An Interview with David Chroust

Interview conducted by Russel Gardin

After living in refugee camp, Dr. David Chroust’s parents decided to go to the United States with the help of an organization called AFCR. He shares his story about Czech comminities and how he actively involves himself in them.

Interview

This interview was made in collaboration with Department of History in University of Houston and Czech Center Museum Houston. The following text is the verbatim transcription of the oral history project.

February 8, 2020

UH Interviewer: You immigrated to the United States after the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia; could you talk about the initial outbreak and why your family deemed it necessary to relocate, first to a refugee camp and then ultimately the U.S.?

David Chroust: My father was 27 in 1968 and my mother was 26. They had an apartment in Teplice. My father worked for a construction company where he was a machine designer and my mother worked in a department store. They decided to leave Czechoslovakia after the Soviet occupation because that was something they were unwilling to accept, the occupation of their country. That’s what they always said for the reason to leave. We eventually left, but it was not easy for them to leave, obtaining the information to leave the country in the fall of 1968 and early 1969. Their emigration depended on the approval of their employers and beyond that. They did eventually get permission and they left with me in March of 1969 and went to live in the refugee camp.

When we lived in the refugee camp, my parents were considering which country they would like to live in; they didn’t want to live in any European country because they thought that—I recall them saying maybe the Soviet Union would occupy that country. Sweden, for example, was a place they considered. They wanted to go outside of Europe. They really wanted to go to Canada, not the United States. But in order to go to Canada, they would have to have some money, which they didn’t; the United States made no such requirement. That’s why they came to the United States.

UH Interviewer: You didn’t initially land in Texas. Central Texas and “hill country” in particular has a large Czech community. Was there, and perhaps is there, a similar demographic in Ohio? If not, what was the feeling of coming to Texas and seeing that for the first time?

David Chroust: There is a large Czech community in Cleveland, Ohio. It is a city with large populations of other nationalities from central and Eastern Europe, a lot of people from Polish descent as well as Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, and Ukrainian. The Czech community in Cleveland dates back to the 1850s—it was something I wrote about in my dissertation on Czech immigrants in the United States and their journalism from the 1850s until World War I. In 1910 or 1920, Cleveland had about 40,000 Czech people and their children, so first and second generation, which made it the second or third largest urban community of Czech people in America after Chicago, which had about 10,000, and greater New York, which had a little over 40,000. There was a large Czech community in Cleveland.

When I earned my Master’s Degree in library information systems I wanted to work as an academic librarian at a university and that was not possible in Ohio because of low state funding for libraries. I wanted to go somewhere else and had several offers, but one reason I wanted to come to Texas was that there were also a lot of people of Czech descent here. I thought it would be interesting that there would be a lot of people here that I had something in common with.

UH Interviewer: You said your mother worked as a designer for windows—

David Chroust: Store displays. Window and in-store displays, yeah.

UH Interviewer: What kind of machines did your father design?

David Chroust: My father had several different jobs in Czechoslovakia and succession. His education was from—I would call it in English—a technical high school. He learned machine design and did that kind of work for a company called Báňské Stavby. (báňské means “mining” and stavby means “construction.”) It was a company that constructed things in coal mines because it was an area in northern Bohemia. A coal region. At that time in the 1960s, there was a lot of coal mining in mines that date from the 1870s, actually. He worked for a company that did construction inside coal mines—corridors and other kinds of technical construction.

UH Interviewer: What was the social circle like for Czechs in America and what kind of assistance did your family get from the Czechoslovak diaspora?

David Chroust: There was an organization founded at the beginning of the 1950s by refugees from Czechoslovakia after 1948 called the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees (AFCR). This was the organization that sponsored my parents along with many other families from Czechoslovakia after 1968, and by “sponsor” I mean they paid for the plane tickets for us, decided which cities to send us to, and made living arrangements for us there. The local Czech community, in our case Cleveland, helped my father find a job, which was at a machine shop. About seven years ago I found a book published in Czech about the AFCR and the work they did for people like my family.

UH Interviewer: How important was it for you to retain the Czech culture? Was there any push from your parents to assimilate and “Americanize”?

