Slovak folk ensemble’s upcoming perfomance takes on special meaning

For 50 years, the Pittsburgh Area Slovak Folk Ensemble has kept alive traditions brought to this country more than a century ago by immigrants seeking better lives for themselves and their families. The ensemble performed around the world, from Slovakia to Paris to New York, Florida and Chicago. Yet their appearance on the University of Pittsburgh campus this weekend may be one of their most significant ever.

On Sunday, you can see the organization do its thing at the Slovak Heritage Festival, which begins at noon in the Commons Room at Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning. The day is full of traditional Slovak music and dance, lectures and films. The folk ensemble — members call it PAS — takes center stage at 1 p.m.

What makes this performance special? It may well be the organization’s finale, thanks at least in part to an infectious disease. But more on that later. First, let’s explore the organization’s origins. Like so much in Pittsburgh, it’s attached to a family story.

We pick up that story in 1903, the year, Joseph Dzumba and his bride, Anna, departed from Humene, Slovakia, and traveled to the United States. The couple, in their mid-20s, quickly settled in the Allegheny County borough of Rankin, where they lived in a dirt-floor house on a hillside overlooking the Carrie Blast Furnaces, which produced iron for the Homestead Works steel mill across the Monongahela River.

Joseph, whose last name became Jumba, worked as a laborer at the furnaces and as a Rankin garbage collector. Anna stayed at home and cared for the couple’s family, which grew to include three sons. A family story passed down over the years says the couple lost a set of twins — a boy and a girl — although this was rarely discussed.

Oldest son Stephen married Mary Elish in 1938. He was 21, Mary 20. The marriage license lists her as a “sales girl.” Stephen found work as a crane man at the Homestead Works. Middle son John became a butcher in Braddock, and youngest Joseph served in the U.S. Navy, where he learned to be a junior engineer. The family’s lives centered around the rumble and boom of the Mon Valley’s steel towns and the traditions brought to those town’s by the immigrants who made the mills work.

For Stephen and Mary Jumba, those traditions reflected the Slovak ways as passed down by Stephen’s parents, Joseph and Anna. The young couple raised five children. Daughter Angie recalls her days at St. Barnabas Catholic Church in Swissvale, which her parents and grandparents had helped build. Attached to the church was a school, which Angie attended.

Angie’s family lived in a Slovak world. During Advent, everyone carried out the tradition of fasting, and on Christmas Eve families prepared meatless suppers of bean soup, mushroom soup, pierogi and bobalky — baked dough balls served with poppy seeds and honey. Then everyone sang Christmas carols in Slovak. Before Three Kings Day, a priest blessed the home of every parishioner and, before leaving, wrote above the doorway the initials of the three kings and then, in Roman numerals, the current year.

Once Angie’s education ended at St. Barnabas, she attended high school at nearby St. Anselm. Students there came from a variety of nationalities, and Angie was shocked to learn they celebrated holidays differently.

But Angie held her Slovak traditions closely, and in 1973 she and her father joined a few women from the Slovak community to start a cultural group called the Pittsburgh Area Slovak Folk Ensemble. The organization’s goal: to preserve the Slovak heritage and culture in the U.S. through traditional dancing and singing.

“It was the most unbelievable thing to happen to me,” Angie says. She studied Slovak choreography and folk art at Duquesne University and taught members to dance, cook and dress in the traditional Slovak manner.

She met her husband, John Lipchick, through the organization. The couple would eventually raise three children. Each went on to make PAS a part of their life.

PAS held weeklong camps at Carlow College (now University) and by 1974 could perform two hours of nonstop dance and music. Angie’s mother sewed members’ elaborate costumes. John became music director and, in addition, taught the basics of decorating Easter eggs — his father excelled at painting the elaborate designs.

Angie and John learned from musicologists and dance masters who traveled from Slovakia and stayed at the couple’s home. How did these traditions vary from village to village, from region to region? Angie and John wanted to know everything so they could pass it on.

The group traveled three times to Slovakia. PAS performed at the 41st International Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia in 1976, when Paul VI was pope, and in 1986 traveled to Manhattan to dance in celebration of the July 4 rededication of the Statue of Liberty. They traveled three times to Slovakia.

One of the highlights was a 2009 performance at the Folklore Festival Pol’ana in Slovakia. After exiting the stage, the dancers and musicians heard the crowd, which numbered in the tens of thousands, chanting “USA, USA, USA.”

John couldn’t believe it — he still gets emotional when discussing that moment.

But it may all be coming to an end this Sunday. Why? Partly because Angie and John have been doing it for so long — Angie is 69, John 73 — and all that teaching and performing takes a toll. COVID-19 also played a role.

“With COVID, time passed us by,” Angie said. “People don’t have interest in belonging to something like this anymore. It’s too bad. People need to realize the importance of sharing cultures. People come from all different walks of life in our culture today. They need to talk about respecting one another. That’s when people in the world can open their eyes.”

PAS’s 50-year history of performance may be coming to an end, but members will continue to gather so they can observe and celebrate the Slovak ways together, Angie said. In that way, and among the families themselves, the old Slovak traditions will live on in a new world Joseph and Anna Dzumba could not have imagined.

Find all the details about Slovak Fest at https://www.slavic.pitt.edu/events/33rd-annual-slovak-heritage-festival.