A Community Performed: St. Nicholas, Lucifer, and Invented Tradition

Abstract

Immigrants to the United States have used many strategies in order to survive and flourish, emotionally as well as materially, in the new environment surrounding them. The attempt to preserve traditions has been one such strategy. Festivals, food, songs, folktales, and performances have long served as a means of affirming identity and preserving some semblance of continuity while adapting to tremendous cultural change. However, this strategy cannot stem the tide entirely: some traditions die out because they are no longer relevant, some traditions are adapted to new surroundings, and some "traditions" are in reality invented to preserve group identity, especially when the group feels threatened by religious and political differences within itself. In his introduction to The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm defines invented traditions in this way: "Invented Tradition" is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.... In short, they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition. It is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant, that makes the "invention of tradition". so interesting for historians of the past two centuries. (1-2) Hobsbawm argues that this construct can establish membership to a group, it can reinforce the authority of the institutions within that group, or it can reinforce models of behavior or value systems (9). Examination of an invented performance tradition thus can reveal ideals held by a group, what the group perceives as a problem and what has changed about the group, for as Hobsbawm notes, these invented traditions can serve as "evidence" (12). The invented tradition of a Slovene-language St. Nicholas operetta performed yearly in Cleveland, Ohio, and its roots in an earlier traditional village procession, will be examined here. The operetta serves as an example of how a performance was constructed in order to educate children about appropriate behavior within Slovene culture. While the operetta was originally invented to educate and entertain homeless boys while controlling their behavior, the operetta performance became for immigrants after World War II an annually performed model of orderly ethnic and religious cohesion. The Slovene immigrants after 1945, many of them middle-class, educated, politically conservative and devoutly Roman Catholic, found a deeply split Slovene-- American community waiting for them in Cleveland. One faction was active in Roman Catholic Slovene organizations. The other supported Josip Broz Tito's Partisans during World War II and was only nominally Catholic. This second faction had their own set of "progressive" Slovene cultural organizations and tended to be anticlerical and nonreligious (Susel, in Thernstrom, 934). Miklavz Prihaja ("St. Nicholas is Coming!") promotes the values espoused by the post-World War II, Roman Catholic wave of Slovene immigrants as central to their identity, both explicitly within its text and implicitly by its staging. Furthermore, it criticizes differences within the group, by presenting an ideal picture of a hierarchical, harmonious world. The operetta offers sharply contrasted gender roles in the casting of characters, with female characters more tightly prescribed in their behavior than male characters. The contrast between what the St. Nicholas procession is remembered to have been, and the operetta which has replaced it-particularly in terms of onstage gender roles and offstage audience roles-reveals how that community sees itself and how it defines outsiders. …