It was Father Bill Sherman who brought the authorial papers of Z’dena Trinka into the collections of the Institute for Regional Studies, and thus available to researchers at NDSU Archives. Using Father Bill’s book, Prairie Mosaic, too, we can situate this Bohemian-American author into her circumstances on the northern plains. Bill’s map clearly delineates the substantial concentration of Bohemian settlers in the townships north of Lidgerwood, in Richland County, North Dakota.
Z’dena Trinka was born in 1892 in Kolin, Bohemia, present-day Czechoslovakia. Her parents, Anton and Leopoldine, brought her to America as immigrants in 1893, settling in Lidgerwood, where Anton was a tailor. Finishing her schooling there, Z’dena went to Valley City Normal to get credentialed as a librarian and returned to serve as the first public librarian of Lidgerwood.
More than anyone else, Willa Cather educated us as to the distinctive cultural contributions of European immigrants to prairie life, contributions evident in her Nebraska novels, but declaimed outright in her famous 1923 essay on pioneer life, “The End of the First Cycle.” At a time when Anglo-Americans disparaged immigrants, she argued they were more educated, artistic, and literary than the English-speaking settlers around them.
Z’dena Trinka was of such stock. She had literary aspirations, which surfaced when she moved to Dickinson to direct the public library. It made quite an impression on her when Theodore Roosevelt’s old cowboy colleague, Sylvane Ferris, strolled into the library one afternoon and commenced spinning stories. She then wrote and self-published two books, North Dakota of Today and Out Where the West Begins, establishing herself as a regional author. She also commenced writing about her Bohemian roots, garnering enough notice in the old country to be invited to ceremonies in 1938 at castle Hradčany in Prague, and meet President Tomáš Masaryk. Then she boarded a special train to get Americans out of the country ahead of the Nazi invasion.
On return to the US Trinka published her best-loved book, Medora, which I have studied, along with her unpublished manuscript in the archives, Colorful Czechoslovakia. She has literary talent that gets lost in flowery romance. All her life—and she spent her later years back in Lidgerwood—she felt unappreciated.
Especially in 1956, when she vented her resentments in an angry letter to Russell Reid, Superintendent of the State Historical Society. She accused Reid, who had advised a Hollywood film director making a film about the Marquis de Mores, of suppressing her own, superior work—the resulting film making a “lamentable caricature” of the Marquis.
The outburst flowed from a broader disappointment in her literary life. “Being an author in North Dakota is not an enviable lot,” she writes. “It means heartbreak . . . and dying by inches . . .and it should be engraved on the tomb of every writer worth his salt who lifts a pen in North Dakota!”
No such epigraph is incised on her gravestone in the Bohemian Cemetery of Lidgerwood. Nor do I intend to exhume any of the unkind remarks Trinka made about other authors on account of her frustration. Given a break or a sympathetic editor, she might have achieved greater fame. Or perhaps the chip on her shoulder was just too heavy for her to take wing. I can only read so much from the dark eyes peering from her author photo plates.
