Paul F. Lipold, Ph.D. – Sociologist

This article is about Slovenian grit.  Not the kind that you dust off yourself after a hard day in the fields, factories, or mines. Not the proverbial grit that you have to dust off after another hard day at the office or shift at any other place of employment.  Rather, it’s about the grit that gets you back to work the next day, and the next, and the next, and the next.  It’s about the tenacity and faith that have driven Slovenians forward for generation after generation.

I had originally conceived this as an article concerning the economic and political forces that drove Slovenian immigrants to the United States and or the role of the Slovenian Catholic parishes that helped immigrants to settle into their new homelands.  Intriguing as they might be, these topics remain a part of the story but are no longer the focus.  For as I began to do my research for this article, I think that I stumbled upon that which made me most proud to be a Slovenian. 

Interestingly, although a history major with numerous courses regarding European affairs under my belt, I had only a vague understanding of Slovenian history.  Slovenia did not consume chapters of the Norton anthology of European history which I was assigned as an undergrad.  Its armies did not sweep across the continent in conquest.  It served rather as a footnote in the accomplishments of Charlemagne, the Habsburgs, and Napolean.  My two chief literary sources thus became a copy of Slovenian Heritage, by Edward Gobetz, a book which had long sat dormant in a dusty corner of my bookshelves; and From Slovenia – To America, by Marie Prisland, a copy of which I have on loan from Fr. John Kumse, pastor of St. Mary’s of the Assumption in Cleveland, home to the best Lenten fish fry in the city, if not the universe. But I digress.

Although somewhat dated and perhaps out of print, these historical texts taught me much that I did not know, and perhaps more importantly, that which I needed to know.  Slovenians descended from a tribe of Slavs who migrated into the region north of the Adriatic Sea and east of the Alps in the late-fifth century which had been recently vacated by the Lombards; and had established permanent agricultural settlements in all regions currently comprised of Slovenia by 650 A.D.  The Slovenians joined a Bohemian-Slovak alliance for defensive purposes but enjoyed political independence in the duchy which came to be known as Carantania, in which the Slovenians developed the second oldest democratic government in all of Europe, preceded only by the ancient Greeks.  Slovenians were a people of faith and learning. Christianity was brought to the region by St. Cyril and St. Methodius in the late 860s.  In times of peril, the peasants would seek refuge behind the walls of churches built high atop hills and mountains to avoid marauding intruders.  They lit large fires within their mountaintop sanctuaries that signaled those ahead of the coming hazards. “Light the beacons!”  (Perhaps J.R. Tolkien knew some Slovenian history).  The first book in the Slovenian language was published in 1551 and first Slovenian printshop established in 1575. The first Slovenian Bible was printed in 1584.  The Jesuit college of Ljubljana University was founded in 1595. Churches and libraries marked the towns. By the early twentieth century, Slovenia boasted one of the lowest illiteracy rates and highest publication rates in all of Europe.

Yet perhaps that which most struck me was a commentary of the British writer, Bernard Newman, which I quote at length from the work of Dr. Gobetz:

“The Slovenes are indeed a remarkable people. They have never known national independence [except at the dawn of their history]. It was manifestly impossible for a small people to gain and hold its freedom when surrounded by acquisitive great powers, but the Slovenes determined to secure the greatest possible degree of home rule, and concentrated on cultural rather than political liberty. It was a miracle of survival, almost without parallel.”  

Miraculous, indeed!  Political independence was not to last, encroached upon by the Bohemians in 743 and the Franks in 874.  Thus began the waves of Germanic overlords. Its peoples exploited, pillaged, and oppressed.  The indignities were many.  Invading Turks killed 100,000 and kidnapped 100,000 more. The Slovenian nobility was gradually eroded under Habsburg rule while the vast majority of peasants became virtually enslaved as serfs.  Slovenia was carved up by the global powers after World War I. The Slovenians of Austria were subjected to genocidal Nazification.  Slovenia was again carved up after World War II, much of which was left behind the Iron Curtain.  And yet through it all, a Slovenian culture emerged and endured, within the boundaries of Slovenia and beyond. 

We sociologists define culture as a society’s unique design for living.  It has material and non-material elements including language, types of dress, values, beliefs, foods, etc.  What was it about being Slovenian that was so highly valued that the peoples clung to against all odds for centuries?  Hmmm…

I was also mightily impressed by Prisland’s account of the first Slovenian immigrant to Cleveland, OH, John Pintar, who arrived in 1879.  Like many thousands of his fellow immigrants, he appears to have been motivated by the principal “s trebuhom za kruhom” – with stomach after bread.  He got a job in a shop in the rapidly industrializing city but returned to Slovenia after only five months.  Four year later, he joined a Slovenian agricultural colony in Ely, Minnesota before returning to Cleveland.  After losing employment during an economic downturn, he walked all the way to Colorado in search of work in the mines.  Then, he walked all the way back to Cleveland.  

The story reminded me a bit of my paternal grandfather.  He arrived in the United States in 1912 and found work in the mines of New Mexico.  One of my father’s earliest memories was that of his father returning from work, blackened with coal dust, taking a seat in a large tub to be scrubbed clean by my grandmother as he sipped from a pail of beer.  When the mining industry collapsed, the family relocated to Cleveland, which was by that time on its way to hosting the largest Slovenian population outside of Ljubljana.  He got a job in a local factory to support the family of now six children.  There was no family wage to be found. Everyone contributed.  My father got a job in a stamping-plant at the age of sixteen.   He wanted to go to college.  My grandfather couldn’t help him.  So, my father had to make his own way.  He joined the Marines and with the aid of the GI Bill, became a lawyer.

Then, there was my maternal grandmother.  Her father, a cabinet maker by trade, arrived at the Port of New York in 1905.  He was killed by a hit and run driver on her birthday while she was yet a young child.  A poor family was deprived of its primary breadwinner, thus becoming poorer.  She told me stories about being burned by sparks while laboring in a machine shop while in her teens before gaining employment as a seamstress.  She had two children die in childbirth from complications readily managed today.  She also lost my mother to cancer when I was a young boy.  Yet, she, along with my father, remained two of the most faith-filled people that I ever knew.  They never stopped.  When things got tougher, they leaned into their faith. They leaned into their families. They kept moving forward.  Like their peasant ancestors, they got back at it day after day after day.  They did it out of not just necessity but with hope of a better life at some point, if not for themselves, than for their future generations.  My grandfather inhaled coal dust for his family.  He died of black lung for us.  For me.

I tell these stories because that’s how I can relate to my cultural history as a third and fourth generation immigrant.  I’m sure the vast majority of Slovenians can share similar stories from their own histories.  Why?  Because the hardness if not cruelty of life was not exclusive to my family.  Life was hard in Europe.  Life was hard in the United States.  Yet, like their culture and because of it, they survived.  Centuries of Slovenian fortitude were rewarded with political independence in 1991, and upward mobility in destination nations.  Culture is not inherited in a biological sense. It is learned.  My grandmother tried to teach me some Slovenian vocabulary when I was young, but it never stuck.  I’m not a linguist.  My father played the button box and loved to read.  I loved to hear him play but have no musical talent of my own. I do like to read.  But what I appreciate about them most was their tenacity and faith.  Their Slovenian grit.  Such grit may not be exclusive to the Slovenian culture.  But it abounds within it.  It is the cultural trait that I most hope to be ‘inherited’ by my children.

There was one last line to the quote cited above worth revealing now.  

“The boundaries of Slovenia have never been based on physical features; they rest upon the moral strength of its people.” Proud to be Slovenian?  More than ever.