"Where everyone goes to meet everyone else": the translocal creation of a Slovak immigrant community.

  The whole area east of the Bowery and south of Houston Street is their
  particular province. They have started colonies all up the East Side
  from the Brooklyn Bridge to Harlem.... The New Yorker constantly rubs
  elbows with Israel. The thorough-fares abound with Jewish hucksters,
  selling all imaginable jimcracks; certain streets are almost
  impassably clogged with Jewish pushcarts.... In a word, New York is
  not only largely, and probably destined to be overwhelmingly, a city
  of Hebrews, but a city of Asiatics.
  --Burton J. Hendrick, "The Great Jewish Invasion" (1907)

  The Czecho-Slovak group in Philadelphia is very hard to reach as a
  group because they live in scattered neighborhoods where many other
  immigrants are mingled with them--because they do not have one center
  to go to.
  --Christine Zduleczna, "The Czecho-Slovaks in Philadelphia" (1927) (1)

When magazine writers such as Burton J. Hendrick toured the Jewish Lower East Side near the turn of the century, they might have been forgiven their assumption that the immigrant "invasion" had rendered the area east of the Bowery into a wholly Jewish district. Hendrick noted, after all, that by 1907 New York was home to 800,000 Jewish "souls." Yet as the report by social worker Christine Zduleczna makes clear, there were many other, less numerous, less visible immigrant groups that never had the numbers to dominate in a single enclave in America's cities. The problem I set out to examine, then, is how a small immigrant group created a community for itself if it could never control its own piece of the city, an ethnic ghetto, in which all or nearly all residents shared the same Old Country home. Small immigrant communities' invisibility continues to be a problem, not just for magazine "slumologists," but also for historians, who to this day by and large look to neighborhood ghettos of the large groups when seeking to hunt out their immigrant quarry.

This conception of the urban immigrant community as existing in bounded space began with Progressive Era reformers such as Jacob Riis, and continued with armchair ethnologists for the popular press, writers such as Hendrick who took readers on exotic safaris to the "Asiatic" Jewish Lower East Side or Italian Mulberry Bend. In these depictions a particular neighborhood was synonymous with the immigrant community, and for large immigrant groups in New York, this may well have been the case. (2)

Sociologists, beginning with the Chicago School represented by such luminaries as Park and Burgess and Louis Wirth, spoke of the laws of immigrant acculturation, beginning with a ghetto area of first settlement, chiefly among one's own ethnicity, and then pushing out to rings of secondary settlement as ethnic group members acculturated. The important facts remained that, these sociologists argued that immigrant communities began in contiguous inner-city neighborhoods, chiefly among large numbers of ethnically similar neighbors. (3)

This conception of the immigrant community has continued to have resonance with historians, who for the most part conceive of the ethnic community in terms of bounded space. (4) To be sure, some historians have documented the extent to which even in areas regarded as German or Irish enclaves several groups lived together, even if one particular group achieved dominance. Olivier Zunz argues the Irish and Germans came to dominate distinct sections of Detroit between 1880 and 1900, even if they never comprised 51% of a neighborhood, by "marking" an area as theirs through ethnic businesses, fraternal associations and parishes, even if other groups shared the streets. Zane L. Miller in general notes that even parts of 19th-century American cities such as Chicago commonly regarded as "belonging" to one ethnic group were more often polyglot depositories of the foreign-born. (5)

When immigrants and the native-born alike tried to carve communities out of these vast urban spaces, they did not always do so in localized ways. Kenneth Scherzer has documented the ways in which native-born Protestants as well as Irish Roman Catholics created translocal communities in 19th-century New York. To be sure, John McGreevy writes of the way in which Catholic residents of the urban Northeast and Midwest conceived of themselves as denizens of particular parishes, no matter who their neighbors were or how distant the journey to pray. The examples he cites, though, are primarily Irish-Americans, who usually lived in geographically bounded parishes, which Eastern and Southern European Catholics often rejected when building non-localized "ethnic" or "national" parishes. (6)

Nicholas von Hoffman, too, has argued for the development of a sense of "local attachments" by the late-19th-century residents of a chiefly middle-class Boston area. Out of a vast array of associations, secular and religious, there developed in the neighborhood "a common neighborhood culture" among those dedicated to the geographically bounded space of Jamaica Plain. The spatially bounded nature of community that von Hoffman stresses may have applied to those with sufficient disposable income to invest themselves in civic-pride campaigns, but even here it seems the "local-ness" of such attachments is slightly overstated. When it comes to the Germans of the area, ethnic allegiances won out over localism, as immigrants of the Plains sought Vereinswesen (associational fellowship) and religious services among co-ethnics in institutions located miles away, in other parts of the city. Von Hoffman's discussion of the overlapping weave of German, native-born and Irish church-based organizations and associational communities, suggests that rather than a common, and locally based community, several at times dispersed associational networks coexisted, at times contentiously, within the same streetscape. The "common neighborhood culture" sometimes seems more assumed than demonstrated, and little evidence is presented for the harmonious interaction of the various subgroups sharing Jamaica Plain. Contentious arguments between Irish working-class denizens of the fringes of Jamaica Plain and their more affluent, old-stock not-quite neighbors over the siting of train stations and the quality of schools suggest that the Irish, German, and native-born experiences of the area were not as seamless as the evocation of "a common neighborhood culture" might suggest. Streets might be shared, but it may have been that communities, even here, were layered on top of each other, and have had different cognitive boundaries and meanings, depending on whom one asked. Von Hoffman fails to account for the possibility that, as in Zunz's Detroit, ethnic dominance and clustering may have occurred, but that the cityscape may have been experienced differently by varying subgroups. (7)

Thus even in more recent scholarship on urban ethnic groups the focus has been on large immigrant clusters that dominated particular locales, or on the middle-class denizens of cities who may have had the disposable income and leisure time to develop a spatially bounded pride of place in a particular locale. Historians have tended to overlook the ways in which smaller groups may have been able to transcend geography through the institutional formation of ethnic communities. It was such smaller ethnic groups of the "new immigration" that may have needed to build communities in more resourceful, selective, and non-geographical ways.

The Slovaks of Philadelphia were one such small group that never had the numbers to dominate any one neighborhood, and dispersed over several neighborhoods from the very first years of settlement. By 1910, approximately 2,000 Slovaks had already dispersed far and wide across Philadelphia, with another 1,000 or so in nearby cities such as Clifton Heights, Delaware County, and Camden, N.J. Still, it is possible to map out a community centered not in shared turf but in the churches and fraternal clubs to which a widely diffuse membership belonged. A translocal community could expand to contain people miles, even states apart but contract to exclude from one's social, worship, and job networks non-Slavs living around the corner. In this configuration the ethnic community becomes a series of cognitive maps centered on ethnic nodes of community that allowed various groups to share residential neighborhoods while simultaneously layering different ethnic communities on the same few blocks of streetscape.

Moreover, as I hope to demonstrate through an examination of parish records and fraternal-club minutes from elsewhere in industrial America, this pattern of selective and expansive community building was employed elsewhere in the country such as western Pennsylvania, where Slovaks were more numerous than in Philadelphia. As members of a small ethnic group, often laboring in isolated yet multiethnic settings such as coal patch towns or small steel cities, Slovaks often had no other option but to find community among coethnics in creative ways, using the institutions they built themselves, not the accident of who lived in the tenement or shack next door, to attain the material and psychic benefits that enabled them to survive. Community could be a portable commodity.

