Why I am searching for family roots abroad

Clarifying the stakes for my time in Prague and Moravia

Apartment buildings in Žižkov. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

A few weeks ago I began writing about how genealogy had become a ritual that grounded me while transitioning from a tenured faculty position in Iowa to life as a writer in Pennsylvania. First I told the story of Maria Obrdlíková, a woman who lost her first husband and married his cousin, František Doležal, my great great great grandfather. The following week I followed their eldest son, Karel Josef Doležal, from his birthplace in Moravia to the farm in Nebraska where he died in 1940. 

This week I caught a flight to Prague, where I will be living for the next four weeks while participating in Prague Summer, a writing workshop directed by Richard Katrovas with an All-Star cast of participating artists. Next week I plan to visit Sokolí, Kněžice, and a few other ancestral places, and I’ll share some of those experiences here.

Today I’d like to clarify some of what is at stake for me during my time in the Czech Republic. I am taking my share of photographs, but this is not a sightseeing trip. I applied to Prague Summer in February at a friend’s recommendation, hoping that a community of writers meeting in one of my ancestral homelands might anchor me as an independent artist. As a longtime admirer of Mark Slouka’s fiction (Lost Lake and All That Is Left Is All That Matters) and nonfiction (Essays from the Nick of Time), I was also motivated by the opportunity to share a week of the workshop with him. Whether this program will open doors to publishing in bigger magazines, landing an agent, or finding other teaching opportunities remains to be seen. But a monthlong workshop is an intentional step in that direction.

I am also chasing personal questions about family origins and identity that I expect will seed some essays, if not a book project. Thus I follow in Patricia Hampl’s footsteps, although on a decidedly smaller scale. Hampl broke onto the literary scene with her memoir A Romantic Education (1981), which featured her Czech grandmother’s life and death and Hampl’s subsequent quest in 1975 to explore her family origins in the Czech Republic. 

From Goodreads

Hampl describes her purpose for this trip as simple: “to see the place my grandparents had come from, to hear the language they had spoken.” I, too, want to see the village where my first immigrant ancestor was born, to smell and feel the countryside where the Doležals, Obrdlíks, Matulkas, Procházkas, and Kohouts lived, to learn more about Czech heritage than the kolače recipe that seems to be the only surviving artifact, other than my surname, that links me to a place of origin. Like Hampl, I know that nostalgia for family history has the potential to blind me to the truth, that my instinct will be to see what I want to see, and that the past offers few stable anchors of meaning. These are the subjective impulses that the memoirist indulges before examining them from a reflective distance. 

I am hungry for history, but the Prague I see now is more like the hipster district in any American city. There are more BBQ joints, bistros, and sushi restaurants than I expected to see. And I was unnerved to see a bar named Up and Down (featuring retro arcade games) which is eerily similar in name and concept to the Up/Down bar in Des Moines. Needless to say, I did not come to Prague to have the same experiences I’ve had in Minneapolis and Des Moines.

But many other establishments offer traditional staples, such as roast pork knuckle and my favorite, bramboráky, the potato pancake. These dishes are served on nearly every corner, along with Czech beers drawn “from the tank” on site. 

Cmunda po Kaplicku, a dish with potato pancakes, roast pork, and red cabbage served at U Sadu. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

The Žižkov district where I am renting an apartment features rows of older buildings freshly painted with the pastels of the art nouveau style, which began in the nineteenth century. I recognize that this is a fiction of sorts, not Prague as it really is, the way that Dutch people in Iowa prefer to remember the quaint dresses and wooden clogs of yesteryear rather than the bohemian culture that has defined Amsterdam for much of recent memory. Concrete apartments from the twentieth-century Communist era could be defended just as ably as authentic relics of Czech history. And Žižkov seems to have been a hardscrabble area not all that long ago. But aren’t all of us making choices about which aspects of our past we choose to carry forward with us and which we are content to leave behind? This is one of the shapes that freedom takes. 

More flats in Žižkov. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

Prague was a sanctuary for many alchemists, mystics, and magicians during the Middle Ages. The Astronomical Clock, the legend of the Golem, and many other monuments and artifacts keep this history alive. But it is also a feeling that one gets from the rooftop view, a sense that Prague is still a haven for dreamers. Such a feeling is not me seeing what I want to see. It is me seeing how the city wants to see itself: as a city devoted to art and music, a city that believes in lingering longer over beautiful things than stern realities. In this, Prague has much in common with Willa Cather.

