'A Home in the Heartland: Czechs in Chicago' banner
Czechs arrived in the U.S. in large number after the failed European revolutions of 1848. They poured through New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore and—as emphasized in the documentary A Home in the Heartland: Czechs in Chicago—many caught the first train to Windy City. The Midwest hub was a magnet for immigrants from many nations, drawn by work in the burgeoning factories, lumberyards, granaries and commercial harbor. Like other immigrants, Chicago’s Czechs grouped together in neighborhoods, first near Lake Michigan before moving westward toward the suburbs.
A Home in the Heartland is a well-made examination of a particular set of American immigrant experiences. The Czechs who came to the U.S. were not a monolith but were often fractious, divided into the camps of Roman Catholics, Protestants, Freethinkers and Jews. Czech Chicagoan Henry Horner became Illinois’ first Jewish governor in 1933. Two years earlier, Anton Cermak became the first Chicago mayor born outside the U.S. He died in 1933 during a failed assassination attempt against President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Filmmakers Susan Marcinkus and Larry Jacobs have ably assembled contemporary interviews with historians, public officials and celebrities along with a wealth of archival material and original black and white drawings. A Home in the Heartland examines many aspects of the Czech immigrant experience including entrepreneurs as well as labor activists, their high rate of literacy upon arrival in the U.S., the role of women and the once flourishing Czech media, the Sokol (equivalent to the Turners) and the influx of new immigrants fleeing the Nazis and the Stalinists.
A Home in the Heartland: Czechs in Chicago will be screened 7 p.m., Oct. 18 as part of the CGSI Cultural Conference at the Ingleside Hotel, 2810 Golf Road, Pewaukee. Also screening that evening is Pictures from the Old Countryat 8:30 p.m. Public admission is $15.