In this respect, these immigrants are a vivid example of the kind of urban network creation that Claude Fischer discusses in the context of 1970s urban northern California, in which far-flung associates may be those with whom one establishes the greatest emotional ties, while one builds relations with nearby neighbors--if one builds them at all--based on utility and convenience. When far-flung contacts are retained, Fischer posits, the greater investment in energy, time and money required to maintain these commitments indicates a stronger degree of emotional attachment. (8) Thomas Bender, too, performed groundbreaking work that stressed non-geographically localized forms of social interaction in the 19th-century city. Likewise, Barry Wellman suggests that in the working-class Toronto neighborhood of East York, residents "were finding (community) in ties, not in public places." Wellman contends that "personal communities" exist "in neither locality nor solidarity, but in the ways in which networks of informal relations fit persons and households into social structures." With the caveat that Slavic immigrants to the U.S. circa 1900 were more associational minded (and in an age before Social Security and other amenities of the broker state, perhaps they had to be), Slovaks in places such as Philadelphia were no less translocal and selective than East Yorkers in the "ties" that they built with co-ethnics. (9)

The evidence strongly indicates this is how Slovaks structured a sense of place in Philadelphia. Two demographic factors made it difficult for Slovaks to build an ethnic community in the Quaker City. They were already by 1910, the federal census indicates, dispersed across the city, chiefly in four widely separated parts of the city, and for the most part living in places where they were only one small element in multiethnic neighborhoods. (10) The dilemma faced by Philadelphia Slovaks in search of community was all too apparent to the settlement house author of Foreign Born in Philadelphia, who remarked in 1930 that, "The Slovak group in Philadelphia has many disadvantages.... They come from two sections of Slovakia widely separated, i.e., from the far west and from the far east.... The Slovaks from western Slovakia live mostly north from East Market Street, while the Slovaks from Eastern Slovakia live mostly in South Philadelphia, quite far south near 28th Street." Similarly, Christine Zduleczna's report to the Nationalities Service Center on "the Czecho-Slovaks (sic) in Philadelphia" in 1927 lamented how hard it was to even identify such a group "because they live in scattered neighborhoods where many other immigrants are mingled with them--because they do not have one center to go to." (11)

In Northern Liberties immigrants from Trencin province, western Slovakia, as early as the 1880s began settling in the area bounded by Vine on the south, Girard Avenue on the north, from the Delaware west to about Seventh. Although one or two streets such as New Market stood out in the memory of senior informants as "all Slovak," (12) these streets were invariably home to other ethnicities, too. The 100-300s of New Market (between Arch and Callowhill) in 1910 was indeed Northern Liberties' densest concentration of Slovaks, 37 households in just three short blocks.

But as throughout the Liberties, on New Market a wide range of ethnic types lived in tight proximity. The 300s of New Market in 1910 contained native-born residents of Irish and English parentage; Irish; Russian-Jewish; Polish; Lithuanian; German; Italian, and Finnish residents, aside from Slovaks. Indeed, in 1910 Northern Liberties, not a single block was discovered that was only Slavic, never mind Slovak. The block front clustering that Zunz discovered for German and Irish Detroiters did not occur for Slavs in Northern Liberties. (13)

Two-and-a-half miles to the south, in the old colonial neighborhood of Southwark south of South Street, a second concentration of Slovaks lived near the Delaware on S. Front, Bainbridge, Fitzwater, and Queen, but as in the Liberties, in 1910 this was a multiethnic area, with only a smattering of Slovaks interspersed among a variety of ethnic groups, as well as native-born, working-class whites. On what might be recalled as a "Slovak street" such as South Front, in truth Slovaks were dwelling among people of French, Croat, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, German, Czech, Irish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Canadian nativity. (14)

Eight miles to the northwest, other eastern Slovaks lived in North Philadelphia's Nicetown near Midvale Steel close to the intersection of Germantown and Hunting Park avenues. Nicetown was a smaller and much more isolated neighborhood than the Liberties or Southwark, and for the Slovaks the area was even more circumscribed. Residents distinguished between "Slavic Nicetown," 12 short streets between Germantown and Clarissa avenues, and the larger Nicetown neighborhood. (15) One might have some nodding acquaintance with the wider neighborhood, but it was with one's co-ethnics clustered on a few streets that one shared an intimate life.

In Nicetown a street by street colonization by different ethnic groups occurred, and the 1910 census shows colonization was often confined to a single side of a street. The even side of Cayuga was overwhelmingly Italian (25 of 30 households), but across the street 21 of 24 households were Polish and not a single Italian had dared cross the street. Slovaks made their presence felt on similarly tiny wedges of Newcomb, Blavis, and Dennie. Nicetown could be shared so long as ethnic others kept their distance--even if that distance was only 20 feet. (16) Indeed, as one Nicetown Slovak recalled, "When you talk about the Slovak community of Nicetown, there really aren't very many streets. There would be Blavis, which was a very small street.... Then the next street was Cayuga. Now, that was almost all Italian." On his street, a Nicetown Slovak enjoyed community, whether he wanted it or not, as all the men and women of one's ethnicity presumed to tell kids where they could and couldn't play "pimple ball" or sneak cigarettes. But when asked about the state of relations with Italians, a one-word answer came back: "Barely."

When Slovaks began improving their Nicetown rowhouses without benefit of building permits, they suddenly became aware of the perilous proximity of Cayuga Italians. In speaking of working-class home improvements, Andre V. recalled, "All this was done on the sly. Because you had to pay $5 for the building permit. A lot of times you'd hear, 'I wonder if them Italians is gonna turn us in?' You know, because the Italians were right behind us.... Then the next thing you know, the Italians are building, they're probably saying, 'Hey, I wonder if those goddamn Slovaks, Polacks, or whatever are gonna turn us in, you know?'" (17)

The final significant Slovak settlement was Point Breeze, or Polacktown, so named in the days when "the Irish thought every dumb Hunky was a Polack." (18) Here Zemplinske immigrants lived on and around far S. 28th Street near Atlantic Refining and the Philadelphia Gasworks along the Schuylkill. According to a woman born in 1918 on 28th north of Passyunk, there were "only all our own kind here." (19) Even here, though, the 1910 census indicates there were remnants of an Irish community, but the main interaction between Slovaks and Irish was "stone fights in the vacant lots," which would continue until someone got hurt and then the battle was called off. Nevertheless, after one informant taught Tommy Mulligan enough Slovak so they could converse, he became an acceptable companion. (20)

While Point Breeze was indeed more uniformly Slavic than the other three areas, until after World War II it remained a mostly undeveloped area of vacant lots, oil tanks and marshy land, where one man said "don't think of concrete, think of mud." (21) Thus it was an unlikely place in which to base a citywide community, and in any case, this was 10 miles southwest of Nicetown, 2.5 miles west of Southwark, and 5 miles from Girard Avenue.

