Ivan Klíma (1931-2025)

The Czech writer Ivan Klíma has died; the New York Times has a full obit.

Klíma has long been a favorite writer of mine, and I revisited at least one of his books earlier in the year. Of the ones that have been translated and that I've read, My First Loves, My Golden Trades, and My Merry Mornings are all worth reading, as is the weightier (and occasionally ponderous) Judge on Trial; the English-language edition of his novel Love and Garbage, however, is marred by a stilted translation. His memoir My Crazy Century covers the same ground as some of his fiction, and includes some philosophical musings that could easily have been skipped. My earlier posts can be found by clicking the tag at the bottom of this post.

I find it somewhat irritating that at least one obit pigeon-holes Klíma as an "author and anti-communist dissident." The latter designation isn't literally wrong, but it's a cliché (and arbitrary at that — he was also "a concentration camp survivor"), and I doubt that it's how he would have wanted to be remembered. Klíma wasn't an ideologue, he was a novelist.

Update: The Guardian also has an obit.

They Don't Sing This One in Church

I found this Canadian edition of Josef Škvorecký's novel about his countryman Antonín Dvořák one afternoon in Kingston, Ontario, and read it and enjoyed it soon after, but then I put it away for many years and I can't say I remembered much about it until I picked up a used CD of the New World Symphony the other day, and then of course I had to read it again. It's an odd book, splendid and sad and often hilarious. It's not quite "about" Dvořák and not really about him being in love at all (though that element is in there too), but instead it manages to trace a portrait of him largely through the eyes of the people around him (family members, other musicians, casual acquaintances), sometimes in scenes decades after his death. Many of the characters are historical figures from the music world and quite a number of them are Americans, including Will Marion Cook, the black violinist and composer who winds up having to "explain" (i.e., sanitize) the lyrics of a raunchy African-American musical number during the composer's sojourn in the US. "Is it a kind of spiritual?," asks Dvořák, whose English is limited, and Will replies, "Exactly, except they don't sing this one in church." Dvořák, a devout Catholic but one with an earthy streak, eagerly soaks up the music in any case.

According to an interview with Škvorecký, the title was the suggestion of his English-language publisher. The Czech title is Scherzo capriccioso, and it was originally issued by 68 Publishers in Toronto (that is, by the author and his wife, who were publishers to the emigré community), in an edition with illustrations that sadly weren't used in the translated version. I understand no Czech but Paul Wilson's translation reads extremely well.

One change in the translation that everyone, including the author, seems to have liked, is to move to the very end a chapter involving the celebrated classically-trained black singer Sissieretta Jones. Dvořák is long dead when the chapter opens, and Jones, who had known him and performed for him, is now old, retired, mostly forgotten, and living in Providence, Rhode Island. She receives a visit from an old colleague, and at the same time a phone call from Jeanette Thurber, who as patron of music had been responsible for first bringing Dvořák to America. In the brief chapter the narrative moves back and forth over the years, while in the present a boat outside, rocked by the waves, bumps repeatedly against a dock as Jones reflects on what, if anything, all of it was for. It's a small but unsettling detail, a reminder of the ceaseless tides that in the end carry everything away.

Naturally the novel should be read to the accompaniment of your favorite rendition of the New World Symphony.

Klíma's Century

The Czech writer Ivan Klíma, now in his early eighties, has survived the German occupation of his native land, during which he and his family — of Jewish descent, though entirely non-observant — were interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, as well as four decades of communist rule, and he has outlived such compatriots and friends as Josef Škvorecký, Václav Havel, Jiří Gruša, and Pavel Kohout. Though barely established as a novelist of international stature before he turned forty, he came into his own in the 1970s and '80s, at a time when it was impossible for him to publish in Czechoslovakia. A member of the Czech Communist Party from his teens (two communist uncles were executed by the Nazis), he became gradually disenchanted in the years leading up to the Prague Spring of 1968, during which he was active as a writer, journalist, and editor, and he was eventually expelled from the party. Though he evidently never signed the dissident manifesto known as Charter 77 — he is somewhat reticent about the reasons, which seem to have included both personal and philosophical factors — he was closely allied with the leaders behind the document, helped organize the publication and distribution of samizdat, and was an active participant in the breathtaking sequence of events that brought about the end of Czech communist rule in 1989. Since then he has largely kept to the political sidelines, content to concentrate on his writing.

Much of the territory in My Crazy Century, the English-language translation of a two-volume memoir published in Prague several years ago, will be familiar to readers of his fictional work, especially My First Loves, My Golden Trades, A Summer Affair, and his masterpiece, Judge on Trial. Klíma is said to have written at least twenty works of fiction, many of which are not available in English and which I have not read, but he seems to be a writer who needs to hew closely to his own personal experience; in fact in this memoir he mentions deliberately choosing menial employment, at a time when it was politically impossible for him to earn his living as a writer, in order to be able to write knowledgeably about that kind of work. He also makes it clear that his own marital infidelities have often been reflected in his fiction. He has not, to my knowledge, previously described the cultural and political movements in which he participated in as much detail as he does here.

