Tearing Down Prague's Jewish Town

Book Description

In 1887 the middle-class Czechs dominating Prague's City Hall announced that they had a plan for the large-scale destruction and reconstruction of the city's former Jewish ghetto. The plan, involving the razing of nearly all of the roughly 260 buildings inside the ghetto, was carried out in the name of sanitation. To fund this ambitious project, city officials borrowed a vast sum of money. They also expelled the area's impoverished residents from their homes without making any effort to secure new affordable housing for them.

This book examines the social and ethnic interest-group struggles that fueled this project, suggesting possible continuities between nineteenth-century politics and twentieth-century authoritarianism. Giustino shows how middle class officials who held nineteenth-century liberal values shrewdly used municipal power to pursue their group interests, sometimes at the expense of outsiders, and in the process, contributed to persistent anti-Semitism.

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Architecture of New Prague 1895-1945
Rostislav Svácha
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0262193582

Book Description

foreword by Kenneth Frampton
essay by Eric Dluhosch

Prague is a one of Europe's oldest and most beautiful cities. Originally published in Czech in 1985, this seminal work focuses on the architecture of Prague from the turn of the century to the end of the Second World War: a rich matrix within which to place the figures who created the powerful, innovative spirit of modern Czech architecture.

Encyclopedic in its coverage, The Architecture of New Prague documents the architects, structures, and theoretical underpinnings that helped to shape Prague's cultural heritage and present-day artistic spirit. Three supplements appear in this edition: a directory of approximately 1,200 buildings (with street addresses), 25 short biographies of the main Prague architects of the time, and a revised bibliography. The more than 300 illustrations, all commissioned for the book, were taken by architectural photographer Jan Maly.

The text provides detailed coverage of the most important architects and their buildings, many of which have never been documented in any English-language publication. There are also valuable insights into the cultural conditions that helped to shape the Czech capital. An introductory chapter takes up Prague's urbanistic development and its context within international architectural movements.

Where She Came From : A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History

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We should ALL know where we came from so well...
A Wonderful Book for College Classes
A Wonderful Read
Beautiful Personal Tribute
Amazing personal story!!!!!!!

Where She Came From : A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History
Helen Epstein
Manufacturer: Holmes & Meier Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0841914443

Amazon.com

Along with millions of lives, the Holocaust stripped away the official records and family mementos that anchor personal histories. In 1989, after both the opening of Czechoslovakia to the outside world and the death of her mother Frances, a concentration-camp survivor, journalist Helen Epstein made her first tentative efforts to uncover her own history. Armed only with a 12-page letter written by her mother, she retraced family footsteps from the provincial town of Brtnice to Vienna, where her great-grandmother Josephine had killed herself in despair. In Prague, her spirited grandmother Pepi, who had been orphaned at age 8 and left in poverty, rose from those ashes to run a fashionable dressmaking salon. Pepi married a man who repudiated Judaism so completely that their daughter Frances learned of her background only as the Nazis rose to power. Epstein's meticulous research beautifully conjures the drama of their lives and times, carving out the surrounding culture until these three women stand against it in stark relief.

Book Description

Note: this is the current edition of ISBN 0452280184 which is now out of print

Customer Reviews:

We should ALL know where we came from so well..........2006-09-04

In WHERE SHE CAME FROM, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based award-winning author Helen Epstein has penned a meticulously-researched memoir to the four generations of Czech and former Czechoslovak women in her extensive family, from her mother's side of the brood.

While today she associates her public persona to the proud and extensive line of former Czechoslovak Epsteins (see Ms. Epstein's fabulous Amazon Short available off of this site, SWIMMING AGAINST STEREOTYPE: The Story of a Twentieth Century Jewish Athlete), the writer stakes her claim to a noble and illustrious family line which once proudly sported famous Viennese and Prague-based surnames such as Rabinek, Solar, Weigert, Sachsel, Furcht, and Frucht.