The dispersed pattern of industry in Progressive Era American cities militated against the formation of geographically contiguous immigrant communities. As Olivier Zunz notes, in Detroit many heavy industries located on the periphery of the older, downtown part of Detroit, where land was plentiful and plants could be sited close to the rail lines that ringed the city. So, too, in Philadelphia, many of the dirtier and heavier industries that attracted Southern and Eastern European immigrants as workers were sited in scattered locales north, west, and south of the old colonial city. Working-class immigrant families, moreover, often relied on the family wage, a combination of pay packets from several wage-earning members (fathers, sons, and unmarried daughters.) This certainly was the case among the Slavs studied by Ewa Morawska in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Consequently, as Theodore Hershberg notes, 19th-century (and early 20th-century) cities such as Philadelphia might usefully be conceived of as a series of journeys to work. Hence, as in Detroit, so, too, in Philadelphia immigrant families often lived in a compromise site located equidistant from several job sites, even if this took them further away from co-ethnics. In Philadelphia Slavic immigrants settled broadly across the face of the city so as to be close to the industries in which their family members labored. Those who found work in the tanneries, textile mills, and wireworks of Northern Liberties and adjacent neighborhoods lived miles from the dockworkers of Southwark, and even further from Trencinske living in Delaware County or across the river in New Jersey. Refinery workers settled in Point Breeze, even though it was 10 miles away from fellow immigrants from Zemplin province working for Midvale Steel in Nicetown. Philadelphia's dispersed job sites dictated that the city's Slovaks would never be trapped in Louis Wirth's compact ghetto. (22)

How, then, to hold together an immigrant community? The daunting task facing a small, dispersed group is apparent. Slovaks lived in almost every corner of the city, so the first dilemma was where to build one's church. Fortunately a solution was found so brilliant it could only have come to the mind of a Slovak: Put the church in nobody's neighborhood. The first of the city's Roman Catholic parishes, St. John Nepomucene, was founded in 1902 by a lay society of Slovaks from all parts of the city--as well as Clifton Heights in Delaware County--who met on February 23, 1902, to found the parish. (23)

The transit technology that enabled the middle class to disperse from cities such as Sam Bass Warner's Boston was, by 1902, available to Slovaks working in oil refineries and steel mills, too, and St. John's was always a streetcar parish. Located in an old Presbyterian church at Ninth and Wharton (across the street from Pat's Steaks, to locate it for Philly natives), St. John's was a mile from even the closest parishioner's home. Of 227 parish families identified in the 1902-14 baptismal registry, 15%, 34 families, were from Southwark, most living far from Ninth and Wharton in blocks that hugged the Delaware. Only six parish families lived west of Third. (24)

A mile journey to pray was nothing, though, compared to the dedication of other Slovaks. As early as 1902 the baptismal registry notes 16 families "of Nicetown," although this figure probably undercounts Nicetown's importance to the parish, for the region was recognized in St. John's 50th anniversary jubilee book as one of the two main sending areas to the parish, while informants confirm "it was the two areas, Nicetown and Point Breeze." (25) Michael St. and Andre V. confirm 30 families or so attending "the Downtown Church," St. John's, from Nicetown, with the bribe of a cheese steak at Pat's the reward for more or less well-behaved children. (26)

From Point Breeze, 45 families, or 20% of the new church, traveled 2.5 miles east to St. John's between 1902 and 1914. As with Nicetown, Point Breeze would remain a mainstay of distant St. John's throughout its existence. Some parishioners recalled that this distance was often walked, in order to save the nickel trolley fare. (27)

Church officials were appointed on a regional basis so as to bind a diffuse community. St. John's 50th anniversary book notes, "The kollektory were appointed to help the priest in the various regions of our parish, and to do many a good deed or intercession for the people of their regions." (28)

Eighty-one regional kollektory served in the church's first 50 years, with Point Breeze, Northern Liberties, and Nicetown predominating. Many others lived in North Philadelphia, as far as 7.5 miles from church in Kensington and Richmond; (29) Grays Ferry, about 2.5 miles west of church; Southwark, and even from distant Southwest Philly. (30)

When we recall the distances that Hershberg says a slightly earlier generation of Philadelphians covered in their "journey to work," such long trips to pray do not seem implausible, especially if a mere working man could be transformed into a kollektor (usher) or similar pan ("big shot") at his ethnic parish. In this respect, too, Ewa Morawska's concept of the "internal status markers" that gave meaning to Slavic immigrants' lives in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is instructive when considering why translocal ethnic communities maintained the allegiance of members. Thus a man identified by the 1916 Gopsill's Philadelphia city directory as Michael Lichvar, "laborer," at his home address in Fishtown, North Philadelphia, was transformed in the pages of St. John Nepomucene's 50th anniversary souvenir book into the fondly remembered "Pan" Michael Lichvar, "kollektor." Lichvar very likely was anonymous and indeed simply a laborer to his chiefly Irish neighbors near the docks of Fishtown; it was only three miles away, at Ninth and Wharton, that he was a somebody. Immigrants' internal status markers thus had a spatialized component, too, in cities such as Philadelphia. (31)

The use of regionally based kollektory and sickness visitors seems to have been widely adapted by Slovak parishes and fraternal societies throughout America, not just in Philadelphia. In Mingo Junction, Ohio, the Slovak Presbyterian Church served members in Mingo, Rush Run, Steubenville, and Blue Bell. As these towns were 12 miles apart, the kollektory and curators for the church were selected on a regional basis as early as 1906. The community grew even more dispersed, as Mingo in July 1910 voted to share its minister with Slovak Presbyterians in Juniata, Pennsylvania, and in 1915 agreed to permit their minister to conduct services one Sunday a month, and teach Sunday school twice a month, at the Slavic Presbyterian Mission in Raccoon, Pennsylvania. Raccoon is roughly 21 miles from Mingo, and Juniata about 40 miles further east. (No one ever said holding community together would be easy, and in 1927, the church board had to remind this scattered congregation that, "Those members and adherents who desire service of the pastor, and residing 10 miles within the bounds of our church, should at least every three months contribute their share to the church.") (32)

Slovak fraternal societies, too, appointed sickness visitors for outlying areas of translocal lodges. The National Slovak Society lodges in the western Pennsylvania coal towns of Leisenring and Leechburg, for example, each actually served many dispersed coal-patch towns, and thus Leechburg named sickness visitors for Hyde Park, Piro, and Leechburg, while Leisenring had visitors serving Adelaide, Vojell, Smock, Leisenring, and Uniontown, the last town 7 miles distant. Leisenring's NSS lodge was particularly translocal, from 1897 on enrolling members from as far away as McKees Rocks, 20 miles distant. In 1912, the lodge appointed special dues collectors to retrieve dues from outlying members living in Trotter, Adelaide, Vanderbilt, and Connellsville. Ethnic affinity, then, not the accident of where one was tapping coal veins, provided the building blocks for community. (33)

Nor was this translocal division of communal responsibilities a solely Slavic phenomenon. Michael Weisser demonstrates that Jewish Landsmanshaftn in New York were employing separate "hospitaler" (sickness visitors) for The Bronx, Brooklyn, and "downtown" members as early as 1909. This decision to cater to the "all-rightniks" who had moved uptown caused some strains within these homeland organizations, but the practice continued in many Landsmanshaftn into the 1940s. (34)

