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Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 Paperback – January 1, 1997
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length192 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHolmes & Meier Publishers
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 1997
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100841913773
- ISBN-13978-0841913776
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A story of human spirit at its most indomitable ... one of theoutstanding autobiographies of the century." San FranciscoChronicle-Examiner
"An extraordinary memoir...written with so much quiet respect for theminutiae of justice and truth that one does not know where and how tospecify Heda Kovály's splendidness as a human being ... It is impossible to read her book without the deepest admiration for her quiet, fiercedocumentation of the ordeal of the Czech people in our time." AlfredKazin
"Under A Cruel Star is the most remarkable book for a variety ofreasons: because Kovály has such a keen street sense for individualmotivations; because her writing is so precise and beautiful: and, mostof all, because she conveys such a ferocious and visceral sense that anindividual life is just as important - and just as powerful - asgovernments, militaries, and political might." E. J. Graff, BrandeisWomen's Studies Research Center, Columbia Journalism Review May / June2005
"Given thirty seconds to recommend a single book that might start aserious young student on the hard road to understanding the politicaltragedies of the twentieth century, I would choose this one ... All thisis recounted in an exemplary amalgam of psychological penetration andterse style ... A Google search reveals that the book is on the course inseveral colleges, but it deserves to be more famous than that." CliveJames, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts,W. W. Norton, New York 2007
"I used to teach it in what was for many years my favorite course, asurvey of essays and novels from Central and Eastern Europe thatincluded the writings of Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Ivo Andric', HedaKovály, Paul Goma, and others." Tony Judt, 'Captive Minds, Then andNow', The New York Review of Books
Review
A story of the human spirit at its most indomitable ... one of the outstanding autobiographies of the century. -- San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner
Once in a rare while we read a book that puts the urgencies of our times and ourselves in perspective.... That has just happened to me. In telling her story―simply, without self-pity―[Mrs. Kovály] illuminates some general truths of human behavior. Anthony Lewis, New York Times -- Anthony Lewis, New York Times
Kovály's attention to the world’s beauty, even while in hell, is so brazen as to take my breath away.[E.J. Graff, Columbia Journalism Review -- E.J. Graff, Columbia Journalism Review
This is a book that should never have had to be written; but since it had, we are lucky that it was done so well. -- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Holmes & Meier Publishers; First Thus edition (January 1, 1997)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 192 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0841913773
- ISBN-13 : 978-0841913776
- Item Weight : 9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #388,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,371 in European History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Helen Epstein is best known for her non-fiction trilogy Children of the Holocaust; Where She Came From; and The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma. All three reviewed here:
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/265180/sexual-abuse-holocaust-survivor-epstein
In 2022 book, she published Getting Through It: My Year of Cancer during Covid.
Born in Prague, Helen grew up in New York City. She graduated from Hunter College High School, Hebrew University, and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, then began freelancing for diverse publications including the Sunday New York Times. Her profiles of legendary musicians are collected in the book Music Talks.
She began teaching journalism at New York University in 1974 and became the first woman in the department to be awarded tenure. In 1986, she left NYU to move to Massachusetts. She now lectures at universities; health organizations; high schools; synagogues, libraries and churches, and writes for the New England cultural website The Arts Fuse. Contact her through her website: helenepstein.com.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Heda Margolius Kovály was born Heda Blochová to Jewish parents in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where she lived and married her childhood sweetheart, Rudolf Margolius, until 1941 when her family was rounded up along with the first 5,000 of the city's Jewish population and taken to the Lodz Ghetto in central Poland. When the Jews were taken out of the ghetto and transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 she was separated from her parents and husband. After arriving at Auschwitz, she was chosen to survive - though her parents were immediately gassed - and to work as a labourer in the Christianstadt labour camp. When the Eastern Front of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union approached the camp, its prisoners were evacuated. With a few other women in the first months of 1945, she decided while on the death march to Bergen-Belsen, to escape back to Prague. After arriving in the city, Margolius discovered that most of the people who remained in the city during the war were too frightened by the threat of German punishment to aid an escapee from the camps. When Soviet forces finally freed Prague from Nazi control the Communist Party began to rise. The experiences of her husband at Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps had led him to become a communist. Having been asked, he took a job with the Communist government of Klement Gottwald as Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, despite his own and his wife's reservations about the position.