Like an experienced batsman for a World Series-winning major-league baseball team, Epstein managed to hang in that old batter's box, waiting for just the right pitch to slug out of the ballpark. In the book world, the analogue was when all the right moments fortuitously transpired to assist Ms. Epstein in securing many essential clues of research which she utilized handily in crafting this excellent book's narrative. Even she'll tell you, the process was far from easy.

Thanks to a dedicated coterie of like-minded collaborators based in points all around the globe as you'll soon read (the former Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic, Israel, South America, and the United States), Ms. Epstein succeeded in cobbling together one of the most comprehensive Czech geneological histories on the public record.

The work is not only emotionally remunerative for Ms. Epstein, to the extent that those missing links in her family chain were finally sewn together, but it's additionally a fine account of several strong women, renowned in their various fields of endeavour, who persevered during the best of times and the absolute horrorific worst of the 20th century.

Starting with Helen's great-grandmother Therese Sachsel, nee Frucht (Furcht), who lived during the reign of Franz-Josef in the last of the Habsburg-ian thrones, passing through her grandmother Pepi's life story during the turbulent First World War and the First Czechoslovak Republic, and finally overlapping the history of her own mother Frances Epstein, Helen pored over hundreds (if not thousands) of archival sources in constructing this cogent tale.

Collectively, these three noble upstanding women belonging to the author's colourful past outlived the worst of the 20th century's ravages, passing fads, and tragic downfalls.

We swoon with Therese Sachsel during the euphoria of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk's (TGM) storied first Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938), when all seemed possible for the Central European remant of the former Austria-Hungarian powerhouses of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakia. Our hopes and dreams are temporarily crushed alongside her grandmother Pepi Rabinek as we witness the invasion and subsequent occupation of Prague by Nazi hordes, who sweep unchallenged through the former Czechoslovakia's borders after the West's perfidy of Munich. We agonize alongside Pepi's daughter, Frances Solar/Rabinek/Epstein, the paragon of the family and Helen's stalwart mother, as she is dispatched to the Teresienstadt (in modern-day Terezin, Czech Republic) concentration camp, or in the colloquial Czech, the "koncentrak." We also rejoice when Frances is extricated from the hellhole of Auschwitz, and tranported the West in wartime Germany as part of a labour brigade, towards the oncoming Allies from the West, liberated in Bergen-Belsen by British forces at the end of WWII. Finally, we are shocked to discover the insensitivity, sheer apathy, and in many instances -- outright hostility -- that Praguers demonstrated towards the surviving returnees from the Nazi camps, to which Frances and her future husband, famous former Czechoslovak Olympian swimmer, Kurt Epstein, counted themselves.

Helen Epstein's lines draw us inexorably into this story, and once you start you'll have a difficult time finding excuses to stop.

What staggered me as I made my way through this read was Ms. Epstein's formidable discipline. The sheer single-mindedness with which she approached the colossal task of the near-vertical climb to reach the bottom of her family's history. I read with awe how solace was found towards the end.

WHERE SHE CAME FROM will stand as one of the foremost examples of the self-researched memoir. If you need any reason at all to read this book, then let it be thanks to the iron-willed determination which the answers gracing its pages were unearthed by Ms. Epstein.

A book like this needs to be savoured for its significance, appreciated for its illumination, and respected for its purity. There isn't a single letter which graces these pages that wasn't typed, written, or transcribed in the absence of a labour which can only be termed love.

I sit back and wish we all had the staying power of Ms. Epstein. The book is laudatory in the extreme.

As if Ms. Epstein's family history were not enough, there are other benefits to this book too. For those with a keen interest in the past two centuries of life in Prague and the experiences of Bohemia's and Moravia's Jews and its Czech peasantry, WHERE SHE CAME FROM is chock-a-block with painstaking factoids and historical tidbits that'll nudge you gently towards further reading. It will also supply its readers with a glimpse towards the increasingly-distant Czechoslovak past, which, with the passing of the years and the keener integration of this country with the rest of the EU, slips further and further away from the grip of Czech youth.

