The Slovak Question: A Transatlantic Perspective 1914–1948. By Michael R. Cude,. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. x, 288 pp. Bibliography. Notes. Index. $50.00, hard bound.

The Slovak Question: A Transatlantic Perspective 1914–1948. By Michael R. Cude. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. x, 288 pp. Bibliography. Notes. Index. $50.00, hard bound.

Sizeable émigré groups tend to have political leverage in both their adoptive state and their country of origin. Slovak immigrant communities in the United States were less fortunate. Although they succeeded in forging transatlantic ties with their compatriots in central Europe, they were outmaneuvered at home and abroad by the founders of Czechoslovakia. Consequently, in America the Slovaks failed to garner any official backing for their national cause.

By the early twentieth century “between a quarter and a third” of the Slovak nation—some 650,000 people—had settled in the United States, principally in “the northern industrial belt stretching from New York through Wisconsin” (9), forming large communities in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. The level of their “publications, organization, and lobbying” on each side of the Atlantic is judged by Michael R. Cude to be “astounding” (199). He makes a compelling case that “Slovak national identity formation was a transatlantic phenomenon,” which is insufficiently appreciated in the “tenuous, and tedious,”...