. I knew, moreover, that it made no nevermind that three generations of us had never actually been there. Ditto the equally opprobrious “Czechoslovakian” as a term for a nonexistent language. It was anathema to us Slovaks no one on the inside ever, ever said it, The New York Times notwithstanding. I also knew that the pseudo-word “Slovakian”-usurper, pretender, and offense against eye and ear-was our private shibboleth, the unerring indicator of an outsider. My people were not Bohemians or Moravians. I assumed they were ordered according to the principle of save-the-best-for-last. Czechoslovakia, like Gaul, was divided into three parts: Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia. I knew things about Czechoslovakia that other people didn’t, and not only how to spell it. The little orange strip, topologically ridged to represent the Carpathians, could barely accommodate its unwieldy moniker, in marked and modest contrast to the vast swath only a thumbprint’s width away, which fittingly named itself with a four-letter word: U.S.S.R. Fourteen letters, beginning with that peerless Cz cluster, hinged in the middle by a modest but muscular o flicking upward the long fishtail of the remainder. Surely Czechoslovakia had the most wonderful name of them all. Whenever I visited the red and gray farmhouse in upstate New York cobbled together by my grandparents’ meager construction skills, I would spin their globe, swiping the Atlantic Ocean out of sight, to locate the inverted circumflex amidst a crazy-quilt of countries small enough to be states. It was communist, though poor little Czechoslovakia couldn’t really be blamed for that. There was reason for its reticence, of course. It had been an odd sort of companion throughout my childhood, like an invisible mirror or rumored cousin, never quite real enough to manifest, never quite imaginary enough to vanish. ![]()
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