Entryway

I am a descendent of Moravian (present day Czechia) peasant immigrants to central Texas. My grandmother’s family primarily spoke a dialect of Czech and held on to a Czech identity, despite how culturally removed they had become from their Eastern European relations.

Throughout the cold war my family continued to receive letters from Czech relatives. At age seven, I remember the feeling of staring at a page of ruled notebook paper, unable to think of what to write to my Czech cousin Marek who had told me he was “praying for a basketball for Christmas.” My mother and I lived alone on her preschool teacher’s income but I had no conception that we might be “poor”. At this age I was obsessed with acquiring a computer, and did not understand that this was then out of the question financially— in fact I assumed it could happen at any time. The letters from Eastern Europe were full of pathos to me and I found myself unable to think of anything to write back.

In winter of 2023, I found myself combing through the online historical archives of Czech towns. I painstakingly tried to read scanned pages from a Moravian Parish book dated 1807 during one long night. Looking for the Pavel of “Pavel” and the Frydl of “Fridel” among the pages, the looping lines of tight Kurrent script teetered past the edge of forming sounds in my mind before dissolving into voiceless chicken-scratch. ¹ I was trying to find a marriage record between Pavel, my great-great-great-great grandfather, and someone who might have been named Veronika Chrasteka…