Staško, Joseph

Joseph Staško was Slovak politician, journalist and retired librarian. He was born on August 1, 1917 in Sedliacka Dubová, Žilina (Slovakia). He obtained his undergraduate degree from Comenius University in Bratislava, studied at la Sorbonne in Paris (France) between 1935 and 1942, and received his Ph.D. in French Literature and Language from the University of Bratislava in 1942. He received a Master’s degree in Library Science at Columbia University in June 1963.
While he avoided politics during the existence of the Slovak State, Jozef Staško did join the postwar Democratic Party and won an election to the Prague Parliament in May of 1946. However, because he was an uncompromising autonomist who made it clear that he would not vote for Edvard Beneš as postwar President of Czechoslovakia, the Democratic Party turned its back on him. He was then arrested and charged related to supposed activities during the war. From 1946 to 1953, he was imprisoned in Leopoldov and in the Jachymov uranium mines. From 1953 to 1961, he worked as a manual laborer in various factories. He escaped to the United States in 1962, arriving in New York on May 24th.

After he received his degree in library science from Columbia in 1963, he found employment at the New York Public Library. He became Chief of the Periodicals Department and retired in 1983.
Jozef Staško’s special interests were history, economics and political science and his research focused mainly on Central European economies and political structure analysis. He wrote and published three books:History of Techniques in Trade, Slovaks in the U.S.A., and The April Agreement. He was the editor of the book The Shaping of Modern Slovakia and was a contributor to various journals of political and social science and presented many public lectures on the Slovakia and its people.
Dr. Staško was also active in several political and cultural Slovak organizations in the US. He was the president of the Slovak Historical Association of America as well as the editor and writer for the SKS bulletin and Horizont.
Dr. Joseph Staško is recognized as one of the moving forces in the preservation, defence, and development of Slovak history and culture in Slovakia and abroad. He passed away in 1997.