Life-changing experience told in local man’s book

BY SETH MANDEL
Staff Writer

MIGUELJUAREZ staff Milltown’s Jim Lukach described his travels in Eastern Europe in “Lost Inside the Happy Noise. MILLTOWN — When local author Jim Lukach was ready to write his first book, he had everything but the inspiration.

Then came his 41/2-year trip to Eastern Europe.

“Being in graduate school, I was still pretty young. I felt like I didn’t really have many things to write about, and then here’s this opportunity,” Lukach said. “So I went over there and just kind of started filling my life with experiences. And then when I came home after 41/ 2 years, I was really unsure about what I wanted to do. It was just such a life-changing experience. So, I started writing about it.”

Lukach, who has spent most of his life in Milltown, was an English major at Rutgers University, and then went to Wichita, Kansas, to earn a master’s degree in creative writing.

Since most of his family is from what was then Czechoslovakia, it seemed the perfect place for Lukach to teach English while learning about himself.

“Czechoslovakia was one of the first countries right after the fall of communism to really be open to people coming over and teaching English,” Lukach said. “So, at the point I was looking, everything just kind of came together.”

Although Lukach stayed in Czechoslovakia from 1991-94 (the country broke apart peacefully in January 1993, becoming the Czech Republic and Slovakia), he said it took some time to figure out the form his book was going to take.

“That was always kind of there. I wanted to write something, but it was just a matter of how I was going to write it,” he said.

In 2004, he had “Lost Inside the Happy Noise” published by iUniverse, featuring a collection of essays and short stories detailing Lukach’s experiences with his students, his travels and his absorption into a culture that, until his trip, had been only his heritage, but not yet his life.

“I wanted to let people know what it’s like to be there and what it was like to go back and be a Slovak-American,” Lukach said. “And what it was like to be in Eastern Europe right after the fall of communism. So, it’s really just about all these experiences just coming together.”

Although he embarked on his journey alone, his emotional isolation soon faded, with the help of a “crazy bunch of characters” that welcomed him into a world that was equal parts foreign and familiar, like a home he was visiting for the first time.

“I think the most surprising thing was really how hospitable a place could be,” Lukach said. “I mean, I’m like a total stranger. We’d be in a pub or whatever drinking beer, and all of a sudden people would decide to take you home. These guys would wake their wives out of bed and be, like, ‘We have Americans here!’ This would be at 11:30 at night, and they’d be pulling out the hard liquor, moonshine, and making their wives cook. It was so embarrassing, but it was just so real.”

Lukach was also able to track down a few distant relatives, one of whom had old photographs of his family.

Another surprise came when Lukach’s expectations got the best of him.

“The crazy thing was, here I was, 23, 24 [years old], and I thought, ‘I’m going to go to Eastern Europe and teach in a university,’ and I found myself teaching in a grammar school,” he said.

It worked out for the best, though. He began as an assistant, but soon had the class all to himself. He taught fifth-graders his first year, and continued to teach that same group through their eighth-grade graduation.

“It just brought the whole thing full circle,” he said.

Unfortunately, not everybody was as welcoming.

“In one point in the book, we went to Budapest and got ourselves in the wrong neighborhood and chased by Gypsy prostitutes. So, there was always something crazy going on,” he said.

Chases aside, Lukach found he was most embraced by his students.

“Really, the experiences that stand out were the moments in the classroom, and the relationship between these kids who were really first generation without

communism, and they were just very accepting and loving,” Lukach said.

He said in many cases he was the first American his new friends had ever met, and they treated him like a guest of honor.

Often, locals would run up to him, anxiously awaiting the opportunity to impress him with any English words or phrases they had picked up.

“They were very eager to know about America, so it was a great exchange going back and forth because I was eager to know about their experiences,” Lukach said.

Lukach said one of his favorite aspects of the trip was his ability to travel, though he did not always do so in style.

“They had this subculture they call tramping, and the goal was to go out and go traveling with the least money possible, so it was just like going out and hiking in the woods and sleeping on the sides of the road,” he said. “I went a couple of times and was just, like, ‘Wow, what the hell was that about?’ But it was fun just to see how far and how long you could stay out with as little money as possible.”

Lukach said his central location created even more opportunities to travel.

From his Western Slovakian locale, Prague and Budapest were four hours away, and Vienna was even closer.

“Being able to travel in these places that are generally off the beaten tourist path when you think of Europe, and these great mountain ranges in Slovakia, just to be able to hike through them [were memorable experiences],” he said.

Lukach said his excursion to Europe was inspired in part by the falling of the Berlin Wall, but it was the breaking down of the language barrier that enabled him to stay there.

“My grandmother spoke [Slovak] as I remember growing up, but I was basically immersed in it when I went there, so I had to really pick up everything there,” Lukach said. “Just like they were learning English to communicate with me, I was learning how to communicate with them in Slovak.”

Lukach said he recently visited Slovakia again and was surprised by how quickly the language returned to his memory.

He also enjoyed reuniting with his old friends, many of whom he has kept in touch with via e-mail and letters in the 10 years since his trip.

He said the reaction to the book, which can be ordered through Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, as well as many bookstores, has been positive, especially from his friends and family.

“It was always difficult to put into words the whole experience,” Lukach said. “It’s easy to tell the crazy stories about the traveling and the drinking and stuff, but the book goes much deeper into my feelings about it.”

One of the reasons Lukach wanted to pay a second visit to Eastern Europe was to hand-deliver copies of the book to many of the people with whom he shared his experiences.

“Not only to show up and surprise them, but to put a book in their hand, and they see their name in it and how much they meant to me,” Lukach said.

Lukach said he was able to inform some of his former students and friends of his impending return, but wasn’t in contact with all of those he intended to visit.

“I just kind of showed up at their door after 10 years, and that was pretty crazy,” Lukach said. “I just happened to call them out of the blue; I was able to track down their phone numbers. You know it was worth it just to see the shock in their face when I was standing there at the door, or hear it in their voice. It was nice not to be forgotten.”