This book is more than just a reminder, it's a testament to a time which no longer exists. In that respect, it is now part of the permanent historical record.

WHERE SHE CAME FROM is written in a language at once accessible and magnetic. For all ages, for all backgrounds. I can't do anything less than award this superb work of history my highest rating of 5-stars.

I know you will too.

-- ADM in Prague

A Wonderful Book for College Classes.......2006-06-23

Beautifully written, WHERE SHE CAME FROM is also the product of very serious and exhaustive research. It is a magical and haunting book. It brings alive a period of Jewish women's history that is only now being written about in English. Travelling through pre-Holocaust Central Europe with Epstein is an amazing experience: the reader follows both the process of investigation of family history and the emotions this opens up for the writer.

I taught the book several times both in the US and Mexico in classes on Memory and Autobiography. My students loved the book. Many of them bought several copies to give to relatives and friends as gifts. My graduate students (in History and Literature) were impressed by the rigor of Epstein's research, and the skill with which she weaves historical information into her prose.

A Wonderful Read.......2006-06-12

This is a fascinating chronicle of three generations of the author's female ancestors. It is probably the only book in English that tells the story of Jewish women in Prague in the the first half of the twentieth century. Helen Epstein has a special talent for recreating social history and bringing it alive.

Beautiful Personal Tribute.......2006-03-29

This book was a beautiful personal tribute to the author's ancestors.

I was engrossed in this book from the first page...although it was a slow read for me, because I wanted to grasp the intensity of the generational saga, and grasp the historical facts, correctly. Epstein has more than proved herself in this dramatic memoir of family generations, identity, and history, weaving us through time, each piece of family fabric a part of the final tapestry. The reader is given remnants and squares of fabric in a familial tapestry, of sorts, through history and time, through the horrors of war, and how it affects all the generations, from past to present. From assimilating into society and racial and religous identity, to how one views themselves and what they identify with, Epstein manages to stitch a tapestry of her family, each stitch in time adding to the fabric of her own identity. Bravo for a wonderful read!

Amazing personal story!!!!!!!.......2004-01-17

Although this book has a slow start with a lot of historical information, once you get to the Holocaust section, you will not be able to put this book down. I read it while in Vienna and after I visited Prague. I felt so connected to my surroundings and the author that I literally felt like I was in the book. Makes the enormity of the Holocaust personal and understandable. A MUST READ FOR EVERYONE!

Vienna Secession 1898-1998: The Century of Artistic Freedom (Prestel Art)

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Vienna Secession 1898-1998: The Century of Artistic Freedom (Prestel Art)
Iaroslava Boubnova , and Czech Republic) Galerie Rudolfinum (Prague
Manufacturer: Prestel
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3791319477

Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle

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gregor samsa
a different reading of kafka

Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle
Scott Spector
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0520236920

Book Description

Scott Spector's adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called "Prague circle" and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and practice.
With the collapse of German-liberal cultural and political power in the late-nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, Prague's bourgeois Jews found themselves squeezed between a growing Czech national movement on the one hand and a racial rather than cultural conception of Germanness on the other. Displaced from the central social and cultural position they had come to occupy, the members of the "postliberal" Kafka generation were dazzlingly productive and original, far out of proportion to their numbers. Seeking a relationship between ideological crisis and cultural innovation, Spector observes the emergence of new forms of territoriality.
He identifies three fundamental areas of cultural inventiveness related to this Prague circle's political and cultural dilemma. One was Expressionism, a revolt against all limits and boundaries, the second was a spiritual form of Zionism incorporating a novel approach to Jewish identity that seems to have been at odds with the pragmatic establishment of a Jewish state, and the third was a sort of cultural no-man's-land in which translation and mediation took the place of "territory." Spector's investigation of these areas shows that the intensely particular, idiosyncratic experience of German-speaking Jews in Prague allows access to much broader and more general conditions of modernity. Combining theoretical sophistication with a refreshingly original and readable style, Prague Territories illuminates some early signs of a contemporary crisis from which we have not yet emerged.

