Smerzes

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My mothers parents, Albert Smerz and Josepha Kalal, were born in Prague in about
1850. They were part of a large number of Bohemian (Czech), dark European, immigrants
who settled on Chicagos South Side between 1850 and 1900 when Chicago became the city
with the third-largest Czech population in the world after Prague and Vienna.
My grandfathers parents were prosperous enough to send him to America to avoid
being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. I know nothing of Josephas story except that
they she and Albert were not acquainted in Bohemia. They met and married in Chicago in
about 1870. Albert became a building contractor and his sons became tradesman and
contractors also. The Smerzes were Catholic, but I do not think they took religion very
seriously.
19th century Czech nationalists were free thinkers and socialists who identified
Catholicism as an import that had been forced upon them by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
And so while Many Czech immigrants in the United States remained Catholic, the influence of
the church on their lives was pale compared to the influence of the church on the Irish. In
Chicago, Bohemians became known for their Savings and Loan Institutions, and I learned to
my surprise that that might have been the result of socialist influence. I knew nothing of this
when I was growing up because my mother rarely spoke about her family.
She did tell me that the girls in the family were not allowed to read the newspaper. She
used to take it from the garbage and read it in the attic. That was like her. She was interested
in politics and she was a rebel. She told several of my siblings and their children that she
wished she could have become a senatorshe would have been good at it.
The Smerzes had seven children. My mother their fifth child. She was named Albena
after an older brother named Albert who died in infancy. After she was born her parents had
two more children, a girl named Bess and a son named Albert. When my mother finished
grade school she changed her name to Alverna. Her brothers and sisters always called her
Alby.
I dont think Josepha ever spoke English fluently. All my mothers siblings were
bilingualEnglish and Bohemian. They all married people descended from eastern Europe.
My mothers oldest sister and her husband (Marie and Joseph Kordik) owned a ma and pa
grocery store at about 22nd and Ashland in a neighborhood known as Pilsen, after a city in
Bohemia. Bohemian was the language mostly spoken in that store. My mother and her
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brothers and sisters used a few Bohemian words or phrases when they were together
always accompanied by laughterbut she never spoke Bohemian in our home. Once while I
was in high school I asked her to try speaking Bohemian at dinner so that I might pick a little
of it up. She was not interested.
The Smerzes owned their own home and, judging from a family photograph taken in
around 1910, they were fairly well off. The photograph was taken by a professional
photography studio. The father and all the boys wore well-fitted suits with white shirts with
stiff collars and tiesthe kind of collars that were starched and ironed as stiff as cardboard
and buttoned on to shirts that were laundered separately. The mother and girls wore
expensive looking dresses with hemlines nearly at their ankles. My mother was only eight or
ten and unlike any of her siblings she was over-weight.
My mothers mother had died before I was born and her father not long after. One of
my earliest memories is of visiting a very old man with my mother. I think that was her
father, but it might have been my Uncle Joe Kordik. He had only one leg and I think that
because he had some difficulty getting around, I thought he was much older than he really
was. I never knew how he lost his leg.
I knew my mothers sisters Marie, Bess, Jose and her brothers Albert, and Joe. Aunt
Marie and Uncle Joe Kordik had one son, Joseph, who graduated from Notre Dame and became
general manager of the huge Westinghouse Plant at 22nd and Cicero. Bess married a Pole who
worked at the Steel Mills on Chicagos far South side. They had two children, Donald and
Maryland. Donald was my age. He died of an unusual heart ailment before he was 40. Albert
had [Mickeyfill me in on all of this!]
There was an Aunt Ann whom I rarely saw. My mother really disliked her. From her
rare references to Ann I got he impression that Ann disapproved of my mothers hell raising
when she was single and the fact that she married an Irishman. I have no knowledge of
ancestors on my mothers side beyond her parents.

By the way, I put the name Joseph Kordik into google and found this:
Zachary Kordik, M. D.
25 E Washington St
Suite #904
Chicago, IL 60602
This guy graduated from Notre Dame, and I wonder if he is a grand son or great grand son of
out cousin Joe. Im going to write to him.
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