In the case of Slavic immigrants, though, it is evident that this pattern of selective community building was transplanted from the Carpathians. While emigration to the U.S. put Slovaks in contact with many new groups, they nevertheless already had experience living in multiethnic parts of the Habsburg Empire. Towns in Zemplin such as Humenne, main town of one of the regions from which Philadelphians emigrated, were, by the late 19th century, a mixture of German, Jewish, Slovak, Ruthenian, and Magyar (Hungarian) residents, and home to Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Lutheran, and Calvinist congregations, as well as Jewish communities. The 1900 census of the Kingdom of Hungary reveals that even in Trencin, home to Northern Liberties' Slovaks, small towns were also multiethnic. Vel'ka Bytca, a town that sent wireworkers to Philadelphia, had 479 Germans and 266 Hungarians living in a town of 3,072. In such small, multiethnic regions, Slovaks in outlying villages often could not support a parish of their own, and pooled resources to provide lay trustees for mission chapels that affiliated with several-villages-wide parishes. Timothy Smith notes that in the Carpathians

   Rarely could those of the same faith in a single village support a
   pastor or rabbi. Instead, a parish or congregation usually comprised
   a parent organization with its filial congregations in villages from
   a mile to ten or more miles distant and scattered groups in other
   villages which were too small to justify a chapel or synagogue of
   their own. One pastor or rabbi served the entire congregation.... A
   leading layman watched over the property of his segment of the
   congregation.

M. Mark Stolarik documents a similar multi-village Calvinist congregation in the vicinity of Lastomir in eastern Slovakia, and immigrants from that region who later recongregated as members of Philadelphia's St. John Nepomucene confirm that the villages of Hankovce, Koskovce, Lubacov, Laborec, and Lubisa all constituted one "wallo," or church community strung across approximately 10 miles. "So these people knew each other more or less," one informant said, "because their fields were close together or they met in the villages." It is this creative transcendence of village localism to build elastic congregations that Slovaks brought with them when they arrived in places such as Philadelphia. (35)

Commitment to a transoceanic community evidently persisted for decades. Amerikansky Russky Viestnik (American Ruthenian Messenger) in 1921 periodically listed the names of immigrants who were collecting money to send back to Europe in support of home parishes. One such list in May grouped immigrants from Philadelphia's Polacktown; Lyndora, Pennsylvania; Braddock, Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh; Binghamton, New York, and Jersey City, who had donated funds in support of the church back in Medzilaborce, Zemplin province. Similar lists showed support by the people of Lyndora and Sykesville, Pennsylvania, for the church in Cabini, Zemplin, and immigrants from Denbo, Pennsylvania, for the parish of Littmanova, Spis. A similar persistence of transoceanic communal ties was noted by Robert C. Ostergren between Dalarna, Sweden, and migrants who had left a multi-village Lutheran parish--at least physically--for Minnesota. (36)

In Philadelphia, translocality continued, but had to contend with regional tensions between eastern and western Slovaks. Slovaks from Northern Liberties also initially traveled to St. John's, with 55 such families noted for 1902-14 (24%). (37) This contingent, though, quickly lobbied for its own church, forming St. Agnes at Fourth and Brown in 1907. The split had more to do with stara krajina ("the old country") than Philadelphia, as Liberties immigrants were primarily from western Slovakia, especially Dolny Hricov and vicinity in Trencin county, where many had practiced the wireworking craft they continued to pursue in Philly. Point Breeze and Nicetown Slovaks, though, were mostly from rural eastern Slovakia, many from Hutka and nearby towns. And if they didn't want to go to a German or Irish church, Hricovats weren't too keen on sharing the pews with Hutoroks, either.

"See, it's like if you want to be boss and I want to be boss," one woman whose Trencin parents left St. John's for St. Agnes said. "That makes for two bosses, and that don't congeal too good." (38) Informants of both parishes spoke of "friction" between the two groups. (39) A senior St. John's kollektor still bristled at slights from St. Agnes parishioners:

   In as far as their work habits and everything else, they were as
   different as night and day. The Nicetown people, which was coming
   from Zemplin, they were agricultural people.... Yet the St. Agnes
   group. They were more or less artisans.... They just did not seem to
   get together very much.... The St. Agnes group sort of had the
   feeling they were sort of on a higher plane.... When they seen one
   another, they wouldn't jump around and hug one another. They might
   shake hands. But doggone it, they didn't jump around and play ring
   around the rosy. (40)

In Philadelphia, two separate parishes developed based on Slovak regions of origin, a pattern that played itself out in even more heavily Slovak cities. June Granatir Alexander has demonstrated that Pittsburgh's separate Slovak parishes drew membership based on region of origin, as several chain migrations fed into the Steel City and demanded their own home-region parishes. Likewise, Robert Slayton notes that even in a tight, seemingly homogenous immigrant community such as the Polish community in Chicago's Back of the Yards, working-class immigrants made fine distinctions between elite churches and the parish reserved for the Gorals, Poland's slighted Tatra "hillbillies." Pulls of community could be subtle and strong and confound local neighborhood ties in American cities. (41)

In Philadelphia, St. Agnes, like St. John's, retained the loyalty of its own trolley-riding faithful who made miles-long journeys to pray. St. Agnes' baptismal registry from 1907-1915 yields 441 families, most with the address provided by the priest. Other addresses were determined by correlating names with people listed in Gopsill's, Pinkerton's, and Boyd's Philadelphia City Directories. An additional 127 families were identified from the parish's financial report for 1912, which listed the "darovali" (donations) of parish families, and a list of parish founders honored in the program of the parish's 20th anniversary celebrations, in 1927. Fifty-five percent of St. Agnes families in the baptismal registry for 1907-15 (316 families) lived in the immediate Liberties area, (42) but 46 Hricovat families, 9%, lived in the Delaware County mill town of Clifton Heights and traveled 12 miles to St. Agnes even though the trolley bypassed St. John's. By 1931 this satellite was large enough for a mission chapel, Little Flower, ministered to by an assistant to St. Agnes' Father John L. York. (43)

Eighty families (14%) were already in Fairhill and other parts of North Philadelphia, called by one woman "the suburbs of the ghetto." (44) By 1923, the parish's financial report and registry of parish families indicates that only 45% of families listed as contributing dues in the annual financial report lived in Northern Liberties, while 30% were already living in far North Philly in Bridesburg, Feltonville, and Hunting Park. (45) Even those remembered as "big wheels" in St. Agnes, such as the Berko Brothers who owned a wireworks on Green and Randolph in the Liberties, were already commuting to pray from semi-rural Torresdale, about as far to the northeast as one could go in Philadelphia. The roughly 8-mile trip to St. Agnes did not diminish Steve and Adam Berko's commitment to their Hricovat parish, however, for in 1923 the parish financial report indicates they both paid the full $12 in monthly dues as well as providing darovali of $50 on Christmas and Easter and toward the building of St. Agnes Parochial School. Another St. Agnes parishioner living in Lawndale likewise donated $50 to his faroff parish. Other St. Agnes families came from Camden and other Jersey towns, while already by 1913 some traveled 45 miles from Lumberville, Bucks County. (46) This commitment often did not diminish over time. When St. Agnes' Slovak Catholic Sokol held a memorial service for its members who had lost their lives in World War II, one such honoree was a resident of Bucks County's Trumbauersville, 35 miles northwest of the parish. (47)