Customer Reviews:

gregor samsa.......2000-05-06

A well documented and beautifully written book on the jewish writers,known as the prague circle, at the beginning of the twentieth century. It captures their identity struggle in a political and cultural prague. Spector gives his readers a treat by unmasking an enigmatic Kafka. We are able to perhaps know a more tender man behind the desk. We can now imagine how Gregor's creator felt. This alone was worth waiting for.

a different reading of kafka.......2000-04-24

Spector does a brilliant job in reading Kafka together with the other members of what he calls as the Prague circle. The book is challenging to read and it requires a certain level of acquintenance with the field and some German perhaps. In any case, it gives you a different perspective to understand the cirisis within the Prague circle to which Kafka is also included. Territory, territorialization, reterritorialization and deterritorialization cna be considered as the key processes one must understand in reading the book. Even though it seems somewhat consfusing from this Spector eloquently argues and proves his thesis.

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The Personal, Political, and Literary -- Klima's Thoughts Past the MidPoint of his Odyssey
Translations are always harder to nail down...

The Spirit of Prague
Ivan Klima
Manufacturer: Granta Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light: A Novel

ASIN: 1862071020

Customer Reviews:

The Personal, Political, and Literary -- Klima's Thoughts Past the MidPoint of his Odyssey.......2007-01-31

The book is a collection of essays which vary widely in their scope and quality. The best of them, detailed below, are very good. However, to put it bluntly, the brief feuilleton-type pieces which address the desperate, then-current (1970's and 80's) political and cultural situation in Czechoslovakia perhaps should not have been included in this particular collection. (At the time of their composition they were suitable battle-cries for Klima's countrymen and suitable appeals to Western sympathizers for moral support of the dissent movement in his native land, and therefore have a value as historical markers.) These are pieces which bemoan and attempt to describe totalitarianism's inner logic and workings, using the language of standard assaults on the beast and standard pleas for a more human and humane alternative political system. But they present the conventional wisdom on this topic without giving insight into the peculiar situation of the history of socialism in Czechoslovakia, and they do not delve into the original commitment of a large part of the Czech and Slovak intelligentsia to the establishment and maintenance of the communist state during its first twenty years before the crisis of 1968. In other words the essays do not really examine the assumptions and illusions of "reform communism" itself and the extent to which intellectuals had contributed to the confusion of utopian goals with politics as practiced in the real world.

The reader learns at the outset what experiences have framed Klima's ideas about writing and living (in his case even living cannot be a given or automatic phenomenon but a problematical one). A good part of his childhood was spent in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, and this demoralizing experience has to influence one's thinking in an inescapable way (though it should be pointed out that Klima's memories of the experience are not entirely depressing or bitter - he and his family made a child's life there and he survived the experience).

The title essay attempts to woo readers away from the idea of that city as either a "magical" or "mystical" place (an idea which Klima attributes mostly to foreign writers who have traveled to Prague). As he points out, the cosmopolitan hothouse Prague of arts and letters which flourished at the end of the Habsburg era no longer exists - the Jews and Germans who participated in this exciting urban culture are long gone, courtesy of the vicious politics which prevailed during the middle of the twentieth century. Viewed over a longer period (half a millennium) Prague is a city whose residents have accustomed themselves to a series of political and cultural defeats without lapsing into defeatism or hopelessness - in other words a city of people who are aware of limitations without foregoing opportunities as they arise. And, from the physical point of view (which always molds mental outlook), it is a city of neighborhoods and public areas built on a human scale, symbolized to Klima above all by the foot-traffic on the Charles bridge.

