P. Selver in his Anthology of Modern Bohemian Poetry gives, besides specimens of their verse, an illuminating account of the lives of a number of poets. The biographies of the literary workers of old Bohemia are treated adequately in Lützow’s History of Bohemian Literature.
No Čech has been more written about than Hus; and, incidentally, none has shed greater lustre on his native land than he. Every volume dealing with the causes and effects of the Reformation necessarily considers Hus’s part therein. Associated with Hus usually appears the name of his fellow-martyr, Jerome of Prague.
Biographies of Komenský are not wanting, for which thanks are due principally to educators the world over, who regard Komenský’s writings as milestones in the progress of education.
Music, speaking as it does a language which is universally understood, has granted a passport to Anton Dvořák and in a lesser degree to Bedřich Smetana and Zděnek Fibich.
The interested public will find many portraits and life sketches in Vicker’s, Gregor’s, Maurice’s and Monroe’s volumes. Some have been published in The Bohemian Voice; however, complete files of this magazine are now exceedingly rare.
Bohemian Glass is renowned everywhere for its excellence and beauty. The industry is an old one and there are some two thousand shops and factories in the country engaged in the making of it. As an export article Bohemian glass constitutes a major item.
Dictionaries. Grammars. Interpreters. Adolf William Straka, (died in London in 1872), a political exile, who lived for years in England, becoming a British subject, was the first to write an English Bohemian Grammar. It was printed in Prague in 1862.
The first English Bohemian dictionary, by Charles Jonáš, was published in Racine, Wisconsin. Before emigrating to the United States in 1863, Jonáš spent some time in London. In the English metropolis he associated with Straka and the inference is that the author of the English Bohemian Grammar inspired a liking for lexicographical work in his younger fellow-exile.
Charles Jonáš, the “first Bohemian in America” was born in 1840 and died abroad in 1896 while serving the United States in the capacity of Consul. He was buried in Prague, “in the land he loved above all else.” Although he was not a philologist by training, having studied in a technological institute, he plunged courageously into lexicography. His introductory work was the Bohemian English Interpreter (1865), followed by the Dictionary of the English and Bohemian Languages (1876). Like every initial effort, the dictionary was deficient in many respects. Each succeeding edition, however, was improved and amplified, so that now Jonáš’ dictionaries compare favorably with like German publications. Other American Bohemians have achieved political distinction in the United States (Jonáš was successively State Senator, Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin and U. S. Consul at Prague), yet Jonáš the journalist, Jonáš the author, Jonáš the politician had not, in the estimation of pioneer immigrants, an equal among his American co-nationals.
F. B. Zdrůbek’s Anglická mluvnice (1870) is the earliest publication of its kind in America. Crude typographically and faulty textually, the volume is a compliment neither to the printer nor to the author. Jonáš and Zdrůbek, one will observe, worked along parallel lines. This is explained by the circumstance that the two men were attached to two rival newspaper and printing concerns—Jonáš to the weekly Slavie published in Racine, and Zdrůbek to the daily Svornost of Chicago.