Andy Warhola and Alphonse Mucha

Last week I enjoyed carrying a paperback copy of Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England through a Dayton Art Institute exhibit of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, "Master of Art Nouveau." Then, over the weekend I stumbled upon the Andy Warhol section of Olivia Laing's The Lonely City which noted that Warhol was Slovak and that his relatives were members of the Ruthenian Catholic Church and also once citizens of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Whereas the Warhols were Warholas before they came to live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my father's side kept their "a" at the end but moved from Soska to Kudera when they arrived in a section of Ohio close to Pittsburgh and later settled near Allentown, PA. It was always a point of curiosity for my father as to how his parents communicated when they first met, but I recognized a possibility from reading about Warhol: they were both Slovaks after all.

I say this because although my earliest memories are of being told that his mother was Ukrainian or Russian, later in life my father mentioned that she may have been Ruthenian. It's highly possible she was Ruthenian, but in the sense of religion, not ethnicity, and that she was in fact Slovak. Anyway, for whatever reason, I'd always thought Warhol was Polish, not Slovak, but now I know better. To the best of my knowledge, I have a Czech last name but no Czech ancestry, if we're viewing Czechs as an ethnic group separate from the Slovaks.