You may know that the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak spent the summer of 1893 in Spillville, Iowa. But did you know why the visit to Iowa was important to the composer?

Joseph Kovarik, the Spillville native who was Dvorak's assistant throughout his stay in the United States, once wrote that "upon his return to New York, [Dvorak] missed Spillville... and said that 'Spillville is an ideal place, and I would like to spend the rest of my days there!'"

That's a pretty strong statement, but to understand how a tiny American town on the prairie could have so profoundly affected a European composer who was deeply attached to his homeland, we have to see Spillville as Dvorak would have seen it.

Like most immigrants, the Czech settlers in Spillville probably had a heightened awareness of their own national origin. Most of them probably left Europe with a primarily local identity-as natives of a particular town or servants to a prominent noble family. But when they arrived in America that suddenly changed. As strangers in a foreign land, they would have been identified simply as "Czech." Knowing little or no English, they naturally turned to others who spoke their language for help and support.

Like most immigrants in the 19th century, the Spillville Czechs had come to America to pursue their own individual lives and to find freedom-especially freedom from debt or hunger or poverty. In the case of Czech immigrants, this also meant freedom from a political structure that had kept their language and culture subordinate to the German-speaking elite of the Hapsburg Empire. Now, living in a little town on the American prairie, surrounded by other communities of Czechs, Norwegians and Germans, the immigrants discovered that their culture was no longer subject to a social and political elite.

So when Dvorak arrived in Spillville, he found a town that was intensely aware of its Czech identity, a town where Czech was spoken in the streets and the church and taught in the schools, where the trades and foods and customs of Bohemia were maintained. It was in fact just like a village in Bohemia, with the one important exception that there were no Austrian/Hapsburg authorities to repress their language and customs. In Spillville, on the American frontier, the Czechs were even more free to be Czech than at home, and I think is what made Dvorak refer to Spillville as "an ideal place."