Klíma's narrative ends in 1989 and the last hundred or so pages are made up of a group of brief essays — "expendable chapters" we might call them, following Cortázar, who may in fact have been his model — on various themes: "Ideological Murders," "The Party," "Dogmatists and Fanatics." These rather solemn and general pieces add little to the book, and suggest that although Klíma as moral novelist (and memoirist) has a keen sense of the ambiguities experienced by ordinary, essentially decent people who are unfortunate enough to live through extraordinarily dark chapters of history, he is not a particularly original moral or political philosopher. No matter, though; the stories are enough.

Update: A profile of Klíma in the New York Times (November 18, 2013) implies that the English-language version is an abridgement of the original. If so it's not clear what may have been taken out.

The Child Ghosts of Prague

Above is one of a series of brief animated shorts entitled Legendy Staré Prahy. This one is called "O neviňátkách z židovského hřbitova"; I don't speak Czech, but the story can be identified with a miracle-working tale associated with the Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a renowned 16th-century rabbi whose name came to be linked, long after his death, with the legend of the Golem.

In the original tale, the Jewish population of Prague has been visited with a terrible plague, leading to the deaths of many of its children. Convinced that this affliction must be a divine punishment of some sort, Rabbi Loew dispatches a young pupil to the Jewish Cemetery to steal a shroud from one of the young ghosts who emerge at midnight to play among the headstones. When the ghost comes to the synagogue to retrieve the shroud, Rabbi Loew demands that the child first reveal what has brought God's wrath upon the community. The child identifies two adulterous couples whose sins have been concealed from view, and once they are confronted and punished the curse is broken. (The film version seems to single out one woman, but perhaps the narration makes this clearer.)

A version of the above legend can be found in The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: A Historical Reader, edited by Wilma Iggers; a very similar one is included in V. V. Tomek's Jewish Stories of Prague. More shorts in the series can be found at the Legendy Staré Prahy website; there is also a companion English-language page with one of the shorts in translation.

Update: There is now an English-language version of the above video.

Views of Bohemia

These two postcards were mailed five years apart, the first to an address in Kutná Hora (or Kuttenberg) in Bohemia and the second from Kutná Hora to Cleveland, Ohio. Both recipients were named Čermák, and if the abbreviated first name on the first card is Antonín, as I suspect, then the two cards were either mailed to the same person or to two (probably related) people of the same name.

Čermák seems to be a fairly common family name, but during the period these cards were mailed a prominent violin maker named Josef Antonín Čermák was active in Kutná Hora, and the later card appears to be signed either Jusef or Josef. Coincidentally or not, one of the violin maker's students, Jan Baptista Vavra, was active in Smichov in Prague, which was where the first card was postmarked. The signature on the front of the card, however, is definitely not that of Vavra.

The printed message at the top of the first card reads Podrav ze Smíchova! -- "Greetings from Smichov!" It was issued by F. J. Jedlička, a well-known publisher of postcards in Prague. There's a somewhat uncanny quality about the left side of the image, which shows a couple walking together along a deserted street that hardly seems to belong with the view of the Vltava to the right. The view of Kutná Hora was published by one Josef Zajíc.

I can't read Czech and can't transcribe the handwriting on the later card, so for now that's about as much as I can say.

Judge on Trial

I first read this novel in 1993, the year it was published in the US by Knopf, but the copyright date of the Czech edition, Soudce z milosti, was 1986, and even that was for a reworked version. According to a review by the late Malcolm Bradbury, the book was originally written and circulated as samizdat in 1978. The events of the novel itself take place around 1972; that is, four years after the premature end of the Prague Spring in which Ivan Klíma, as the editor of Literární noviny, was an active participant. There are also several long digressions dating back to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II. The book remained unpublishable in Klíma's own country until the collapse in 1989 of the Czech Communist regime, which to the end of its days was one of the Soviet Bloc's most hardline members.

The protagonist of Judge on Trial is Adam Kindl, is a jurist assigned to hear the case of a man accused of the murder, by gas asphyxiation, of his landlady and her adolescent granddaughter. The incident wasn't political in nature but its consequences may be. The defendant faces a possible sentence of death; Kindl, though no dissident, had once incurred the displeasure of the Communist Party, years before, by writing an article calling for the abolition of the death penalty. The judge suspects that he has been assigned the case as a test of his loyalty. If he refuses to impose a death sentence he will lose his job and his decision will likely be overruled upon appeal anyway.

Except for the fact that its author is by profession a writer and not a lawyer, much of the book appears to be loosely autobiographical. Like Kindl, Klíma was born into a thoroughly assimilated family of Jewish descent and spent much of his childhood in a concentration camp. The details of the judge's family members, his affiliation and eventual disenchantment with the Communist Party after the war, and even his marital infidelities seem to echo the author's own background. The chapters dealing with the concentration camp coincide with many of the details of the story "Miriam," included in Klíma's My First Loves. (It will be interesting to see to what degree they will also correspond to Klíma's as yet untranslated memoirs.)

