The Change which the Bohemians Undergo. The change the Bohemians undergo in crossing the ocean and settling down in Chicago is a radical one. From the Austrian monarchy under which the Catholic church has been indirectly forced upon them, they come into a republic where freedom of religion is acknowledged. From villages and little, old towns, they come into the rushing city of Chicago. Their inward, often unconscious, store of principles and thoughts, superstitions and prejudices, has to be revised because it has been revolutionized. Sometimes the revision is swept away by the revolution.
What intense mental work it requires to distinguish the wisdom of ages crystallized into tradition from an organic prejudice—faith from superstition. Very, very few can do so much and therefore the hardship, the unevenness of the first generation of Bohemians.
The simple, gentle manners of a Bohemian peasant and artisan have to undergo a period of change through the distrust accorded all strangers and the imitation of those beati possidentes that inherited their traditions and manners from other ancestors. This queer mixture in the period of changing does not raise sympathy in those who, because they see only the surface, cannot understand and therefore cannot love.
The Bohemians at home have a strong family life. A married son or daughter remains under the same roof with the aged parents, who retire into a quiet nook, where they enjoy their flaxen-haired, brown-eyed grandchildren. This trait, though modified, continues in Chicago. On a Sunday afternoon, the Eighteenth street car is filled with families, scrubbed, brushed and starched-up, bound for some festival hall to have a good time.
The Bohemian housekeepers know how to get great results from small means, which is most valuable for the poorer class and shows in the red and glossy cheeks of the children. On the other hand, the heavy food (pork with dumplings, for instance, is very common, and with it the usual glass of beer) produces those of full forms without corresponding strength, so general among the well-to-do citizens.
The Bohemians are capable of being amalgamated quickly. They learn the language easily, they give work for which even under competition, they can demand decent wages; they take an interest in politics.
From the Old Country to the New.What then is the reason for that vigorous Bohemian-American life, which forms a world of its own in the midst of the city of Chicago? A hundred years ago, after a long and dead slumber into which the Catholic anti-reformation (one form of Christianity) put the country, the Bohemian national spirit began to breathe. Like an underground current, that tries to find an opening for its waters and is untiring in the tiresome task of seeking and seeking, so tried the hidden, downtrodden Bohemian nation to find a way to live, and it slowly succeeded.
After the fifties, one streamlet, diverted from the general current, found its way to the United States and to the city of Chicago. The obstacles, the bounds that held in this streamlet were removed. So sudden was the change that the waters which expected obstacles burst out into a jet instead of flowing slowly, running mills and factories. Liberty, longed for by generations of Bohemians, was given to the people here, and the energies of thought and longings pent up in the breast for generations without being examined and modified in the fire of deeds, have compelled a disproportionate display.
In the meantime, the mother stream in the old country found its way more naturally because the movement was slower, the obstacles greater, because those who took part in it possessed the discriminating and radical conversatism of thorough education. The same longings that make the Bohemians in Chicago form endless clubs, which make them free thinkers, distrusting all denominational churches, took a more organic growth in the old country, in development in music, arts and sciences, as well as in economic life.
II.
Two pages, large sheets of the daily paper Svornost lie before me, covered with