Indeed, it may be that those immigrants who moved out of the neighborhood of first settlement remained more dedicated to their translocal communal institutions because it was there that they could most readily demonstrate what successes they had become. A St. Agnes informant remembered of the Berkos that "they talked about the air up there as if it was better, like they was in the Poconos or something." While fewer than half the members of Saint Agnes lived in the immediate area as early as 1923, the site continued to be the seat of Slovak Philadelphia, especially, perhaps, for those who had begun to succeed and assimilate, at least tentatively, into American society. It was here that boasts of better air in their moderately comfortable semi-suburban neighborhoods might receive at least a grudging hearing. (48)

Michael Weisser likewise notes that middle-class Jewish New Yorkers continued to utilize the old neighborhood to reinforce ethnic ties:

   The Landsmashaftn provided their members with a continuous dose of
   Old World customs and culture, primarily through the device of
   maintaining the meetings of most societies on the Lower East Side.
   Even when a majority of the city's Jewish population lived far away
   from Delancey and Essex streets, this original neighborhood of
   immigrant settlement retained its fundamentally Old World character.
   Consequently, a visit to the Lower East Side for the monthly or
   bimonthly landsmanshaft meeting was a means of reasserting the bonds
   to the traditional culture.

Weisser cites societies meeting in the World War I era on the Lower East Side, even though members already were predominantly residents of The Bronx or Brooklyn. Likewise, Jewish members of the clubs of the Cristadora Settlement House of Ninth Street and Avenue B, came from Harlem, The Bronx, and Brooklyn, as well as Lyndhurst, New Jersey, as early as 1916. In 1918, the House's Aim Well Club had a secretary, Malvina Gottherer, who lived on 117 Wadsworth Street, in Fort Washington. A similar process of retaining ties to a changing city was documented by Kenneth Scherzer, as in the post-Civil War years old stock Manhattanites fled the Hibernian metropolis for New Jersey and Brooklyn's suburban havens, yet continued to return to Protestant churches in the city. The transit revolution of the 20th century enabled Philadelphians, New Yorkers and others to utilize the subway and El to retain translocal ties. (49)

For Slovaks, even those who emigrated to more heavily Slavic regions such as western Pennsylvania's coal and steel towns often built translocal parishes that mirrored Carpathian patterns of community-building. Slovak Lutheran congregations in the Pittsburgh area in their early years drew on a non-localized membership. From 1891 the baptismal registry at St. Paul's Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church in Braddock reveals that families traveled to the church from many other steel and coal towns, as well as from all parts of Pittsburgh (the South Side, Smallwood Street, and Allegheny City, i.e., the North Side.) Indeed, in the congregation's first 17 years (1891-1908), worshipers from Braddock itself were vastly outnumbered by families from Homestead, Duquesne, Rankin, Munhall, Moon Run, McKeesport, Port Vue, Glassport, and Dooker Hollow. The furthest south of these towns, Glassport, is about 7 miles from Braddock, but even greater journeys were made by the Lutheran faithful. From Westmoreland County families traveled 17 miles to St. Paul's from Export and 30 miles from Mutual. As early as 1899, families from Fayette City, Fayette County, journeyed 20 miles to pray, while other Fayette County members came from Gillespie, Shamony, and Brownsville, 35 miles away. Washington County Slovaks traveled to Braddock from Canonsburg (15 miles), Charleroi (25 miles), Coal Center (30 miles), and California (32 miles.) A congregation family was even recorded in 1899 from Windber, Somerset County, near Johnstown. This faithful Slovak family traveled an astounding 72 miles to be part of the community. (50)

A similarly diffuse body of worshipers congregated at St. Peter's Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church in Uniontown, with families listed in the baptismal registry of 1897-1916 from as far away as Leisenring (16 miles), Vanderbilt (19 miles), Fredericktown, Washington County (20 miles), Greensburg (30 miles), Fayette City (32 miles), Ambridge, Beaver County (47 miles) and even recurring entries for Dixonville, Indiana County, an amazing 70 miles to the northeast. As early as 1899, families attended St. Peter's, at least for important emotional family moments such as baptisms, from Fairport Harbor and Youngstown in Ohio, roughly a surprising 180 and 130 miles away from Uniontown. In 1912 and 1913, too, baptisms were recorded for families living in Monongha and Grant Town, West Virginia, 30 miles to the south; these parishioners were likely more frequent attendees at St. Peter's than the group from Ohio, to be sure. Nevertheless, even if Youngstowners were only present in Uniontown for important sacramental occasions, their presence on the baptismal rolls suggests the ways in which emotional ties of community could transcend local, spatialized attachments. As a minority within a minority, Lutheran Slovaks may especially have had to seek out members wherever they lived, and individuals seeking fellowship may have had to leave their particular town to journey miles to pray. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the Slovak Zion Evangelical Lutheran Synod, with which St. Peter's and St. Paul's affiliated, was organized in 1919 as America's only non-localized Synod. (51)

Pittsburgh-area Catholic Slovaks, though, were equally elastic in their community-building. In 1946 the Slovak Catholic Sokol published a detailed history of all the Slovak parishes in the Pittsburgh Diocese. Like the Carpathian villages from which they had emigrated, many of the coal-patch towns in which Slovaks toiled proved too small to support their own churches, and were parts of translocal parishes centered in the region's larger towns. Saints Cyril & Methodius parish in Fairchance, Fayette County, also served nine towns, among them Smithfield, 5 miles distant, and Haydentown, 4 miles away. A mission chapel in Shoaf was also served by the Fairchance parish from 1911 to 1921, and again after 1943. From its inception in 1904, St. John the Baptist in Star Junction also served Slovaks in Wick Haven (7 miles to the north of Star Junction), Perryopolis (4 miles north), Donora (10 miles northwest), Uniontown (12 miles north), and even Bradenville (22 miles south of Star Junction.) Nearly ever parish documented in the coal and steel regions of the Diocese served a translocal Slovak community. (52)

When it came time to relax, immigrants proved equally mobile. Slovak Philadelphia, for example, was wider even than the city in its search for recreation. The Catholic Sokols of St. John's and St. Agnes were part of Anton Bernolak Group 12, which included lodges in Reading, Trenton, Bethlehem, Phoenixville, Coatesville and Clifton Heights. Gymnastic slets (exhibits) were held in all these places beginning in 1912, and Group 12 also held celebrations in conjunction with these gymnastic meets, and theatrical evenings to which all regional lodges--Reading, Coatesville, etc.--sent performers and audience. From 1916, a Sokol Band affiliated with St. Agnes' Assembly 48 was a fixture at all regional and national slets, and before 1918 Philly Sokols had tested themselves against gymnasts from throughout the country at national slets in Trenton and Passaic, as well as at their own regional slet in Phoenixville. (53)

