Czech language passed from generation to generation at a Cicero school built 100 years ago

The Masaryk School is architecturally undistinguished, a faceless cube set among Cicero’s bungalows, but every brick was laid with loving care by immigrants determined to pass the Czech language on to future generations. A century later, the parents of its students are equally committed.

Some drive their children in from far-flung suburbs such as Aurora and Downers Grove, then kill time during the three hours that classes meet on Saturdays. When I asked a room full of beginning students if they were there by choice or command, hands shot up at the second alternative, accompanied by some giggles and exclamations.

But when the room quieted down, 5-year-old Isabella Holub, of Elgin, said: “I want to learn Czech so I can talk with my grandmother.”

A life in two languages is the blessing and curse of every immigrant group. It subjects newcomers to accusations of infecting America with foreign ideas and customs. It brought the Masaryk School into existence.

Before the school was built, Czech language lessons were given in Cicero schoolrooms on Saturdays, when the public schools weren’t in session. But in 1919, the school board voted against further use of its classrooms by the Bohemian Freethinkers association.

As the population of Cicero was then 70% Czech, the maneuver seemingly reflected the establishment’s fear that “foreigners” were displacing them. In response, the Czechs decided to build their own school. They bought a lot on 22nd Place, and a Czech draftsman drew up the plans for free.

A Czech contractor issued a call for carpenters and brick masons to volunteer their services to his construction crew, and on May 8, 1922, the cornerstone was dedicated.

Several hundred schoolchildren carrying little American flags marched at the head of a parade to the site, according to the Denni Hlasatel, Chicago’s Czech newspaper. The children sang the Bohemian national anthem. A band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Karl Marx Singing Society performed.

Some of that next generation will be there grudgingly, others by choice. But one or two may say: “I’m here because my father learned Czech here so he could talk with his grandmother.”built by Freethinkers, was named for one “too: Thomas Masaryk, a philosopher and historian as well as a political activist, who had realized his dream of an independent Czechoslovakia because Austria was on the losing side in World War I.

Masaryk was in exile in the United States when he was chosen as the new country’s president. Two hundred thousand Czechs and their linguistic cousins, the Slovaks, turned out to greet him as he passed through Chicago on his way to Prague in 1918.

Its enthusiasm for Masaryk notwithstanding, Chicago’s Czech community remained split between Catholics and Freethinkers, and the debate sometimes escalated into fisticuffs.

The feud began when Marie Silhanek, a Czech woman, was denied burial in a Catholic cemetery in 1871 because she hadn’t made confession or received communion during the Easter season. Freethinkers responded by establishing the Bohemian National Cemetery on what became Chicago’s Northwest Side but was then the village of Jefferson Park.

Jefferson Park tried to veto the cemetery, alleging of Czech burial customs: “Picnics are held in the cemeteries, liquor is sold, drunkenness and noisy carousing ensue,” according to a Tribune story.

Such was typical of the stereotypes Czechs faced. It’s why they financially underwrote the Masaryk School: It demonstrated that Czechs were not uneducated and vulgar, lacking a literature and a history worth knowing.

It had language classes for adults as well as children. At 10, Jeanne Zasadil said, she was given this poem to memorize:

Za nasich mladejch let

(When we were young)

bejva svet jako kvet

(the world was beautiful like a flower.)

After reciting it at the Christmas program, she dropped out. Decades later, and having moved to downtown Chicago, she again took Czech classes at the Masaryk School, she said recently.

The school also taught English and prepared those seeking U.S. citizenship for the required civics test. “Only this way will you be able to use your political rights of voting and combating those unfriendly factors which oppose immigrants,” the Denni Hlasatel newspaper observed in calling upon readers to sign up for the courses.

Fraternal associations and civic-minded groups such as the Czechoslovak Taxpayers Association of Cicero met at the school. The Freethinkers kept watch over the separation of church and state. In 1922, they warned that a proposed revision of the Illinois Constitution would allow the Bible to be taught in public schools.

Czechoslovakia’s turbulent history kept the school’s classrooms and auditorium filled. Occupied by the Nazis on the eve of World War II, Czechoslovakia was made a Soviet satellite afterward. A reform movement was crushed by Russian tanks in 1968. Only in 1989 did democracy return.

Better conditions in the Old Country and the suburbanization of Chicago’s Czech community drained the Masaryk School’s audience pool. By 2010, only one classroom was in use.

But that year, the Czech Republic dispatched Klara Moldova to be the school’s first paid director. “I had to learn to say ‘ahoj’ not ‘dobry den,’ ” she recalled. Both translate as “hello”. The latter is more formal, and customary in Europe, but haughty sounding to American ears.

Possessing unlimited energy, Moldova met with Czechs wherever they were to be found: at picnics and in senior citizens centers. She lured them back to the school, sometimes both chairing a program and playing the violin. She is a professionally trained musician.

Recently she presented a reading by novelist Jan Novak. He was born in Czechoslovakia, raised in Chicago, and now lives in Prague. His English and Czech novels are set in both cities.

As older Czechs returned to the school, so too did their children and grandchildren, and now all classrooms are again in use. Its Czech classes traditionally ended after the eighth grade, but this year, high school students insisted on going on. Jerry Mech, a student at Chicago’s Lane Tech High School, explained that he wanted to have the option of going to university in Prague.

Such commitment could yield a new crop of Masaryk students when Mech and others from the school’s first ninth grade class have their own children.

Some of that next generation will be there grudgingly, others by choice. But one or two may say: I’m here because my father learned Czech here so he could talk with his grandmother.”

rgrossman@chicagotribune.com