In contrast to much of the literature of the same period, whether from Eastern Europe or elsewhere, Judge on Trial is neither ironic nor phantasmagorical. Its manner is realist, its tone earnest. It presents no difficulties, in terms of following the action or interpreting the motives of the characters, but on the other hand it makes no attempt to amuse or divert the reader either. It's not particularly grim -- the deaths of the old woman and her granddaughter are left on the periphery, and the horrors of war and Stalinism are implied rather than described -- and Klíma is fundamentally a writer of moderation, of the prosaic and ordinary rather than the romantic and heroic, but there is no mistaking the fact that this is, in the best sense of the word, a serious novel.

As is the case with much of the literature of Eastern Europe produced between 1945 and 1989, the inescapable question is whether, now that the political situation has changed and an entire generation has come of age with no memory of life under Communism, the book still bears the same urgency. The specific conditions under which Kindl lives no longer exist, at least in what is now the Czech Republic, but I think the book is more than a historical document. Its underlying theme is the inescapability of moral choice, whether in a legal decision that is literally a matter or life or death or in choosing between one's wife and one's mistress. (Kindl's lover is the seductive but cruelly manipulative wife of a senior colleague.) Tyranny complicates the predicament because the regime recognizes only its own moral authority, and will relentlessly punish anyone who refuses to do the same. Kindl is therefore simultaneously compelled to make moral choices and constrained from doing so in a disinterested manner. Our own situation is very different, and it would be a mistake to romanticize it by likening it to life behind the Iron Curtain, but it seems to me that a little of Klíma's earnestness is something we could use.

The translation of Judge on Trial is credited to A. G. Brain, a pseudonym for Gerald Turner. I speak no Czech but his rendition seems fairly adept compared to other Klíma translations I've read. There are a few slang terms and Britishisms that may stick in American ears, but nothing that will interrupt the flow of reading. One curiosity: Kindl's mistress describes a book she has been reading by a Latin American writer, in which a group of characters revere an author they have never met, then wind up meeting him by chance after he is accidentally struck by a car. Though the book isn't named, it's clearly Cortázar's Hopscotch, a different section of which is also discussed by two characters in Klíma's My Golden Trades. It's hard to think of two authors less superficially alike, but perhaps at bottom there's a kinship after all.

Acrobats

Like Ivan Klíma himself, the narrator of the "The Tightrope Walkers," the fourth and final story in this 1985 collection, has spent part of his childhood in a wartime concentration camp. Though he survives physically, he isn't unscathed:

Perhaps it was a result of my wartime experiences or of a self-pity typical of my age, but I had never quite been able to surrender to pleasure or joy, or to relax. As if I never ceased to be aware of the connection between happiness and despair, freedom and anxiety, life and ruin. My feelings were probably those of a tightrope walker on his high wire. No matter how fixedly I was looking upwards I was still conscious of the drop below me.

As the story begins, the young man is en route to visit a classmate, Ota, who has a cabin in the country. Along the way he recalls an experience, a year or so after the end of the war, of seeing a traveling troupe of acrobats. While he had been waiting for their performance to begin, a young woman had approached him selling tickets, and though he never spoke to her he had been quite smitten by her. Later he had watched the same girl, now wearing a different costume, ascend one of the masts to take part in the show.

With Ota at the cabin is his girlfriend Dana, whom the narrator has never met. She too has painful memories: both of her parents were executed in the war, her grandmother has recently died, and she herself is still recovering from a serious illness. She and the narrator become friends, and later they exchange visits, books, poems, and eventually kisses. Finally, still loyal to Ota, she implores the narrator not to see her any more, then collapses and has to be brought to a hospital. Three days later, recovering at home, she sends him a letter, ardently declaring her love and informing him that she has broken it off with Ota. He hurries out to go to her, but on the way he is racked by second thoughts:

If only her letter hadn't been so totally urgent or her offer so unconditional. Did I even have the right to reject her after what I'd caused? But what feelings did I have for her? Did I have any feelings of the kind she wrote about?

Suddenly, on the way to Dana's apartment, he comes upon the acrobats again:

As I stood there in the crowd, gazing up at the celestial acrobat who, high above our heads, above the dark void, was invoking that vaster void with the starry face, it seemed to me that I was beginning to understand something of the secret of life, that I would be able to see clearly what until then I had been helplessly groping for. I felt that life was a perpetual temptation of death, one continual performance above the abyss, that in it man must aim for the opposite mast even though, from sheer vertigo, he might not even see it, that he must go forward, not look behind, not look down, not allow himself to be tempted by those who were standing comfortably on firm ground, who were mere spectators. I also felt that I had to walk my own tightrope, that I must myself sling it between two masts as those tumblers had done, and venture out on it, not wait for someone to invite me up and offer to carry me across on his back. I must begin my performance, my grand unrepeatable performance.

His resolution soon fades, however, and the story ends ambiguously, as he stands staring up at her window, still uncertain, suspended on the high wire.

(Translations by Ewald Osers, very slightly emended.)

Wish list

If someone would like to translate these books for me as a personal favor I'd be really quite grateful. Thanks.


Ivan Klíma, My Mad Century, Vols. I and II. Edice Paměť, Prague.

Update: An English translation of My Crazy Century will be published by Grove Press in November 2013.