Looking from my apartment toward Jiřího z Poděbrad. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

Czechia does not hand anyone a ready-made history. In that sense it resembles the kind of story or essay that I like best: the kind that resists resolution into a Sunday School takeaway and therefore requires the reader to complete it within herself. History in Czechia is a series of facts, but it is also a series of choices about what those facts mean to the individual. Such is true anywhere, but the principle of choosing seems more prominent here. Hampl made one of these choices during her first visit to Prague. While waiting in line at a tourist agency for directions to her family village, a place vaguely located near Třeboň, in southern Bohemia, Hampl stood behind a couple from Ohio. The man held a slip of paper bearing the name of his ancestral village, but the travel agent did not recognize it and directed them to a place with a similar spelling that might have been the town they were looking for. 

Hampl decided, impulsively, that she wasn’t going to do what the Cleveland couple was doing. 

“I stepped out of the line, crumpled up my piece of paper, and left it in an ashtray. The absurdity of trying to get to Třeboň, and from there to wherever this village with the approximate spelling was supposed to be, lay on me like a plank. I felt like a student who drops out of medical school a semester before graduation; I was almost there and, suddenly, it didn’t matter, I didn’t want what I was seeking.”

I felt a little chill followed by a zing of anger when I read that. Hadn’t I just spent hours emailing and Zooming with a genealogist in Omaha to track down my ancestral places and more hours trying to find the story that those facts told? Hampl made me feel like this was a cliché, the kind of thing that everybody does, like buying a souvenir near Charles Bridge. 

She goes on to suggest that following a bloodline too myopically to its source enables a smaller discovery, one untethered from the larger currents of national history. But if you look for yourself in the country’s history, which chronicles a search for ethnic identity, “the country itself becomes the lost ancestry…. Its long story, its history, satisfy the instinct for kinship in a way that the discovery of a distant cousin could not. For it is really the longing for a lost culture that sends Americans on these pilgrimages.” 

I came to Prague still a little miffed at Hampl for suggesting that my own pilgrimage was small, that she could – with a sudden crumple of paper – implicate herself in a grander story of national heritage and not bother with those real people from Moravia that had made her. But that response of mine was a very American one, just as Hampl’s initial reaction to the Cleveland couple had been. She (in her younger incarnation) and I (old enough to know better) both saw it as a binary choice: one must prioritize either the Moravian roots or the national identity. Quite naturally it can be both. I intend it to be both. But Prague does not care one way or another. Prague is just as happy to embrace an impulsive young person who prefers to stay in the city and immerse herself in art to avoid being reduced by her bloodline to peasantry as it is to welcome a middle-aged man who cries more easily than he once did and who wants to know where his people come from because his father and grandfather could not tell him. And because he has three children who deserve to know that part of their family story.

I have only haunted the Žižkov district for a few days, but the sound I hear most frequently on the street, especially after 4 p.m., is laughter. This is part of Kafka’s legacy, embodied in David Cerny’s famous pissing fountain outside the museum devoted to Kafka’s life and art. These two men are relieving themselves in a pool shaped like the Czech Republic. At one time their hips moved by computer, swiveling to inscribe quotes attributed to famous Praguers in the water (the computer has since crashed). Make of that what you will, but one thing it captures is the essentially satirical, and often self-effacing, nature of Czech humor.  ​​

From Solitary Wanderer

This penchant for quirky humor goes back a long way. Many of the stories collected in The Key of Gold, a volume of folk tales first published in 1917 with sources dating back to the Middle Ages, have a trickster quality about them. Dragons and basilisks and hideous old crones are perpetually asking for their heads to be cut off, after which they magically transform into handsome princes or lovely princesses. Rather an extreme variation on shape shifting, which is more commonly prompted by a kiss in fairy tales. But my favorite stories end with non sequiturs. “The Three Roses” ends with the typical wedding feast, and then the storyteller says, “But the floor was of paper, so I fell through it, and here I am now.” Another story follows the “happy ever after” cliché with “How are they all now? I don’t know.” 

These stories made me think of Jan Švankmajer’s “Picnic with Weismann” (1969), an enigmatic work of animation that doesn’t take itself too seriously and that ends with a surprise that I expect is meant to be comic but will assuredly strike Americans and other more literally-minded folk as horrifying. 

So, yes, laughter in Prague is different. Švankmajer has quite a different take than Shakespeare on old Yorick’s skull. 

My first night here I watched three heavily tattooed young men at a table outside a pub. They were drinking giant beers and smoking cigarettes and laughing continuously, and an older man sitting by himself was smiling as he listened to them. Of course, I couldn’t understand a word. But I did gather that they were not drunk. You must quaff many pints of Czech beer to feel it. The laughter from young Americans binge drinking is either sad or threatening, because the point often is to get as blitzed as possible. But Czech laughter, even in public, manages to convey a private pleasure without intruding on others. Maybe they were telling dirty jokes, I don’t know, but there was a tenor in their laughter that also allowed for my solitude. The young men weren’t forcing their fun on me. 

Laughter in Prague is like the beer: pleasurable, but not intense, even when it’s dark. You can enjoy it for two hours straight, all day if you take it slow, and not wake up with regrets in the morning.