Kristína Royová, Only a Servant, trans. Charles Lukesh (Minneapolis: Osterhus, 192X; reissued Crockett: Rod and Staff, 1991).
This is the second installment of novels by Kristína Royová, who, though late to be discovered by yours truly in her search for all Slovak novels in English, is probably the most-published Slovak author of all.
This short novel, first published in Slovak in 1903, concerns the lives of several families in a small village in Slovakia, which at this time was the northern outpost of the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A stranger comes into town, bearing goodwill the same way Clint Eastwood would have borne a gun. Indeed, the opening line reads: “Just when farmer Ondrasik needed help most and had no idea where to find someone, there came to his house a man, uninvited and unexpected.” The helper is named Methodius, no mistake that: it’s the name of the first apostle to the Slavs, commemorated every year on July 5.
Methodius goes on by his kindly service and warm testimony to his faith in God to have a transformative effect on everyone around him. Naturally, there are some obstacles along the way. Given Royová’s socially-conscious objection to alcohol and its evil impact on peasant society, it’s no surprise that the proposal of one family to open a store selling booze is strongly opposed by Methodius and in time leads to catastrophe in the family. More positively, Methodius helps to facilitate loving relationships both within families and between young people seeking honorable marriage.
The heart of the story, however, is Methodius’s interactions with David, a Jew. In a post-Holocaust era, there is unsurprising discomfort with the prospect of Christian missions to the Jews, so some context is important to understanding this story. First, of course, the novel predates the Nazi rise to power in Germany by thirty years. While anti-Judaism certainly has a long history in Christendom, and anti-Semitism a shorter but equally if not more disastrous history, Royová’s motivation in telling this story is not powered by either.
It was a commonplace of the Pietism to which Royová adhered to seek better relationships and ultimately conversion of the Jews, from a sense of God’s eschatological purposes in finally bringing Israel to faith rather than out of contempt for Jews. It’s very clear in this novel that no advantage whatsoever adheres to “Christians” in name but not faith or act over against Jews. If anything, they come off the worse. Moreover, there is no indication that David is meaningfully a believer in the God of Israel or devout in observance. He is more like an ethnic outsider than anything else, and no blame attaches to him for not being attracted to the so-called religion of unconverted Christians.
What unfolds, then, is Methodius’s patient befriending and helping of David, sharing the gospel with him openly but not placing any pressure on him to “convert.” What David needs—just like the “Christians” in his neighborhood—is a real relationship with the living God, not the right status on the census survey.
Not indulging in spoilers here, I still have to say that I was not at all surprised at the plot revelation at the end after two other novels by Royová, who seems a big fan of long-lost family members—and maybe in an era of mass migration, that was actually truer to life than it is now in a time when you can do genealogy effortlessly on the internet. The end result, naturally, is David coming to knowledge of Jesus Christ as his savior—and the “Christians” coming to the exact same knowledge, on account of Methodius’s witness.
Since reading this and the previous Royová novels, I’ve done a little more digging into their translation history, too. I haven’t unearthed a whole lot, but what I have found does shed some light.
Charles Lukesh, who translated both Only a Servant and Three Comrades, was evidently working in Chile on behalf of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a Holiness network that had a big impact on early Pentecostalism but eventually stayed the Holiness course and regrouped as a denomination in the early 20th century. So I contacted the archives to see if they could tell me anything about him.
It’s true that Lukesh was originally a “Bohemian,” so presumably his name in Czech was Karel Lukeš. I had no luck googling under that name because it’s evidently pretty common and contemporary Karel Lukešes flooded the results! But the CMA archives at least helped me figure out how “Lukesh” became fluent enough in English to translate Slovak novels into English—he was a student at Nyack College in New York, a CMA institution, graduating in 1920. How he came to be a student there at all remains a mystery. Assuming he did a four-year degree, he would’ve arrived halfway through World War I! Perhaps at the time it was only a two-year degree and he came in 1918, the year that the war ended and Czechoslovakia was formed as an independent state. That seems somewhat more plausible.
Whether he came as a professing Christian in the first place, or became one during his college career, is also unknown. What is revealed by back issues of The Alliance Weekly is that in 1920 he signed up as a missionary to work in Chile. He left that August and arrived in September. Did he know Spanish in advance? Again, no clue.
It seems likely, however, that he didn’t like it or wasn’t a success, because the next record to be found is from CMA “Minutes of Foreign Department” in September 1922, in two separate places. The first mentions a letter from “Miss E. T. Smith offering to pay the cost of sending Mr. Lukesh to Central Europe for work among his people there in the preaching of the Gospel.” Somewhat later the minutes note: “Recommended that we approve Mr. Lukesh’s going to Central Europe if he is released by the Chile Committee, but believe he should be connected with some organization working in Central Europe.”
The archivist who responded to my request surmises that Lukesh was affiliated with the CMA only for these few years at Nyack and then in Chile. Only a Servant was published sometime in the early 1920s by Osterhus in Minneapolis, a Christian publishing house founded originally by a Lutheran pastor (!! could this explain the sympathy to Royová’s work, since she was a Lutheran?) and still in business four generations later. Presumably Lukesh made the connection with Osterhus through his CMA network.
Lukesh’s translation of Three Comrades, however, wasn’t published in English until 1941—obviously, right in the middle of World War II and the occupation of severed Czechoslovakia by the Nazis—and this time by Loizeaux Bros, a Plymouth Brethren publishing house. And that’s where the lost trail picks up again! The Brethren archives include four issues of their publication Our Hope referring to Lukesh.
An issue from March 1924 mentions “dear brother” Lukesh who has been authorized for Gospel work in his home country. The president of the Russian Evangelization Society gave him a personal letter for the president of Czechoslovakia (no less than the famous Masaryk) and another from the head of the “Away from Rome” society—unfortunately, in this pre-ecumenical days, Catholics and presumably Eastern Orthodox were not regarded as Christians and thus the targets of “evangelization.”
Note the misspelling of “Slovakia”! Typical.
Lukesh doesn’t show up again till eight years later in the March 1932 issue, and then only briefly, but it does shed light on why he translated Royová’s Only a Servant: he’s a member of the American European Fellowship, whose mandate is among other things conversion of the Jews. He is listed among a number of others throughout Europe aiming at this goal.
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Then in April 1938 the editor of Our Hope reports on a visit with Lukesh and his wife—a Pennsylvanian! perhaps a fellow student from Nyack?—at their home in Znaim/Znojmo in the Moravian part of Czechoslovakia. The “Away from Rome” society is evidently still going strong, alas. It’s noted that a big part of Lukesh’s ministry is the distribution of evangelical literature in both Czech and German. The editor mentions the tense relationship between Czechs and Germans, as at this time what we now call the Czech Lands were populated by at least as many Germans as Czechs. He remarks, “We doubt not that someday Germany will act”—prescient words indeed.
The last entry comes from December 1938, but it only mentions in passing that Lukesh is continuing his work among his fellow Czechs in “one of the disputed areas”—perhaps this means disputed under the conditions of the Nazi reassignment of the Sudetenland to Germany?
Then again the trail runs cold. The last mention I can find of Lukesh’s life is in the brief note about the translator of Greasy the Robber, which says he left after six months of Nazi occupation but returned to Czechoslovakia after the war. Did he spend the war years in the U.S., which might explain the publication of Greasy the Robber by an American press? Did he survive to see the communist coup? Was he eliminated after the regime change? Does anyone in Moravia remember his work today?
I’ll say this for Slovak novels in English: they have led me to unexpected and fragmented stories of lost human lives, as intriguing as the plots of the novels themselves.