"Czechoslovakia: a Premature Obituary" deals with the breakup of the nation into Czech and Slovakian states, supplying some historical information about the impulses toward autonomy in the Slovakian half of the old nation (a nation not that old, having been established as a unified political entity only in 1918, and having endured the Nazi-created separation of 1939-45). Klima thinks the current separation (the essay was written in 1992) of these closely related peoples is irrational, and he views the whole process with regret but is hopeful that the traditions of non-violence in political life which have been so prominent in this small nation will allow for the divorce to be perhaps only a temporary one

There is an interesting interview in which Philip Roth poses questions about how the new situation (1990) of artistic freedom might influence Czech writing, hinging on the observation of Western writers that "where everything is allowed, nothing counts", which is the reverse of the situation that prevailed for Central and Eastern European artists over a period of almost fifty years. Roth obviously fears that the plunge into freedom may prove to be a plunge into irrelevance or anomie. Klima responds with level-headed reasons for his optimism about how the changing circumstances might still be advantageous for artists. I don't know if he remains optimistic sixteen years later. This essay also includes some interesting asides and byplay on Milan Kundera's writing and career (Kundera had made himself a figure of bitter controversy among Czech writers by emigrating to France; and Roth was at this time a great Kundera partisan).

The real gem of this collection is the essay "The Swords are Approaching", which is a detailed exegesis of three of Franz Kafka's most compelling works - the long short story, "In the Penal Colony", and the novels "The Trial" and "The Castle". It's a very persuasive literary essay in which Klima attempts to relate Kafka's life to his writing - it should be pointed that such a biographical approach is anathema to critics of more "theoretical" orientations (or perhaps illusions) and will draw their scorn as middle-brow or worse. But you should read the essay in order to see just how convincing it is (I started off skeptical but Klima had won me over by the middle of the essay). I won't give away the critical "key" which Klima uses to unlock these stories here. This essay should dismiss once and for all the notion that Kafka had some kind of uncanny prescience about the dark period about to descend on Europe (Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism) which is expressed in the form of parables by his stories (that interpretation seems all too easy and is not supported by the known facts of his life and his letters to and conversations with his friends). I'll mention that I believe Klima might have commented also on the "black comedy" of some of the situations described (both in the stories and in Kafka's life - the situation of his day-long grilling by his prospective in-laws in Berlin is rife with such comedic implications), but one can't have everything one wants; I believe this essay will withstand the test of time and challenges by other literary critics.

Klima's style in these essays is straightforward and without literary flourishes. This is conveyed well by the translator, Paul Wilson, whose abilities with the Czech tongue are admirable and perhaps even amazing, as exemplified by his very different - and apt -- handling of B. Hrabal's language.

Translations are always harder to nail down..........2006-08-06

...because the translator -- in this case the Canadian, Paul Wilson -- often loses the essence of what the author genuinely meant by his lines. Wilson is known around Prague circles as *the* quintessential "go to" guy for Czech to English translations, and if I'd not have seen and heard certain North American expats and their skill in the Czech language, I'd have never believed it at all possible.

Klima glosses over a wide range of relevant former Czechoslovak issues in his essays. What I found most striking about them was the obscure facts they'd always seem to reveal -- how Klima would shed a bright light on the history of the one-time dissident movement in the former Czechoslovakia, and of the foibles of certain Czech authors and artists who have since been elevated to positions of prominence in Czech society -- making them no longer accessible to their once-stalwart cronies. This, of course, is a full essay in and of itself and for another time.

Certain passages in SPIRIT are tinged with longing regret for "the way things used to be" in the former Czechoslovakia...and as I'd heard one former exile mention to me over coffee and wine in an out of the way Prague bistro recently -- "During Communism, things were much better. We were all at the same level. None of us was better than the next. You could enjoy drinks with your friends, and there were no petty jealousies. Sometimes I wish for those times again." Frightening comparison, actually. At least to my mind.

At spots in THE SPIRIT OF PRAGUE, I also get that feeling that this is the way that author Klima feels too, but for vastly different reasons. Regardless, the tide has long since crept away. This is a radically new Czech "republic," to be sure.

What got me started on my "Klima tip" was a Foreward he'd penned for TRAVELER'S TALES PRAGUE, a book I'd reviewed earlier if you leaf through my Amazon Review archives.

