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Slovak Easter Customs in the United States
| Article
# : |
16922 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1990 |
2,091 Words |
| Author
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M. Mark Stolarik
M. Mark Stolarik, a postwar refugee form Slovakia, is
president and executive director of the Balch Institute for
Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia as well as director of the
Balch Institute Press. He has published seven books and many
articles in the field of ethnic studies. |
On Holy Saturday of each year, one may observer the blessing of colorful Easter baskets in many Slovak churches across the Northeast and Midwest. This is one of the few Old World nonreligious customs that Slovak Americans still practice as a part of a religious holiday (the other being an elaborate Christmas Eve feast) after three or four generations of living in the New World.
Slovaks are a small ethnic group (approximately five million live in today's Czechoslovakia), with over a million residing in the United States. Linguistically they belong to the West Slavs of Europe (the other West Slavs being the Poles, Czechs, and Lusatian Sorbs), although culturally they are closer to the non-Slavic Magyars or Hungarians, with whom they shared the Kingdom of Hungary from the eleventh century to 1918.
The largest number of Slovaks (over half a million) came to the United States before World War I. Overpopulation, lack of arable land, and lack of industry drove nineteenth-century Slovaks out of northern Hungary and into the United States, where there used to be plenty of jobs for unskilled peasants. The burgeoning coal mines, steel mills, and oil refineries, which paid the highest wages to unskilled workers, attracted the greatest number of Slovaks, primarily between the years 1880 and 1914. Northern New Jersey, eastern and western Pennsylvania, northern Ohio, the Detroit region, and the Chicago area were their principal regions of settlement.
Shortly after they arrived in the United States, Slovak immigrants banded together and formed tight-knit communities that resurrected some Old World traditions and created new ones in response to
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