From the Age of Mass Migration to the Great Resignation

How my immigrant ancestor, Karel Josef Doležal, speaks to my own life transition

Photo by Maksym Ostrozhynskyy on Unsplash

I have been thinking of late about the Age of Mass Migration – the period when Europeans flooded into America and part of my family tree branched into Nebraska – and the Great Resignation, in which many Americans are still leaving their jobs, sometimes for better pay and sometimes for deeper questions about purpose.

The analogy isn’t perfect. European immigrants faced harsh cultural prejudice, sometimes starker poverty (at least initially) than they had left behind, and other reality checks that brought the New World fantasy down to earth. Most of us leaving our jobs these days have better opportunities and are not trading a real house for a sod dugout. Privilege plays more of a role in my transition than it did for my ancestors, than it does for many weathering major life changes today.

Yet both periods mark a big reshuffling of people, of communities, and of value systems. I feel a deeper kinship with those people in transition than I ever have, because I have taken risks, abandoned cornerstones of identity, and find myself still groping toward a more permanent definition of home on the other side. Like my ancestors, I’m trying to decide how much of the language and culture that defined my old life I want to preserve and which traditions and habits of mind I’ll need to shed to keep moving forward.

Last week I traced my roots to Maria Obrdlíková, a woman who died just ten miles from her birthplace in southern Moravia. If she had not lost her husband and married his cousin, František Doležal, I would never have been born. Today I want to explore the story of Maria’s son, Karel Doležal, the first in his family (I think) to sail across the Atlantic. He is also one of the reasons why I cheer so passionately for the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

Karel Josef Doležal drew the short straw from the start. He was his father’s eldest son, but he was born on January 20, 1859, into a family that already had three children from his mother’s previous marriage. Two of them were boys. According to inheritance laws at the time, the eldest son got everything. That put Karel third in line, behind his half-brothers František and Josef Nováček.

This was tough luck, because Karel’s father was one of the wealthiest farmers in the village. Thanks to the hard work of Mary Šrámková Levesque and Richard D’Amelio, I can identify the fields that would have belonged to František Doležal, owner of House #1, where Karel was born. See two samples from an 1835 map below.

That is a lot of land. But František Nováček stood to inherit all of it. Which left Josef Nováček and Karel Doležal essentially in the same boat with bupkus.

Karel’s native tongue was grief. He lost his mother when he was 7 years old. His father remarried, but died three years later, when Karel was 11. A year after his father’s death, Karel lost his sister, Maria, who was just 10 years old.

Special thanks to Mary Šrámková Levesque for these records

What a sad house! I have no notion of whether Karel got on well with his half siblings or whether they gave him the cold shoulder as a latecomer to the fold. At age 12 he found himself effectively orphaned, with a stepmother that he had only known for a few years trying to keep a household with six kids afloat.

What future could his birthplace offer him? As Karel approached adulthood, he would have understood that Austrian control of Moravia meant several years of mandatory military service once he came of age. Did he emigrate, in part, because he refused to serve in a colonizer’s army? Or did his train wreck of a family just make him want to get the hell out of Sokolí?

It must have been a swirl of excitement and fear that lit Karel’s belly as he boarded the ship for America in 1877. I don’t know why he chose Nebraska, or whether this decision might have been made for him (answers or educated guesses are welcome). But I expect that he would have landed in New York and taken a train west, like the Shimerda family in My Ántonia. Karel might have traveled alone, or he might have joined his uncle, Jacob Doležal, who brought his household of five to the same region of Nebraska in the summer of 1877.

At age 18, Karel would have been a day laborer on other people’s farms until he could save enough to buy his own land. By then, he went by Charles. It took him six years to establish himself before he married Mary Matulka in 1883. Charles and Mary went on to have seven children of their own, one of whom was my great grandfather Adolph Dolezal, who lost his Nebraska farm and resettled in Montana.

From Family Search (thanks to work by Joanna Sedgwick)

The part of Karel’s story that speaks to me now is his willingness to face the unknown. It may well have been that his prospects in Sokolí were so dim that he didn’t feel he had other options. But he embraced the risks. Endured the bad jokes about Bohemians. Did the work and ultimately thrived. Nebraska turned out to offer more than Sokolí ever could.