I'd just loved (then) the way he phrased certain things in TALES, and I was intent on getting to the bottom of the mystery of Klima's many other works. Happening across this title in a local bookshop a few weeks back, I couldn't help but fetch it from the shelves. I could hardly resist.

When it comes to books like this, the author expects that you've done a fair amount of rudimentary background reading on Czech and Slovak history. Don't expect to dig to the heart of what makes the Czech lands tick in this title, folks, as Klima glosses over much of the relevant history of this place, supplying us with colourful details of the many things which we won't typically hear about in the hundreds of guide books, travel books, and propaganda spin pieces which are printed in the Czech capital and abroad.

You'll learn about snippets from Franz Kafka's diaries, with Klima's cogent analysis of Kafka's choice of characters in his various works and how they relate to Kafka the man, the author. Also, there are historical anecdotes about the thinking of great Czech statesmen such as TGM -- Tomas Garrigue (Garrick) Masaryk -- the First Republic of Czechoslovakia's President (post-WWI), and similar stories which I'd never heard about up until now. I'm always grateful for finds like these.

SPIRIT is a mixture of essays written by Klima during the height of his dissident years; spirited out of the former Czechoslovakia as they were and delivered in absentia at various foreign symposia in the West, and those which were written immediately following the former Czechoslovakia's "Velvet" Revolution. Those which were written circa early '90s are just precious. That time (the one which existed in this country during those transitional years) will never again exist in this quiet pocket of the planet -- so Klima's essays serve as more of a snapshot in time, and hopefully will stand the test of it too.

The creme de la creme arrives in the final chapter, when Klima deconstructs the writing of Franz Kafka in a way I've never read before.

This thin book is worth its price in gold just to get a glimpse that last commentary.

Like I said, translations are always a tough go. In spots, Wilson appears to me to be struggling with the original Czech, and it makes for a somewhat clunky read.

I'd had about thirty (30) pages left to go on this book for the past two weeks, and I just couldn't find the inclination to just hunker down and gobble it up -- save for this afterenoon -- because I was just too intimidated by the complexity of the translated prose.

This either says a lot about my schedule, or it says a thing or two about my patience for this sort of writing. I suppose, that at the time I'd put it down I'd come across a rather challenging section, so I just didn't want to sit through and work it out for myself. ::: who knows :::

But if you've got a couple of weeks, and are looking for a fun and edu-taining exercise, read Klima. His intelligence amongst the Czech intellectual set is unsurpassed, and his reputation -- the one which precedes him -- is very well-deserved.

Four stars.

-- ADM in Prague

Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism

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Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism
Chad Bryant
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0674024516

Book Description

In September 1938, the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany. Six months later, Hitler's troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia--the first non-German territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German.

Chad Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its consequences for the region. To make the Protectorate German, half the Czech population (and all Jews) would be expelled or killed, with the other half assimilated into a German national community with the correct racial and cultural composition. With the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich, Germanization measures accelerated. People faced mounting pressure from all sides. The Nazis required their subjects to act (and speak) German, while Czech patriots, and exiled leaders, pressed their countrymen to act as "good Czechs."

By destroying democratic institutions, harnessing the economy, redefining citizenship, murdering the Jews, and creating a climate of terror, the Nazi occupation set the stage for the postwar expulsion of Czechoslovakia's three million Germans and for the Communists' rise to power in 1948. The region, Bryant shows, became entirely Czech, but not before Nazi rulers and their postwar successors had changed forever what it meant to be Czech, or German.

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Mesmerizing, Tragic yet Uplifting
Skvorecky's Best Work
Humourous tale of Czech horrors
The essential modern Czech novel.
A complex and amusing autobiographical novel

The Miracle Game
Josef Skvorecky
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0393308499

Customer Reviews:

Mesmerizing, Tragic yet Uplifting.......2003-11-23

This is the first book I ever read by Skvorecky and it is undoubtedly the best. Two stories procede at side by side, the former (from 1948) setting up the latter (in 1968) which references the first. The religious experience of downtrodden peoples from Middle Europe was perfectly depicted - from their simple faith to their hope for a miraculous deliverence from the tyranny of communism.

