A memoir of the author who describes the lives caught up in Czechoslovakia's tragic fate under the Nazis. It also illuminates the chaotic life of a nation during the Stalin era.

Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968

“The pages of history recall scarcely any parallel episode at once so romantic in character and so extensive in scale.” —Winston S. Churchill

In 1917, two empires that had dominated much of Europe and Asia teetered on the edge of the abyss, exhausted by the ruinous cost in blood and treasure of the First World War. As Imperial Russia and Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary began to succumb, a small group of Czech and Slovak combat veterans stranded in Siberia saw an opportunity to realize their long-held dream of independence.

While their plan was audacious and complex, and involved moving their 50,000-strong army by land and sea across three-quarters of the earth’s expanse, their commitment to fight for the Allies on the Western Front riveted the attention of Allied London, Paris, and Washington.

On their journey across Siberia, a brawl erupted at a remote Trans-Siberian rail station that sparked a wholesale rebellion. The marauding Czecho-Slovak Legion seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and with it Siberia. In the end, this small band of POWs and deserters, whose strength was seen by Leon Trotsky as the chief threat to Soviet rule, helped destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire and found Czecho-Slovakia.

British prime minister David Lloyd George called their adventure “one of the greatest epics of history,” and former US president Teddy Roosevelt declared that their accomplishments were “unparalleled, so far as I know, in ancient or modern warfare.”

Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe

Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic, created to be the wife of a man who dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899. 

Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert, trapped in an old copper flask, and released in New York City, though still not entirely free. 

Ahmad and Chava become unlikely friends and soul mates with a mystical connection. Marvelous and compulsively readable, Helene Wecker's debut novel The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, into a wondrously inventive and unforgettable tale.

The Golem and the Jinni (The Golem and the Jinni, #1)

Erben compiled and wrote "A Bouquet" based on his studies of Slavic folktales and folk songs. First published in 1853, it is dotted with murder and mayhem : graves opening and the dead walking the earth, the animate becoming the inanimate and vice versa, ogres and monsters of lake and wood, human transformations reminiscent of Ovid's "Metamorphoses". Written as ballads, Marcela Sulak's new translation perfectly captures the cadence and rhythm in an English that is fresh and energetic. Through the years "A Bouquet" has come to be regarded as a masterpiece and wellspring of inspiration to artists of all stripes, including Antonín Dvořák, who composed a series of symphonic poems to some of these tales. Of the many illustrators who have contributed to the various editions that have appeared over the past century and a half, Alén Diviš's artwork is generally considered the most powerful. This edition also includes Erben's own notes explaining the origins of many of these tales.

A Bouquet of Czech Folktales

Before Madeleine Albright turned twelve, her life was shaken by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia—the country where she was born—the Battle of Britain, the near total destruction of European Jewry, the Allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War.

Albright's experiences, and those of her family, provide a lens through which to view the most tumultuous dozen years in modern history. Drawing on her memory, her parents' written reflections, interviews with contemporaries, and newly available documents, Albright recounts a tale that is by turns harrowing and inspiring. "Prague Winter" is an exploration of the past with timeless dilemmas in mind and, simultaneously, a journey with universal lessons that is intensely personal.

The book takes readers from the Bohemian capital's thousand-year-old castle to the bomb shelters of London, from the desolate prison ghetto of Terezín to the highest councils of European and American government. Albright reflects on her discovery of her family's Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland's tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation. Often relying on eyewitness descriptions, she tells the story of how millions of ordinary citizens were ripped from familiar surroundings and forced into new roles as exiled leaders and freedom fighters, resistance organizers and collaborators, victims and killers. These events of enormous complexity are never-theless shaped by concepts familiar to any growing child: fear, trust, adaptation, the search for identity, the pressure to conform, the quest for independence, and the difference between right and wrong.

"No one who lived through the years of 1937 to 1948," Albright writes, "was a stranger to profound sadness. Millions of innocents did not survive, and their deaths must never be forgotten. Today we lack the power to reclaim lost lives, but we have a duty to learn all that we can about what happened and why." 

At once a deeply personal memoir and an incisive work of history, "Prague Winter" serves as a guide to the future through the lessons of the past—as seen through the eyes of one of the international community's most respected and fascinating figures.

Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948


  Winner of the Europe Book Prize
One of Europe’s most preeminent investigative journalists travels to the Czech Republic—the Czech half of the former Czechoslovakia, the land that brought us Kafka—to explore the surreal fictions and the extraordinary reality of its twentieth century.For example, there’s the story of the small businessman who adopted Henry Ford’s ideas on productivity to create the world’s largest shoe company—and hired modernist giants such as Le Corbusier to design his company towns (which were also the birthplaces of Ivana Trump and Tom Stoppard).Or the story of Kafka’s niece, who loaned her name to writers blacklisted under the Communist regime so they could keep publishing.Or the story of the singer Karel Gott, winner of the country’s Best Male Vocalist Award thirty-six years in a row, whose summer home, Gottland, is the Czech Dollywood.Based on meticulous research and hundreds of interviews with everyone from filmmakers to writers to pop stars to ordinary citizens, Gottland is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a resilient people living through difficult and often bizarre times—equally funny, disturbing, stirring and absurd . . . in a word, Kafkaesque.

Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia

"They chose not to speak and now they are gone…What’s left to fill the silence is no longer theirs. This is my story, woven from the threads of rumour and legend."

Jakub Rand flees his village for Prague, only to find himself trapped by the Nazi occupation. Deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, he is forced to sort through Jewish books for a so-called Museum of the Extinct Race. Hidden among the rare texts is a tattered prayer book, hollow inside, containing a small pile of dirt.

Back in the city, Františka Roubíčková picks over the embers of her failed marriage, despairing of her conversion to Judaism. When the Nazis summon her two eldest daughters for transport, she must sacrifice everything to save the girls from certain death.

Decades later, Bram Presser embarks on a quest to find the truth behind the stories his family built around these remarkable survivors.

"The Book of Dirt" is a completely original novel about love, family secrets, and Jewish myths. And it is a heart-warming story about a grandson’s devotion to the power of storytelling and his family’s legacy.

The Book of Dirt

Deux parachutistes tchécoslovaques envoyés par Londres sont chargés d’assassiner Reinhard Heydrich, chef de la Gestapo, chef des services secrets nazis, planificateur de la solution finale, protecteur de Bohème-Moravie, surnommé "le bourreau", "la bête blonde", "l’homme le plus dangereux du IIIe Reich". Après des mois de préparation, il est finalement abattu dans sa Mercedes. Il s’ensuit une folle traque qui se termine dans une église du centre de Prague. HHhH est un acronyme inventé par les SS qui signifie en allemand : "le cerveau d’Himmler s’appelle Heydrich" (Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich). 

L’essentiel de l’histoire se situe entre 1938 et 1942. Le récit est structuré comme un entonnoir : des chapitres courts relatent différents épisodes en divers lieux et à diverses époques, qui tous convergent vers Prague où s’est déroulé l’attentat. Tous les personnages de ce livre ont réellement existé ou existent encore. L’auteur a rapporté les faits le plus fidèlement possible mais a dû résister à la tentation de romancer. Comment raconter l’Histoire ? Cette question conduit parfois l’auteur à se mettre en scène pour rendre compte de ses conditions d’écriture, de ses recherches, de ses hésitations. La vérité historique se révèle à la fois une obsession névrotique et une quête sans fin.

HHhH

A wildly comic story about the fate of a Czech family from the 1960s onwards. At turns humorous, ironic and sentimental, an engaging portrait of their attempts to flee from history (meaning the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia ) – or at least to ignore it as long as possible...

Light-hearted and sophisticated at once, this is a book that reminds us that comedy can tackle large historical subjects successfully.

Bliss Was It in Bohemia

In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century Czechoslovakia.

First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times), telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances, Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his place in history.

I Served the King of England

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with "Brooklyn Noir." Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.Brand-new stories by: Chaim Cigan, Martin Goffa, Irena Hejdová, Michaela Klevisová, Štěpán Kopřiva, Ondrej Neff, Markéta Pilátová, Jirí "Walker" Procházka, Petra Soukupová, Petr Stančík, Michal Sýkora, Petr Šabach, Kateřina Tučková, and Miloš Urban.While Prague might today be one of the world's top tourist destinations, and a cosmopolitan capital of European culture, it remains an open-air monument to a history of violence. Here, Prague's top writers explore the hidden corners of the "City of a Hundred Spires," pulling back the curtain to reveal gloom and despair.From the introduction by Pavel Mandys:"How to write noir in a city where, until 1990, the profession of private detective hadn't existed? Where the censors insisted on portraying police in the media and literature in a positive light? Where freelance organized crime hadn't existed, but where the largest criminal group was the secret police? Before you delve into the fourteen stories in this collection, a heads-up: most of the stories owe their allegiance more to Prague than the noir genre...but if the concept of "noir" is extended, and considered a characterization of literary works containing elements of crime, danger, threat--or where central characters find themselves in critical life situations--then you will find fourteen such stories in this collection."

Czech Republic

Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968

Heda Margolius Kovály

Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe

Kevin J. McNamara

The Golem and the Jinni (The Golem and the Jinni, #1)

Helene Wecker

A Bouquet of Czech Folktales

Karel Jaromír Erben

Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948

Madeleine K. Albright

Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia

Mariusz Szczygieł

The Book of Dirt

Bram Presser

HHhH

Laurent Binet

Bliss Was It in Bohemia

Michal Viewegh

I Served the King of England

Bohumil Hrabal

Prague Noir

Pavel Mandys