Czech history: A tough people make Cedar Rapids their home

A new book by former Gazette columnist Dave Rasdal, 'Czech Village & New Bohemia: History in the Heartland,” tells the story of how Czech immigrants helped shape Cedar Rapids into a prosperous city.

Working from family histories, books, documents and newspapers, Rasdal has written a narrative history - a solid history, written like a story - that runs from the earliest settlers to their present-day progeny. More than 80 pictures accompany the text.

'Instead of a dry history book, I wanted it to be a narrative,” Rasdal said.

'When you're writing about history, you have to give people perspective on where the history comes from,” he added. 'When writing this book, I ran into a lot of names I didn't know who they were. With the age of the Internet, it's so easy to look something up. So I made sure to include a few words to tell the reader who somebody is.”

An example is Jan Hus. 'You hear his name all the time,” Rasdal said. 'But who is he, what did he do, why is he important, why did people in Cedar Rapids in the 1800s celebrate his life and death?”

By way of an answer, Hus was a revered Czech priest who was burned at the stake in 1415 for heresy. Immigrant Czechs named a Presbyterian church and a Methodist church after him in Cedar Rapids.

Providing context, Rasdal noted, meant fitting the Czech experience into the city's history and also into what was happening in the old country, as it transitioned from Bohemia to Czechoslovakia to the Czech and Slovak republics.

Bridges are a central theme in the book - both the Charles Bridge in Prague, built in the 1300s, and the Bridge of the Lions in Cedar Rapids, built in 1989 to replace a 1910 concrete bridge, which had replaced a rickety 1875 iron bridge.

Today, the Bridge of the Lions unites Czech Village, on the west side of the Cedar River, to NewBo, the rapidly developing business and cultural corridor on the east side.

And where there's bridges and rivers, you'll find floods and, in this book, a dramatic retelling of the damage wrought by the big ones, though none so devastating as the one in 2008.

The repeated recovery of Czech Village and the NewBo neighborhoods after floods is a riveting topic, and Rasdal does it justice, telling the story through the tough people who rebuilt, and those who gave up and moved to higher ground.

The other threat to the Czech heritage here came from the loss of interest in immigrant roots that followed World War II. The Czech consciousness never went away, but it wasn't until the 1970s that interest deepened. Enrollment in the Czech school, which taught the basics of the language, increased, as did resident trips to the homeland.

The Czech Heritage Foundation was formed in 1973, and Czech Village won official designation in 1975. At the time, Gazette reporter Dale Kueter wrote, 'However strong and genuine the renewed interest, many regard it as a last-chance spurt to be capitalized on.”

It was, culminating in the opening of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Czech Village on Oct. 21, 1995, with three presidents - from the United States, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic - doing the honors. It's been an enduring symbol, never more so than after the flood of 2008, when the striking building was saved and elevated.

As hard as the early Czechs worked, they also had time for learning, music and culture. Bands were formed almost as soon as houses were built. Throngs turned out for huge parades, including ones with a hundred little girls in white dresses and a hundred farmers on horseback. One of the first organizations formed, in 1868, was a Reading Society to share books.

Rasdal, in fact, said the working subtitle for the book was 'The Resurgence of an Artistic, Working-Class Neighborhood.” It was too long to use, but it captures the essence of people - many of them in blue-collar jobs - who put a premium on the arts.

This is the fourth book Rasdal has written - the first two were collections of his Ramblin' columns for The Gazette - and he's planning on doing more. He turns 63 on St. Patrick's Day and is at work on his fifth novel. He'll be looking for publishers for those works of fiction one of these days.

This book of nonfiction became a labor of love, with many hours spent in archives and on the Internet. 'Other communities have their Greek towns,” he said. 'But only Cedar Rapids has a New Bohemia, a Czech Village.”