By the time of the Spring Prague the nation was demoralized but had not surrendered its soul. As in every country under Soviet tyranny, people expressed their desire to be free in hundreds of ways, one of which was revolution. But the "miracle" of that spring was as elusive as the purported miracle from 20 years earlier.

What is particularly tragic is all the wasted time, effort and lives expended arguing about such an absurd philosophy as Marxism which, we should note, was hardest on the "people" to whom it gave lip service; its existence was made possible through the use of force. By the end one understands that all the dialectics and theories and promises mean nothing when compared to individual freedom or in this case, the liberation of a whole society.

Skvorecky's Best Work.......2003-05-21

This is Josef Skvorecky's best novel, a fairly strong statement since much of his other work, such as the novel The Engineer of Human Souls and some of his short stories, is excellent. Like a number of his other works, this book is semi-autobiographical and covers a good slice of modern Czech history. At its core is an analysis of the false promises of Communism, which is shown to be triumphant only by a combination of repression and chicanery. Written with his usual humor and deft characterization, this is simultaneously an ironic and tragic view of modern history.

Humourous tale of Czech horrors.......2000-09-03

Skvorecky has done an interesting thing here, he has intertwined a serious story of the horrors of living in Czecheslovakia with a bawdy romp about a young oversexed man who teaches in a all girls high school. We follow Danny as he grows into an oversexed middle aged man. The story is funny and well-written for the most part. My only complaints are he jumps around in time a little too much and the translation got a little borderline obscene. All in all I enjoyed reading it and think anyone with an interest is Czech history will as well

The essential modern Czech novel........1999-04-21

This is the one. This novel better than any other explains the imprint left on the Czech consciousness by the Soviet invasion of August 1968, described so vividly by Skvorecky.

A complex and amusing autobiographical novel.......1998-01-13

Skvorecky continues his series of semi-autobiographical novels with The Miracle Game, interweaving his hero Danny Smiricky's experiences in the post-war rise of Czech communism with the end of the Prague Spring. More obscure and hence less successful than The Engineer of Human Souls, but still a complex and amusing story. The high point of the novel is a moving chapter telling in parallel the story of the Nazi roundup of Prague Jews and a friend's escape from the 1968 Russian invasion.

The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring: The Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 19561967 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies)

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The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring: The Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 19561967 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies)
Vladimir V. Kusin
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0521526523

Book Description

In this survey of the development of reformist ideas among the Czech intelligentsia from 1956 to 1967, Dr Kusin presents an intellectual pre-history of the Prague Spring of 1968. He believes that incongruity between the political, social, economic and cultural organization imposed on Czechoslovakia after 1948 and the national disposition of the people was at the root of reformist thinking. The desirability of change gradually found expression in the formulation of a national aim to make the system more democratic, humane and even in a sense ‘pluralistic’, while preserving its socialist character. The author’s emphasis is on the growing influence of the ‘unofficial’ intellectual groups and their impact on the political structure of the day. The book is unusual in putting at least as much emphasis on reformist ideas in the fields of law, philosophy, culture, history and political science as on revisionism in economic organization.

Appeasement in Crisis: From Munich to Prague, October 1938 - March 1939

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Appeasement in Crisis: From Munich to Prague, October 1938 - March 1939
David Gillard
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

General | World | History | Subjects | Books

Book Description

After Munich, the British Government expressed readiness to defend what remained of Czechoslovakia. Six months later, Hitler ignored the warning and initiated its conquest and partition; he faced only verbal condemnation. Yet, a fortnight later, Chamberlain's Cabinet tride and failed to protect Poland by a similar "guarantee". Their deliberations show how and why they had so miscalculated.

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