WRITING MEMORIES IN THE SLOVAK-AMERICAN LITERATURE
Diana Židová (Trnava, Slovakia)
The two contemporary American writers – Rita Malie and Andrew Krivák – bring unusual stories with several common traits. Goodbye America and The Sojourn retell the stories of Slovaks who found their new home in America. Both writers bring remarkable "from the life" stories springing from the reminiscences of their relatives.
A 2001 Danube river cruise in Slovakia becomes an inspiration for writing motherʾs memoir Goodbye America written from Malieʾs perspective. On the other hand, in The Sojourn, Krivák tells a story about the turbulent journey of his grandfather who fights as a sharpshooter in the World War I. Fate, however, leads their steps back to the land of their relatives situated in the central and east sites of present Slovakia. Literature is then significant in the way that by writing and reading stories we can understand that the role of humanities in the 21st century lies in keeping memories alive.
Rita Malie grew up in Youngstown, Ohio and worked in healthcare administration for over thirty years. In 2001, Rita travelled on a cruise down the Danube River visiting Slovakia, the homeland of her grandparents. The cruise inspired her to write her mother´s memoir Goodbye America (2006) which received four first place awards from Florida Writers Association, Royal Palm Awards for Best Children´s Unpublished Nonfiction, Best family Saga and finally she received first place from the 2005 Promoting Outstanding Writers Awards for unpublished Children´s/Youth Category. The book has been a popular item in the Ellis Island Immigration Museum since 2007.
The book has two parallel stories. In the first narrative, Malie`s mother called Baba tells a story of her life every Thanksgiving Day to her great-granddaughters. She is nearly ninety and she has been telling her story for three generations. Morgan and Madison want to hear it again while the rest of the family is preparing the Thanksgiving dinner: “Baba tell us your story again. That´s the best part of our visit.” (Malie, 2006, p. 6)
The second narrative is about Baba - Anna Baron who lives with her family in America. After father´s death during the flu epidemic of 1919, her mother takes four children back to her home village Pohorelá, situated in what used to be Czechoslovakia at that time. Realizing that life filled with misery, hunger and unfavorable nature in Slovak mountains has not really changed since she has emigrated, Mommo takes two elder children and heads back to America. Anna and her younger sister Julie stay with grandparents in Pohorelá for five long years after they eventually return to their native land - America.
Baba´s narrative is a colorful and touching story filled with historical information provided by Lubor Matejko from Comenius University in Bratislava. Matejko provides old photos of different ceremonies and festivities held in Pohorelá. Conversely, the book is enriched with pictures of little Anna and her family or with her Great-Granddaughters too. A little map of Czechoslovakia is printed too, but paradoxically, it is dated sometime in the regime of socialism, because it gives names of Czech Socialist Republic and Slovak Socialist Republic.
Both story lines, although stylistically different, are very plausible. Baba´s conversation with Morgan and Madison is dynamic and colloquial. In these lines they are talking about what will happen in the following chapters, so it reinforces curiosity and expectation: “Do you remember the next part of my story, moje anjels?” (Malie, 2006, p. 16)
The narrative of Anna as a little girl is on the other hand filled with traumatic memories and problematic relationship between her and mother. Anna´s mother blames her for losing husband. In the scene at their arrival to Pohorelá, Anna is introduced to grandparents as follows:
“Last is Anna. I call her ciganocka (my little gypsy) because she likes pretty, colorful clothes. I think she´ll like the Slovak dress with all its fancy embroidery and colors. She´s now four, tall, skinny and sickly. She used to sing a lot and was happy like her Deddo, until he died. Now she´s been sad ever since we left America. She´s allergic to milk and has a bad stomach. She had the flu the same time as Karl. I don´t know how God took my Karl, who was healthy, and left, Anna who was sickly. She´s always been so frail. We never thought she´d live much beyond three years old, but here she is. Mommo never looked at me the whole time during introduction. My heart sank. Again, I felt those words stabbing me. I guess Mommo will never change. She´ll never let me forget that somehow God sacrificed Deddo for me.” (Malie, 2006, p. 22)
Andrew Krivák´s first novel The Sojourn, published in 2011, is a great success. Krivák was the National Book Award Finalist and won the Chautauqua Prize in 2012. He was inspired by the story of his grandfather Jozef Vinich who was uprooted from a 19th-centrury mining town Pueblo in Colorado. After a shocking family tragedy when his mother dies in a train accident, Jozef and his father travel back to his native village near Prešov. Life with envious stepmother and her two sons is hard. Jozef sees his escape in joining the upcoming war with another adopted brother peculiarly nicknamed Zlee. Together they get to the southern front in Italian Alps and become notable sharpshooters. After Zlee is hit by an enemy and subsequently dies, Jozef is captured by victorious enemy and put in prison. When he is freed, his steps lead him to the only place he can call home, his village in the Slovak mountains. Realizing that his father is dead, Jozef intuitively travels back to America, his birth place.
On his desk, Krivák kept a photograph he had of his grandfather, a boyish-looking seventeen, posing with three other “gunners” of the Austro-Hungarian army with what he would discover later was a makeshift anti-aircraft gun. The picture is dated spring 1918, just before the battle of the Piave River. In a matter of months, the other three men would be dead and his grandfather would be on a forced march across Italy to his internment on the Island of Sardinia. Krivák traveled to the battlefields where they died: the Isonzo, the Piave, the Carinthian Alps, the Bainsizza Plateau. Like Jozef, (the protagonist of The Sojourn), his grandfather also grew up with a stepmother, who said to him when he walked through the door, “Why aren’t you dead like all the rest of them?” That question has haunted the author ever since he heard it told around the stove in his grandmother’s kitchen so many years ago. His grandfather’s survival, his coming-of-age story in another country, is the reason why he can think of what it means to come of age, to have a history, to reflect on a past in another place, and to write about it. In his novel, he wanted to take the survival spirit of his grandparents and great aunts and uncles—the American spirit —and place it back in the old country, in the mind, heart, and body of one man, and see how it was that that spirit survived in the sojourn of its youth (Krivák, 2011).
Krivák argues that The Sojourn is not only a war story, but on another level we may consider it as a love story or even a coming of age story. Interestingly, the story is only loosely based on real facts, although Krivák includes experience of his relatives:
“I had grown up hearing about my grandmother´s life in “the old country” and about my mother´s and father´s lives as the children of Slovak immigrants trying to realize the promise of America during the time of the Great Depression. Those stories always followed the arc of a beginning, middle and end, recreating a scene of a place and time that I knew nothing of, and yet knew it was real because people I could touch had come from there.” (Krivák, 2011).
Both books – Goodbye America and The Sojourn show that keeping memories alive is a basic motivation for humans to understand their past, present and future life. By writing down what they have heard enables authors to reconstruct their identity in the country of immigrants and their descendants. It is strongly believed that ethnic features make a colorful impact in the touching story, but they do not exceed the artistic merit of the work itself.
References
KRIVÁK, A. 2011. The Sojourn. New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2011. 191 p. ISBN 19-3413-734-0.
KRIVÁK, A. 2011. A Conversation on The Sojourn. [online]. 07.04. 2011 [cit. 01.02.2017]. Available from: https://www.andrewkrivak.com/book-extras/news/2011/04/07/a-conversation-on-the-sojourn/
MALIE, R. 2006. Goodbye America: A Great-Grandmother's Personal Childhood Story. Jacksonville Beach, FL : High-Pitched Hum Pub., 2006. 73 p. ISBN 09-7879-957-7.