Oral History Discussion at the Czech Consulate

Theme of discussion 'cultural migration'

On June 1, 2011, the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library invited oral history project participants Jerri Zbiral, Milos Stehlik and George Drost to take part in a panel discussion on the topic of ‘Cultural Migration: Identity and Assimilation from a Cultural Perspective.’ The discussion was moderated by Dr. Benjamin Frommer, associate professor of history at Chicago’s Northwestern University. At the event, organized with the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in Chicago, panelists discussed how film, music and the visual arts shaped their experiences as Cold War-era émigrés, and informed their work in arts and culture today.

In this excerpt, panelists discuss what motivated them to promote Czech & Slovak culture in the United States:



Jerri Zbiral: “I make my living as a photography dealer, and so for me, Czech photography has always been of great, great interest, especially from the ‘20s and ‘30s and early ‘40s. If someone would ever ask me if I could chose when and where to live to be alive, I would say the 1920s in Prague, because that’s where all the art, literature and intellectual discourse was taking place, and I would have just loved to have been sitting in a café with all these artists and discussing life and truth, because I think that that’s what was going on and hopefully we haven’t lost that.

“But that always really fascinated me, so even before the Revolution, I was going back and buying a lot of Czech photography and coming back and selling it here. Unfortunately when the Revolution happened, it was very good for the Czechs and very bad for me, all the other American auction houses and dealers went to Prague and there went that. But I’m also an artist and filmmaker, which is really the soul of who I am, and being Czech has come through. Probably many of you here know my personal story, my mother’s a Lidice woman, and my husband and I made a film called In the Shadow of Memory which deals with growing up with my mother’s stories. Obviously I didn’t live through it, but I did live through my mother’s stories, and she talked about it incessantly, on a daily basis. So, it really affected my life. And I’m hoping that my contribution to the Czech world is this film, and I think that maybe being Czech, I’m hoping that’s my largest contribution – in this country, most people don’t know about Lidice, they don’t know what happened. But not only that – telling the history of the event – but also it’s very personal, it deals with secondary trauma, and growing up with stories of trauma and hatred, I grew up with hatred of Germans, and how I deal with that as an adult, and what do you do with that? What do you do with all this baggage? It has a lot of very serious repercussions. And unfortunately, as we listen to the news every day, there are many, many, many Lidices, which happen every day, right now, as we speak. So what I’m hoping is that the film will be some kind of an example, or will show what happens to the second and third generation.”

Milos Stehlik: “I came here when I was 12 years old, and trying to define yourself as an American is a very difficult construct, because what is American? You know, on the one hand, it’s this land of the free, it’s this very large, overblown dream, but in a practical, cultural sense, it is very difficult, because it’s a much more religious country than I was used to from Czechoslovakia. School, for example, where I went was much easier, much sloppier, much less rigorous. So you come to this kind of juncture and try to figure out who you really are and where you really belong, that’s really the ultimate question, and when I started working in film, and why I started working in film, was because I knew Czech films other people didn’t know. It was something that reflected me certainly, my identity in those Czech films, but it was also a story of artists, of filmmakers, of incredible films that Americans really tuned out of and didn’t know. So, quite naturally, you see dirt and you pick up a broom and sweep it, and so this was the same thing: you see this issue and this problem and so I decided to try and fill that role, and that led to many, many years of – 36 years of – screening many, many Czech films, releasing many Czech films on DVD or video, doing lots of retrospectives and forming relationships with many Czech filmmakers. I think it was ultimately work that was perhaps not as important for the American audience as it was, particularly during the difficult years, for the Czech filmmakers, many of whom couldn’t work, didn’t have their work shown in their country, many of whom were in exile and were living here.

“So, I remember my good friend and mentor, Ján Kadár, who once asked ‘what happens to a young filmmaker who cannot work?’ And it is a very important question, what happens to an artist who is prevented from being known, from having his work seen, from being able to have his work actualized. And it is quite possible that those artists die. So, having that work shown, having it presented, really became a lifeline for many of those filmmakers, as I think Jerri’s photography, and having that photography being visible in America was a lifeline for those photographers. And being able to be the conduit, being able to be that glue that brings the art to people and gets it seen and appreciated, became essentially my life’s work and Czech – I certainly distribute and work with cultures of many, many different countries and many, many different cultures, but Czech cinema was certainly a very important and essential element, because it’s something that I know best, and that’s who I am.”

George Drost: “When we came over I was three years old, we were sponsored by the Ravenswood Presbyterian Church and I don’t think that you can get any more Anglicized than being a Presbyterian. But we didn’t spent time in Cicero, we didn’t spend time in Berwyn. We really made our allegiance to the United States. And it was at a time in ’48-’50, I think that most of you have heard of McCarthy and the red scare, and all of the suspicion, and particularly of immigrants. And the more vanilla you could look, the better off you were. And so that was our modus operandi, and none of us were spies, none of us were communists, none of us were Nazi sympathizers. We just came to America to seek freedom.

“My immigrant experience is of doing things normally as Americans would. Don’t show off your Czech-ishness, don’t be an immigrant, be an American. The problem was; what is an American? Is it Roy Rogers, is it Lawrence Welk? You kind of develop these images of people and then you find out, people have stories and that not everybody is just an American, they have a history.

“But I think the real breakthrough came in 1989, this was a life-changing moment for our family, this was the time we could realize that the Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia, became a free country. And the impossible now became possible. There was the ability to return to your place of birth. My wife got on the phone to the travel agent and as soon as we could get visas we were back to the old country. And so that was the [moment] we got back on that bridge. And this was a very exciting time to find out what those similarities were. So, how do we now cross over into the cultural realm? My history had been pretty much philistine, I wasn’t much of a cultural buff, I’m not like Milos or Jerri, who really spend their time in art. But I started to obtain an appreciation of art – I think it goes back to my college days at Augustana College – I had fine arts professors and I had Egon Weiner as a pottery professor, who has sculptures festooned around this town. He got me interested in art, and he was from Austria, an Austrian Jew who left during the Nazi times. So he was a bit of an inspiration for me, and then, being a banker, lawyer, I had the ability to purchase art, and I started collecting. I started to focus on art, Czech art – why? Well, it’s as good as any other kind of art, but it wasn’t really recognized. And that’s sort of the business instinct in me, saying ‘you can get it for a pretty good price, and still it’s high quality.’ That’s sort of a Czech trait, isn’t it?”

Watch this space for a full transcript of the event.