There is also danger in crediting Karel, alone, for his success. He benefited from a history that he may never have learned. When Karel was born in Bohemia in 1859, the U.S. Cavalry was sweeping across the plains displacing indigenous nations. By the time he immigrated in 1877, Kansas had already bled. The Civil War had been fought and won by the North. Nebraska had graduated from an unorganized territory into official statehood, which meant the removal of the Pawnee, Ponca, and Iowa peoples to Oklahoma. That history directly shaped Karel’s experience as a white immigrant, even if he wasn’t white in the ways that Swedes and Norwegians were in those days.

Perhaps the most pervasive image of the frontier period when Karel Doležal of Sokolí, Moravia, transformed himself into Charles Dolezal of Dwight, Nebraska, is the solitary plow. It is the defining image in My Ántonia, the only major literary work to tell the Czech-American story. The plow suggests an independent farmer, a free man working his hundred and sixty acres alone. That chance represented incredible privilege. There is no such chance for working-class immigrants today.

From the Lied Center

Had he stayed in Sokolí, Karel would likely never have earned the wealth that his half brother František gained simply by being born first. And if slavery had been legal in Nebraska, the prospects would have been similar. Karel would have been swimming against the current in a plantation economy and may never have become a landowner, himself.

What I mean to say is that the new Western states fed the illusion of a blank slate, a fresh start, an escape from history. The more each generation forgot, the more freedom their children had to replace history with mythology and to absolve themselves of complicity in genocide, slavery, and land theft. Much of my work as a memoirist is to probe these fissures in family lore, to see what questions they inspire and to try to tell a more truthful tale.

I have a better idea now of why Karel might have encouraged his children to forget his sad past. A little of the Old Country survived in my great grandfather’s name, Adolph, who also made home brew in the Czech way. But my grandfather, Herman Dolezal, let the beermaking die, perhaps because he was teased as a child for being a “Bo-hunk.” Most of the stories I heard from him could have come from anywhere in Nebraska. How on hot, humid nights you could almost hear the corn growing.

Even that generic Heartland myth faded in the 1930s, and few of Karel’s children died where they were born. They kept chasing the Western dream to Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, Montana. I am still trying to understand what it means that so much of my own journey has traced these migrations in reverse. And what is it that I hope to find by traveling back to Sokolí? Something real, no doubt. I cannot deny the fascination that Patricia Hampl describes in A Romantic Education, where she recalls a sentiment shared by her playmates in St. Paul, Minnesota:

“…we remained proud of, or perhaps it is more accurate to say we were enthralled by, the foreignness that was somehow ours. In a thoroughly unconscious way, we saw ourselves as the authentic products of entire nations which lay, mysteriously but definitely, over there. The Old World.”

Yet I also know that the facts in my family history are the raw materials out of which stories are made, not ready-made stories in themselves.

Charles Joseph Dolezal died in Dwight, Nebraska, on October 8, 1940. He was 81 years old, nearly twice as old as his mother, Maria Doležalová, when she died. For much of this essay, I have preferred his birth name, Karel, imagining it to be more authentic. But his grave stone bears the American name, Charles, the name he answered to for more than sixty years. His wife and friends probably called him “Charlie,” and I imagine that he liked it that way. His transformation from the hard-luck boy born under Austrian rule to the American farmer mirrors the enormous changes in the world as the nineteenth century gave birth to the modern age. And I can’t imagine that even the Great Depression made him hunger for distant good old days. The life he found in Nebraska was as good as it got.

From Find a Grave

By recovering Maria Doležalová and her son Karel, I have been looking for certainty in a time of change. As if that old map of Sokolí might put a foundation back under my feet. But it could be that a truer story hinges less on places, ancestral names, and restoring the hacheck to Doležal than it does on the necessity of those migrations and the ongoing imperatives of change. Maybe the story I’m seeking is more about how to navigate change purposefully. How to do more than merely survive it. How to adapt without the blindness of flight.

I don’t know if Karel ever felt weightless during his journey across the Atlantic or lost in a crowd of Bohemians at the train station in Nebraska. Was he burning with purpose, determined to not throw away his shot? Or did he sometimes drift out of himself, puzzling over the curiosity of his own existence as if from above, the way people with sad histories often do?

If anything grounded him, it would have been his wife and seven children. I wonder what he told them about his old life, if he told them anything at all. Whether he felt wistful about Bohemia or damn lucky to be eating koláče on his American farm. Or a sweet-sour mixture of both. I wonder if he ever had the thought that I do now about how each of us eventually surrenders our role as storyteller, stepping back into history where we will remain forever, scrutable in some respects but also impenetrably mysterious. A story waiting to be told.