Home

The Slovak man sitting next to me in the pub was the first one to introduce me to the old Slovak proverb about ‘home”, when he said this, “In Slovak language, we say that ‘Home is where your ancestors are buried.’”

I sat back in my seat and reflected on what I had just heard, and my initial reaction was one of admiration. I was inspired by the proverb’s beauty of rootedness and connectivity to the local community. I found the inherent sense of duty and respect towards elders and family matriarchs, who have passed away long-ago, to be fitting. Yet, I was struck by the heaviness of the phrase and the boundaries that it places around how to define a home, and how it stresses not individuality, but the worth of a human being, being found in his/her relationship to the land, the people, the trees, the animals, the crops and the soil of a concrete, PHYSICAL place. In Slovak language, home is not so much emotional, as it is practical: it only becomes emotional to someone because they’ve been, and more importantly, their family has resided there, for as long as their collective memories can recall.

This Slovak proverb clearly contrasts with the American saying of, “Your home is where your heart is”, which undeniably defines ‘home’ on a strictly individual basis: there is no connection to land, to people, to place and to history. If the American definition does allow for the influence of people, family, history, land and place, it does so only in as much as these ‘elements’ influence the feeling of how much a person’s ‘heart’ is attached to a certain physically-demarcated home location: The American proverb of home puts the individuals feelings and comforts ahead of the individual’s obligations to their ancestors and community.

It might be easy for some of us to claim which one of these proverbs we think holds more truth. Some might feel that the individual’s comfort and peace is more important than some distant sense of obligation to a few dead people laying in a field, while others might find the emphasis on individual, cerebral feelings of ‘place and comfort’ that define the American home to be nothing but a shallow, superficial excuse to support a selfish lifestyle. But, I think for the majority of us, we can find and pick out truths from both.

I think language is a very important aspect of a culture; it’s the way through which the people describe the world around them, and each language, with its different grammatical structures, pronunciations and sayings, influences how people view the world just as much as their physical surroundings can. Language is the vehicle through which the worldviews of a people/nation are told; therefore, when learning another language, one is always coming into contact not only with the actually ‘understanding’ of the words and sounds that the other person is saying, but one comes to see the society and the tendencies of thought that emanate from the people. These two sayings about home are great illustrators of this, as both of them serve a purpose in the society from which they’ve come: the Slovak saying comes from a society that is very small and has had waves of massive immigration in the past; therefore, their saying is practical for them, as it is a form of protection against the disintegration of the Slovak people: think about how hard it would be to completely accept a new land as your home, if your mother language defines home as where your ‘ancestors are buried’. It sustains their culture and language. The American definition, on the other hand, also plays a practical role in our culture: it serves to support the individual pursuit of the ‘American Dream’ with an emphasis on the ‘can-do’ spirit which has defined us for many years. Our home can be found. Our home can be remade. Our home can suit us. Plus, it also helped us populate our great land, as moving was not only justified, but encouraged by the fact that everyone was trying to find their ‘heart-felt’ and rightful place.

I’ve recently struggled with finding my own home. I love the idea that I do have a ‘home’ of some sort back in Slovakia, which is the place where some of my ancestors have been buried, yet, I also found it comforting to know that my home is fluid, which enables me to move. Sometimes, I find that my definition of home can be one of a practical nature: wherever I will be studying, wherever I find a job, wherever I decide to build a house and decide to have family. I think to myself, “well, it’s not a romantic definition of ‘home’; it’s just real.” Other times, I think that home can only be defined by memories; seemingly throwing both the Slovak and the American definitions to the gutter: the most important home is the one where I was born. It is the one where my earliest experiences, smells, animals, trips and friends were found. It’s the home of nostalgia and upbringing; therefore, while my heart might not reside there, my mind always will; and while there aren’t any old ancestors buried there, my mind will be. So, where does this leave me? Is my home ancestral? Is it where I feel most comfortable? Or, is it from where I was born?

I don’t know…


Maybe the reality is, is that home can’t be defined by one main element, because home can be a mixture of many of them. I think that everyone in life has an obligation to find a home that uses all criteria—from ancestors—to memories—to land—to personal happiness—and to love—in a creative way. Thus, maybe a new way that home can be defined (at least for me) is where one’s passion and one’s love find their greatest fulfillment, not in oneself as an individual or as a relative of the deceased, but in how one affects and influences the others around them. I think that it would be much easier to claim a home where your work and your passion can be manifested on a daily basis, and where you work each day for the betterment of the community in which you are a part, even if you weren’t born there, or even if you don’t speak the language natively: if someone becomes a doctor and works in a clinic 5, 000 miles away and gives a service to the people and becomes an integral part of their place and community, then hasn’t that doctor found a home, even though his ancestors aren’t buried there and his memory still harkens back to a childhood and family half a world away? Or, maybe there are people who have regular jobs in a bank, or in a school or at the auto mechanics shop who love their work and engage the people every day; they have a vision for life that isn’t just predicated on finding their place in the world until their ‘heart’s content’, but is founded on the principle that through relationships, memories and community the ‘heart’s home’ will inevitably be found.

I guess to conclude, I think that we should all come to view our places that we now find ourselves in as a form of home. Each one might be a little bit different, and some might be better than others, but if we engage in the people around us and if we care about the physical place we’re in at that moment in time (the nature, the history, the business and the community/society), then we are ourselves making home.

So, as Jamie and I fly back to Pittsburgh (the home of my memories and my family), and as we make our way towards Erie (the home of family and practicality), we’ll always be reminded of the place we left, Policka (the home where we were able to build relationships and find fulfillment). I think we can take solace in the fact that it is our home, even if the place can’t be concretely defined.