American citizenship was a mere epiphenomenon, a fact that my classmates, most of whom hadn’t the faintest idea of their own ethnic heritage, seemed unable to grasp. I knew, moreover, that it made no nevermind that three generations of us had never actually been there. Ditto the equally opprobrious “Czechoslovakian” as a term for a nonexistent language. It was anathema to us Slovaks no one on the inside ever, ever said it, The New York Times notwithstanding. I also knew that the pseudo-word “Slovakian”-usurper, pretender, and offense against eye and ear-was our private shibboleth, the unerring indicator of an outsider. My people were not Bohemians or Moravians. I assumed they were ordered according to the principle of save-the-best-for-last. Czechoslovakia, like Gaul, was divided into three parts: Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia.
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I knew things about Czechoslovakia that other people didn’t, and not only how to spell it. The little orange strip, topologically ridged to represent the Carpathians, could barely accommodate its unwieldy moniker, in marked and modest contrast to the vast swath only a thumbprint’s width away, which fittingly named itself with a four-letter word: U.S.S.R. Fourteen letters, beginning with that peerless Cz cluster, hinged in the middle by a modest but muscular o flicking upward the long fishtail of the remainder. Surely Czechoslovakia had the most wonderful name of them all. Whenever I visited the red and gray farmhouse in upstate New York cobbled together by my grandparents’ meager construction skills, I would spin their globe, swiping the Atlantic Ocean out of sight, to locate the inverted circumflex amidst a crazy-quilt of countries small enough to be states. It was communist, though poor little Czechoslovakia couldn’t really be blamed for that. There was reason for its reticence, of course.
It had been an odd sort of companion throughout my childhood, like an invisible mirror or rumored cousin, never quite real enough to manifest, never quite imaginary enough to vanish.
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