A similar regional zupa (group) for the Narodny (National) Sokols, Jan Kollar Group 10, tied Bethlehem, Allentown, Reading, Philly, and Trenton, and the minutes of Lodge 56 indicate frequent attendance by Philadelphians at slets and balls in these places 40 or 50 miles away, and by the 1930s, in national conventions in cities such as Chicago and Detroit. (54)

Such translocal socializing with distant coethnics continued well into the 1930s, suggesting even second-generation Slavs valued the psychic comfort of distant attachments. The minutes of the Slovak Gymnastic Union ("Narodny") Sokol Women's Wreath 19 show that in February 1930, Anna Kuzmik of Philadelphia was reimbursed $1.50 for traveling to Trenton as a delegate to the regional Sokol organization; on November 1, 1936, Rose Chabot was reimbursed for her expenses in Trenton; on May 11, 1938, train fare to the Bethlehem slet was paid for Rose Chabot and Sophie Labuda, who also was reimbursed for travel to New York. On June 3, 1938, the pair were also sent as delegates to the SGUS's national convention in Detroit. (55)

Even the supposedly Americanizing forces of popular culture, as Kathy Peiss, David Nasaw, and Lizabeth Cohen have demonstrated, were enjoyed in ethnicized milieus in places such as Chicago's Back of the Yards. (56) Indeed, for Slovaks in Philadelphia and other industrial settings, the silent movies (and later the "talkies"), American sports, and picnics or amusement park outings were often enjoyed in all-Slavic gatherings that may have reinforced immigrants' ethnic identities as much as they Americanized.

American games quickly united a diffuse immigrant community struggling for ways to become more American. But these games were often played in all-Slavic milieus that simultaneously reinforced players' ethnic identities. As early as 1895, a Greek Catholic Union (Sojedenia) team in Passaic announced it had formed a "base ball team" and asked "Anybody up for a game?" Of course, the correspondent's second question was, "Anybody know how to play this base ball?" Quickly Slovaks and Ruthenians learned. Similar queries were made by Ruthenian Sokols from Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1911, when they again asked, "Anyone Up For a Game?" The Bridgeport Sokols had already bested Ruthenian teams in Yonkers and New Britain, and were now looking for new worlds to conquer. In 1923 Philadelphia's St. Agnes Athletic Club announced that it aimed "to put a basket ball team on the floor, a baseball and football team in the field." The First Catholic Slovak Union (Jednota) lodge from Nicetown competed in an eastern Pennsylvania Slovak baseball league, where "we were top dogs in that thing." An informant recalled that in the 1920s and '30s teammates and fans alike would climb aboard a flatbed truck rented to take Philadelphians to games against fellow Jednota teams as far away as Palmerton, Coaldale, and Slatington, 45 miles to the north in anthracite coal country. In 1924 both Michael Suchy, manager of the Lyndora, Pennsylvania, Sojedenia Sokol "basket ball team," and Steve Telatnik, manager of the Lorain, Ohio, St. Nicholas hoops team, wrote to Amerikansky Russky Viestnik (The American Ruthenian Messenger) looking for worthy Slavic opponents. Leechburg's Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol lodge similarly fielded a "Slovak base ball club" in the late 1920s and '30s. (57) American games were bridges to an ethnicized identity as Slovak-Americans, as well as ways to expand the ethnic community to opponents miles away.

Silent pictures, and later the "talkies," were similarly often enjoyed among one's own kind. In Philadelphia's Northern Liberties, as early as 1910 the Jumbo Theatre of Front and Girard was a landmark with its large elephant-shaped marquee. Eighty years later senior St. Agnes parishioners gleefully recalled the theatre and its motto, "Where Everyone Goes to Meet Everyone Else." Yet when asked who they remembered attended the Jumbo, the answer was invariably "everyone. People we knew from St. Aggie's." Similar neighborhood movie houses in Point Breeze were recalled, while other times silent movies were shown at the church hall itself, to supplement theatrical performances. Even in small anthracite coal towns theatrical performances were by 1924 combined with "mooving pictures," as when Freeland, Pennsylvania, Ruthenians "sincerely invited all our brothers and sisters from the Freeland and Hazleton area." On such occasions, movies may indeed have been "where everyone goes," but the "everyone else" one met were likely to be fellow Slavs. (58)

Amusement parks were used by immigrants in places such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to hold festivities on "Slovak Day." The uninitiated might think that the dates chosen for "Slovak Day"--invariably July Fourth or Labor Day--had other, American resonances, but as John Bodnar has noted, sites and moments of American patriotism have often been deftly refashioned by working-class and immigrant communities to further their own, non-mainstream agendas. Already by 1913, recreation was a profitable, commercialized concern for the proprietors of amusement parks. But in that year, too, planners for Philadelphia's Narodny Sokol Jan Kollar Group 10 Slovak Day festivities slated for July Fourth wanted to make sure they would get their money's worth, and wrote to the Bukley Amusement Co. Inc., seeking more details on the amenities at Augustin Park in Columbia, New Jersey. The following decade, Amerikansky Russky Viestnik advertised regional "Slovak Day" and "Ruthenian Day" picnics held at Pittsburgh's Kennywood Park. A dispersed immigrant community could reconvene at the pleasure grounds offered by American entertainment companies on days rechristened as their own. (59)

Even that most American of institutions, summer camp, was appropriated by the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol. Every summer a few weeks of gymnastics, team sports, camping, and Slovak language instruction united Slovaks from throughout the Northeast, Philadelphia included, at the Sokol Camp in Boonton, New Jersey. As early as 1913, Philadelphia's SGUS Lodge 56 and Svatopluk Slovak Hall had both purchased shares in this summer camp, and through the '50s Philadelphians continued to camp in an all-Slavic milieu. (60)

Conversely, customs and practices brought from stara krajina could be adapted to express incipient American patriotism, too. The Slovak and Ruthenian practice of Christmas caroling in the guise of comic shepherds and old father winter figures while carrying a model of the manger (the "jaslickari") continued in places such as Philadelphia through the 1940s. These shepherds served as a way of binding an exceptionally dispersed ethnic community together, as informants recalled making flamboyant performances at parishioners' homes no matter how far away, and "having to visit them all." But at least in Endicott, New York, as early as 1915 the jaslickari shepherds also carried American flags when begging from door to door. Slavic identity was already beginning to meld with an American one, but on occasions and places that allowed immigrants to build their own distinct communities. The process that Milton Gordon referred to as "ethnicization" was carried out among Slovak immigrants through a bricolage of American, Slavic, and blended symbols and spaces. (61)

In such contexts one began to conceive of one's self as part of a larger nation. Marching with other Sokols from throughout the nation at slets and conventions, enjoying Slovak Day at a local amusement park with distant co-ethnics, or reading letters and articles in Katolicky Sokol or Jednota about far-off lodge doings, immigrants built up a translocal, "imagined community" of the kind described by Benedict Anderson, that linked translocal Slovaks to fraternalists throughout the country. (62)