David Chroust: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think my parents or the other families that they knew thought in those kinds of terms, whether cultural heritage was important or not. It was just part of their life and when they came here they didn’t speak or have any knowledge of English; it was a language that was difficult for them to learn. I remember as I was growing up their friends were either Czech or Slovak and in some cases Polish; in this circle of people they continued to speak Czech and do so to this day. Many of their friends have died, unfortunately, over the decades, but that was their social circle in Cleveland, Ohio. It was interesting because there were also different generations of Czech people in Cleveland. There were people who came from Czechoslovakia in earlier times, before 1968, but there were also people who came in the early 20th century. And then there were also people who were children of Czech immigrants from earlier times who could speak Czech to some extent. It was a multi-layer community of people. I think you would find the same thing in any other nationality in the United States or anywhere else.

UH Interviewer: From your experience in a majority-student area in Texas like College Station, how do you see the Czech culture being preserved, if at all?

David Chroust: Maybe A&M is not a great example. I don’t know if there are many—there are probably a lot of students of Czech descent simply because there are a lot of Texans who are of Czech descent. There are all kinds of claims about the numbers. But the fact is, in the 1920 or 1930 census, there was something like 40,000 people in Texas whose native language was Czech. The first and second generation. That was about how many there were in Cleveland. One thing I find remarkable in Texas is that there are a lot of Czech heritage organizations, like the Texas Czech Genealogical Society and the Czech Heritage Society. I’m on the board of directors at the Czech Education Foundation of Texas, which was founded in 1954 to support teaching and learning the Czech language in higher education throughout Texas. I think the Czech community in Texas is very well organized.

UH Interviewer: Growing up, were there any kinds of organizations like these around your community?

David Chroust: Yes, there was a Czech school in Cleveland on the west side. It was some kind of Czech community building, or maybe a gymnastics society. They had a Czech language school there on Saturdays; my parents sent me there for a short time when I was around 10 years old. The thing is, Czech is my native language; I already went to school in Czechoslovakia, at least until the first grade. The school was kind of boring for me because there were kids there from American families of Czech descent, kids that couldn’t speak Czech. They were learning simple words and how to write them, so for me, it wasn’t interesting because I already knew all of that. That might be a problem for language schools of other nationalities, too: they bring together children who have a wide range of abilities and knowledge of the language, but it’s not interesting for the kids that already know the language to some extent.

UH Interviewer: Over time, how has your national identity changed? At what point did you consider yourself Czech-American?

David Chroust: I don’t think about it that much, but I do feel Czech. I’m from there and when I visit, everyone thinks I’m from there, but I don’t speak Czech like other people in the Republic do. At the same time, I’m American because I’ve lived in this country since I was seven years old. My wife is from Russia, so for the last twenty-five years, I’ve been able to speak Russian with most of our friends that are Russian-speaking. I also speak German. I feel like we’re living in a world where we can have more than one identity. We can have many.

UH Interviewer: Taking the Czech community outside of Texas, can you talk about the modern diaspora at-large around the world?

David Chroust: Well, there is a global Czech diaspora, just like there is a diaspora of people from any country, like Vietnam or the United States. Diasporas are always tough because they include people from generations and completely different life trajectories and experiences. And by generation, I mean not just the age of the people themselves but also the generations of immigration. Here in Texas, there aren’t many young people of direct Czech descent, but they may be fourth or fifth generation, so that makes diasporas really complex. Diasporas usually have some organizations of people interested in different kinds of things, like genealogy, preservation of language, or tourism. They are complex in their social structure and in their culture.

I remember when I came to Cleveland in 1968 my parents encountered people from Czechoslovakia that had been in the city since the early 1950s, when they left after the communist takeover in 1948. These are really different generations of people, and it was hard for them to understand each other because they had such different life experiences. People may be from the same country and share a language, but that might be all that they share because they are so different. I remember some of the people my parents knew in Cleveland left after 1948: they had a very negative view of everything in Czechoslovakia after 1948 because it was “communist” and that’s what they were escaping from. This came as a shock to my parents because they grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and for them, it was a normal country. It was hard for them to encounter people who had such negative views of where they were from, even though they were also Czech. There can be cultural clashes in diasporas.