Several times a week, Paul Valasek closes his dental office early and helps prepare exhibits at the Czechoslovak Heritage Museum in Oak Brook for storage.
“We like to think the museum isn’t closing, it’s just going into hibernation,” Valasek said on a recent afternoon as his wife, Andrea, carefully wrapped a cut-glass vase.
But with the once tightknit community that built the collection now widely dispersed, the future is uncertain for the 39-year-old museum. The building containing its galleries, in a nondescript office park on 22nd Street in Oak Brook, has been sold, and before the year is out the museum will be homeless. Its loyal supporters don’t know where or when it might reopen.
The museum houses the collection of CSA Fraternal Life, established in 1854 by Czech and Slovak immigrants to provide a measure of financial help for widows and children. The museum’s first home, in 1974, was in the society’s headquarters on Cermak Road in Berwyn. Located on a shopping and socializing rialto, it had a visible presence in the Czechoslovakian community, noted former curator Dagmar Bradac.
Over the years, members of the association, or their survivors, brought in pieces for the museum. “Czechs don’t throw anything away,” explained Barbara Hoffman, a museum volunteer, as others at work packing up nodded in agreement.
Kroje, colorful folk costumes, are packed into boxes labeled with the towns and regions from which they came: “South Bohemia,” “Slovakia,” “Jino Cesky.” The costumes and other pieces of the collection are markers of the journey of Czechs and Slovaks from towns like Prague and Brno to ethnic enclaves around Chicago like Cicero and Berwyn.
They were brought to America by immigrants hoping that Old World customs could be transplanted, or at least remembered.
“I remember seeing parades as a kid with Czech marchers dressed like that,” Dien Zeigler, a volunteer who grew up in Westmont, said of the costumes. “We just packed a three-piece suit made of hemp. He must have come to the States wearing his Sunday best.”
Still on shelves and to be packed are dolls made of cornhusks, elaborately decorated Easter eggs and hand-painted coffee cups. A favorite theme of the latter genre is scenes from Bedrich Smetana’s opera “The Bartered Bride,” revered by Czechs as the quintessential musical expression of their national spirit.
One set of cups is accompanied by a card noting that it was given to the museum in memory of the donor’s parents, Miles and Joyce Aspirin of Molina, N.J. Many artifacts are similarly credited. A poster issued upon Czechoslovakia’s creation in 1918 is marked: “From Aubrecht Family.”
Those donations reflect both the strength and dilemma of a museum dedicated to one immigrant group. The Czechoslovak Heritage Museum acquired its collection free of charge but, over time, its audience and the number of its financial backers have declined. Parents nudge children to assimilate.
“My mother was Slovak,” Zeigler said. “But she told us: ‘Speak English!'”
Zeigler said she got back in touch with her roots later in her life through the museum. Others have done the same — for those trying to trace a family tree, the archives contain invaluable resources like death notices from long defunct Czech-American newspapers.
Yet ties to the old country can diminish quickly in America, where Cupid flies over ethnic boundaries. “My wife and I have multiple ethnic heritages, so which, if any, are our children going to identify with?” said John Kielczewski, president of CSA Fraternal Life.
The museum helped Bradac get her bearings when she arrived in the western suburbs after fleeing Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia in 1982. She saw signs pointing to two area museums.
“One was for Frank Lloyd Wright (in Oak Park), the other for Czechs (then still in Berwyn), which I chose,” Bradac recalled.
In addition to paintings and sculptures, the collection includes humbler objects, even hallowed old country soil. During World War II, the Nazis massacred the population of Lidice, a village near Prague, commemorated at the museum by handfuls of dirt scooped up from the site of the tragedy after Germany’s defeat.
At the museum’s entrance is a heroic scale painting of Czechoslovakia’s first president, Tomas Masaryk, regally seated on a cavalryman’s horse. Bradac noted that, like her, the painting was a refugee from the communists, who wanted to erase all reminders of Czech history prior to their seizure of power after World War II.
“The painting was cut from its frame, rolled up and smuggled to America,” Bradac said. “Look closely, and you’ll see where it was damaged during its travels.”
Also part of the collection is an icon of the group’s New World experience, a dollhouse replica of the type of bungalow that lines the streets of Berwyn and Cicero. Tiny Christmas wreaths decorate its window; a family’s wash hangs out to dry on the front porch. Its maker labeled it: “3729 S. Euclid.”
“A bungalow is the Bohemian heaven,” said Valasek, using a term for a Czech speaker. For immigrants, he explained, a home of their own, no matter how humble, was confirmation they’d made a good decision to come to America.
Berwyn’s bungalows are now more likely to house Spanish speakers, the Czechs having moved on to suburbs farther west. Following its clientele, CSA transferred its headquarters to Harlem Avenue in Riverside, and then to its present location.
Along the way, the museum was spun off as a separate entity, though some members serve on the boards of both CSA and the Czechoslovak Heritage Museum. The CSA continued to house the museum, rent-free, an annual subsidy currently worth $20,000, according to the CSA Fraternal Life president, Kielczewski.
In retrospect, he thinks it was a big mistake to bring the museum along to CSA’s latest location, a commercial structure on an anonymous stretch of a four-lane road.
“It’s like the philosophical issue of a tree falling with no one to hear it,” Kielczewski said. “If a museum is in an office building, and nobody comes, is it still a museum?
The question will soon be moot. Computers have replaced the pyramids of paper files that once were CSA’s records, so it sold the Oak Brook building and is moving to smaller offices.
The museum, which hasn’t been able to afford a professional staff for years, soon won’t have doors for its volunteers to keep open.
“Each of these artifacts has a story to tell,” Valasek said, wrapping still another. “The pity is they’ll be in boxes where no one can see them.”