Competing and socializing in a virtually all-Slovak (or sometimes, all-Slavic) milieu, then, may have indeed made Point Breeze or Girard Avenue, or even a coal-patch town, seem "all our own kind here." One could air brush the Irish, Magyars, or Germans who lived around the corner from one's neighborhood cognitive map, while expanding the community to include Zemplinske or Trencinske of Reading, Trenton, or Passaic. An elastic and selective conception of one's community developed in Slovak Philadelphia that indeed could make it seem it was "all Slovaks down here on Vine Street." (63) The neighborhood might be multiethnic; but the community was all-Slovak, or sometimes, all-Slavic. Whatever "those damn Italians there on Cayuga Street" were up to was of little concern to a Zemplinske immigrant safe in his community on Dennie Street--a mere backyard away. This 20 feet made all the crucial psychic difference on immigrants' cognitive maps. (64)

In this respect, immigrants were demonstrating the kinds of far-flung social networks documented by Claude Fischer in northern California. Next-door neighbors may be turned to when one needs someone to water the plants. Moments of psychic resonance or personal crisis may be shared with those with whom one has more salient bonds, no matter where they live. Indeed, distance may strengthen, rather than attenuate social relationships, Fischer argues, and that seems to have been the case in this immigrant community. (65)

In each one of these neighborhoods, other ethnic groups had their social clubs, which were terra incognita to Slavic immigrants. While Slovaks in Nicetown grudgingly gathered with the Poles at Pulaski Hall until they could form their own Slovak Association, the Italian club on Cayuga Street was never attended. "Because that's members only," one man pointed out, "or to go in as a guest. So who you gonna go with if you don't know an Italian?" In Northern Liberties the high-handed Germans of St. Peter's parish were resented, "because every time there was a holiday there, like Easter, there never seemed to be any pews for rent for we Slovaks." And it was unthinkable for one Slovak wireworker that he or anyone in his family would ever set foot in Girard Avenue's Hungarian Club. This man remembered, too, that in Blue Law Philadelphia, "There were a lot of bars. My God. Every ethnic group had its own private club." Drinking and socializing, then, was channeled via ethnic preference and Quaker abstemiousness into ethnically segregated social networks. (66)

During the 1920s and 1930s, some of this exclusivity broke down as second-generation white ethnics gradually learned they had more in common with neighbors based on working-class identity than they may have realized. As Lizabeth Cohen argues, in Chicago second-generation ethnics put aside their differences to use a variety of ethnic clubs as meeting places for incipient CIO unions. Mildred Allen Beik demonstrates that in Windber, a company coal town near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Slovak Hall was used by miners seeking to gain UMW representation during a 1922 strike. No matter the ethnicity of miners, Slovak Hall was the place to meet, for the hall was owned outright and did not have a mortgage held by the Berwind-White Coal Company, which used liens to restrict union and political activity in other churches and clubs. Hence Slovak Hall proved available for interethnic strike meetings, and expanded into a community-wide resource in the long battle to bring the UMW to this town. The Slovak Hall in Leechburg, Pennsylvania, was similarly rented in the 1930s and '40s to "the CIO" and "the UAW," as well as to Italians, "Polacks," and "Russians," while the National Slovak Society lodge in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, by the 1920s was comfortable with meeting in that town's Sons of Italy Hall. (67)

For many Philadelphia Slovaks born in the Carpathians, however, well into the 1930s ethnic exclusivity remained a way of keeping peace in polyglot parts of the city. A Zemplin native born in 1906 who lived in even greater isolation from his co-ethnics, up in the Manayunk mill district, preferred socializing in Northern Liberties with co-ethnics, and summed up his relations with Magyar, Polish, and Irish neighbors: "We only knew them to say hello and goodbye and that was all." (68) This informant's shrug spoke volumes on the unlikelihood of a Slovak immigrant having anything more to do with "foreigners" than a wary wave, no matter how close they lived.

The elastic and expansive communities of immigrants such as the Slovaks could embrace kumoda and kresny (kin and godparents) from throughout the Delaware Valley, so that there was no need to wonder too long at what went on at Irish St. Augustine, the Russian People's Hall, the Italian bocce courts of Nicetown, or any of the other ethnic nodes of community dotting the multiethnic neighborhoods of Philadelphia. "To tell you the truth, we had more trouble with fights between our own men than with other groups," a senior Slovak woman admitted, and as the brief outline I have provided of Hricovat-Hutorok "friction" makes clear, Slovak Philadelphia had plenty of occasions for fighting within, rather than outside, its ethnic community. (69)

Indeed, elastic translocal community in Slovak Philadelphia might sometimes stretch near snapping. Some informants regarded the Narodny Sokols as "nonbelievers," and for a time around 1927 Catholics boycotted Fifth and Fairmount's Slovak Hall, since it was being used for services for a breakaway Czecho-Slovak Church, which affiliated with the Polish National Catholic Church of Bishop Francis Hodur. Similar breakaway Slovak National parishes were more enduring in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and Passaic, New Jersey, among other places. (70) The Philadelphia boycott, though, was brief, and whatever reservations they may have had about Narodnys, many Catholics still socialized with them--indeed, in many cases belonged to them. Here they came into contact with Lutheran Slovaks from Philly, Camden, Trenton, and Pottstown who were part of a four-city Slovak Evangelical Lutheran congregation. (71)

Narodny and Catholic Sokols were indeed both shareholders in the Slovak Hall that opened at Fifth and Fairmount in 1921 (as were the Slovak Lutheran Jednota branches from Philadelphia and Camden, and Clifton Heights' Sokols). If there were Catholic-Narodny, Hricovat-Hutorok or Catholic-Lutheran frictions they had to be put aside if the community was ever going to build a proper hall. It was only by pooling the small community's resources that such a facility became a reality. Shared Slovak Hall was a magnet for all the sub-communities religious as well as geographic, with dances, plays and concerts at the hall solidifying the community across confessional and geographic divides. (72)

Informants had fond memories of Slovak Hall as a place to go, no matter where one lived, for a shot and a beer, a dance, and an evening of Divadlo (Slovak theater.) Village comedies and wedding scenes were performed by Narodny and Catholic Sokol theatre troupes, and yes, Slovak Hall, or Polacktown's Holy Ghost Club (The "HG") was indeed a place one could relax away from the Lithuanians of the LB Hall, the Moskai at Russian People's Hall, and the Italians of St. Monica's Parish. (73) A picture emerges of live and let live in multiethnic Philadelphia, where a multiplicity of social clubs and houses of worship dotted the same streetscape, and allowed overlapping elastic communities to exist within the same neighborhoods. Ethnic-based fraternals and parishes were a way of keeping the peace in multiethnic cities, as well as the social mechanism by which ethnic groups provided sickness and death benefits in the decades before Social Security. (74) And yet there remained one group with which Slovaks soon concluded it was intolerable to share even the neighborhood. This, of course, sadly enough, was African-Americans.

Consider Slovak Hall. In Philadelphia, even the Slovak Socialist Workers' Section met at the hall, so that it was a communitywide resource, which also opened its doors to other groups, should they need meeting space. As a social worker noted in 1927, "Slovak Hall was available for rental by all other groups, but Negroes were excluded because it was feared that their cleanliness standard would not measure up to that of other groups." This policy stood, even though the manager of the hall, Jan Kolumbus, belonged to the Slovak Socialist Workers' Section, which espoused equality for blacks in its newspaper, Rovnost L'udu ("Equality for the People.") (75) Even though L'udovy Dennik, Slovak version of The People's Daily, continued running cartoons and editorials denouncing the poll tax and "the evil effects of discrimination" into the 1940s, it did not stop the Workers from meeting in the segregated hall. By this point they had established a substantial stake in behaving like whites, and even socialists had internalized the racialized etiquette of their new homes. (76)

Such pejorative comparisons to blacks were not isolated, but rather began early in many locales. In 1918 a Slovak from Brooklyn wrote to Jednota declaring, "Our people have had quite enough of this comedy!" The not-so-funny comedy to which he referred was the indignity of sitting in the same parish with both Magyars and Magyarones (Slovaks who had adopted Magyar as their first language.) But Slovaks had finally succeeded in expelling the unwanted element. "Magyars and Magyarones are no longer welcome in our parish. Now we can announce that our parish is purely Slovak, free of any filthy polluting Magyars." Language of purity and filth that in decades to come would almost exclusively be used in sneering references to Cierny was still used to distinguish Slovak from Magyar.

In order to drive the message home, the parishioners had also founded the "Slovak American Citizens Club" to replace the former Hungarian-Slovak Citizens Club. To highlight this transformation, the writer cited the club's

   many noble intellectual deeds. Such as our St. Joseph's young
   people's organization, which presented its first 'Minstrel Show' in
   our Slovak Hall before more than a thousand people, and many more had
   to be turned away for lack of space. The young people sang and acted
   beautifully, such that everyone marveled it was really only their
   first performance. Thus this is only a glimpse at what kind of a
   future our youth have before them.

It is not clear which aspect of the Brooklynites' new identities--into Slovaks--into Americans--into Citizens--the use of blackface was supposed to cement, but it did indeed seem to point to the anti-black attitudes in the future of many Slovak youth.

As Slovak anger at Magyarones--"the traitors to our Slovak language," the Brooklynite wrote--makes clear, language usage was central to many immigrants' sense of identity. But if Magyar was unacceptable as an alternative, we must wonder if blackface minstrelsy made the English language a little more palatable for those in the Slovak American Citizens' Club, who very likely did not sing "Swanee River" in Slovak. (77) Yet blackface songs evidently could sometimes make the transition into Slovak ballads. In 1913 New Yorksky Dennik noted that Juraj Kazamek of New York had "stitched together a four-page songbook of Slovak songs for young schoolchildren." Along with such predictable Slovak fare as "Hej, Slovaci!" was "Stary Dzho," "translated from the English 'Old Black Joe.'" (78) The question of which language to speak, which led many Slovaks to bitterly resist Magyarization, became less salient if English and Slovak could both be used, at least in part, to belittle an even less privileged group, African-Americans.

As Eric Lott, Michael Rogin, David Roediger and Jim Barrett have documented, "in between peoples" newly arrived from Europe often solidified their racialized place in their new homes via insidious comparisons to African Americans through such productions as minstrel shows. (79) Indeed, minstrel shows continued to be staples of Slovak parishes, fund-raisers that helped solidify the community financially, emotionally--and racially. Parishes in locales such as Passaic began performing the blackface shows around World War I, but even in the late '40s such shows were advertised in the Slavic press and were prominent entertainments at church gatherings. (80)

The coverage of race in the Slovak immigrant press similarly naturalized the black-white binary for these new immigrants until this one group became the unacceptable neighbors. (81) As Thomas Sugrue has demonstrated for Detroit, and Arnold Hirsch and Thomas Philpott for Chicago, neighborhoods that could accommodate a plethora of ethnicities violently exploded with the introduction of black residents. (82) Philadelphia Slovaks, too, were perfectly willing to have Italian, Polish, and German neighbors, so long as they could operate their own parishes and clubs. They could not, however, abide the "invasion" of their neighborhoods by blacks.

As early as 1918, in partially Slovak Grays Ferry in South Philadelphia it had only been the arrival of blacks that had caused full-blown race riots, with an attempt to burn down a rowhouse into which blacks had moved. Black-white battles continued for days. One of the slain whites was a policeman, Thomas McVay, whose mother exclaimed to a reporter, "He didn't deserve to meet with such an end, to be killed by the bullet of a negro!" (83) No similar lament was heard about "my boy" being shot by a Talianov. Nor was the city paralyzed by weeklong race riots when these groups bought houses in the neighborhood; for all the simmering hostility between provisional white groups, lessons on who was an acceptable neighbor were already being learned.

All across the country, Eastern Europeans were learning, with halting steps, that barriers to blacks were a "natural" part of the urban landscape. A daughter of Magyar immigrants who grew up in the South Ward of Trenton recalled that one day in the 1930s her father had entered the Hungarian Club with a black acquaintance. Before the astonished members could say anything, her father reassured them, in Magyar, that this guy was all right. The black man further surprised the members by speaking in Magyar, which he had learned as a waiter on a European steamer. "So they served him," this Trentonian said, hastening to add, "Of course, they had to break the glass once he left." (84)

This recollection of a brief cross-cultural encounter poignantly captures Eastern European immigrants balanced between Old World prejudices and New. A potential linguistic ally enters the club, but he is a black man and therefore problematic--at least according to the code of the streets of Trenton. That the man was served speaks to a tentative alliance based on linguistic lines. That the members, "of course,... had to break the glass," indicates just how deeply internalized barriers based on American conceptions of race had already become.

In the 1930s stigmatization of Eastern Europeans as "off-white," though lingering, was less virulent, and many immigrants and children of immigrants likewise asserted their "Caucasian" identity. This was evident in the pages of The American Slav, a Pan-Slavic, English-language monthly edited by the president of the National Slovak Society. In its inaugural issue in January 1939, AS asserted, "If you are of Slavic origin, you are a member of the biggest family of white people on earth." Two months later AS defended Russians as "the natural defenders of the western christian (sic) civilization which has been endangered by the invasions of barbaric hordes of Asia," and lauded "Russian martyrs of the Christian faith and white race." By May 1939, AS decided "the leadership of our white men's civilization and culture depends now mainly on America," although editors hastened to add that Slavs were part of that white men's civilization, too. "The Slavs ... are just as pure 'Aryans' (Caucasians, Indo-Europeans) as their real cousins--the Anglo-Saxons, the Latins, the Celts, etc." (85) Such assertions reinforced white ethnics' notion that Irish, Italian, and other "whites" might be suitable neighbors, but African-Americans were left out in the cold.

To be fair, there is some evidence that at least a few Slovaks could resist the pressures to exclude any sort of contact with blacks. At least once in September 1930, the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol lodge of Leechburg, Pennsylvania, rented its Slovak Hall to "the blacks." Yet this instance was so exceptional as to stand out among a series of more predictable acts of exclusion. In Leechburg, the lone rental of Slovak Hall to the "Cierny" stood out among the multiple times the hall was rented to Italians, Poles, Russians, and Ruthenians from the 1920s through the '40s. (86)

Far more typical were the strident assertions of Slovak whiteness that continued for decades. In 1931 in Chicago, an alarmed Slovak wrote to Osadne Hlasy (Community Voice) that, "Every citizen who is interested in the progress of his community should belong to some organization, the object of which is to promote the community's welfare." The reason for his alarm was that the Pilsen area "was being threatened by the invasion of the yellow race." The limits of peaceful coexistence