In 1952, her husband was found guilty of conspiracy during the notorious Slánský trial. Rudolf was one of the eleven Jews on the list of fourteen accused. Having been prevented from seeing her husband for eleven months after his arrest, and after he and the other arrested Jews gave false confessions extracted by torture, Heda later learned that he had been hanged and his body cremated and given to security officials for disposal. In a final indignity, a few miles out of Prague, the officials' limousine began to skid on the icy road and his ashes were thrown under the wheels to create traction. Related to 'a people's enemy' her life was made harder - "Heda was thrown out of her job and her apartment, and then additionally persecuted for being unemployed and homeless." Their son, Ivan Margolius, was raised in impoverished conditions. For as long as the Communist Party remained in power, she was kept from good jobs and socially shunned. She did not tell Ivan the truth about what happened to his father until he was sixteen years old.
Heda re-married in 1955 to Pavel Kovály. His name was brought down because of his association with her as the widow of the alleged traitor, her first husband, Rudolf Margolius. Finally in 1968, when once again Soviet Union troops invaded Prague after the Prague Spring and occupation seemed inevitable, Margolius Kovály fled Czechoslovakia to the United States.
She worked as a librarian in the Harvard Law School library at Harvard University, in Boston, Massachusetts. Margolius Kovály returned to Prague with her second husband in 1996.
Heda Margolius Kovály's memoir was originally written in Czech and published in Canada under the title 'Na vlastní kůži' by 68 Publishers in Toronto in 1973. An English translation appeared in the same year as the first part of the book 'The Victors and the Vanquished' published by Horizon Press in New York. A British edition of the book excluded the second treatise and was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson under the title 'I Do Not Want To Remember' in 1973.
In 1986, Heda re-published her memoir 'Under A Cruel Star - A Life in Prague 1941-1968' (published in the United Kingdom as 'Prague Farewell'). The memoir is dedicated to her son and it has been widely translated and is available in French and English as an e-book.
In 1985 Heda published a novel called 'Nevina' ('Innocence') in Czech by Index, Köln and re-published in the Czech Republic in 2013. In 2015 the English translation of 'Innocence' by Alex Zucker was published by Soho Press, New York.
In 2015 Heda together with Helena Třeštíková published 'Hitler, Stalin a já' (Hitler, Stalin and I) in Czech by Mladá fronta in Prague. In 2018 'Hitler, Stalin and I' was published in English by DoppelHouse Press, Los Angeles.
In Czechoslovakia and in the USA between 1958 and 1989 Heda translated from German or English into the Czech language over 24 works of well-known world authors such as Arnold Zweig, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Arnold Bennett, Muriel Spark, William Golding, John Steinbeck, H. G. Wells, Budd Schulberg, Arthur Miller and many others.
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The reader can only be very happy that Ms. Kovaly was able to survive and overcome her ordeals and be able to write about her life. It should also be mentioned that besides a wife and a mother Ms. Kovaly was an illustrator, translator, and librarian with a very intelligent interest in architecture and the fine arts.
This book is an excellent and invaluable historical description of post World War II and Stalinist Czechoslovakia. No student of European history student should miss this work. And for the general reader this book is a must read. The book is a very well written account of survival under very difficult circumstances.
Kovaly's maiden name was Bloch. She was transported from Prague to the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland, in 1941. She spent most of the war in various concentration or work camps, including time in Auschwitz. In 1944, while part of a group of inmates being marched from Poland to Germany, she escaped and made her way back to Prague, where, aided by the Resistance, she hid in various spots until the Germans were ousted. She then learned that she was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. Against long odds, her fiancee, Rudolf Margolius, also survived, and shortly after the War, they married.
Rudolf succumbed to the siren song of communism/Marxism, and eventually he rose to high positions in the Czech Ministry of Foreign Trade. But he was arrested in 1952 and was one of 14 defendants in a show trial, the Slansky conspiracy trial. With ten others, he was executed (and his ashes were used for traction under the wheels of a police car on an icy road). His wife heard his confession, as delivered at the trial, broadcast over the radio while she herself was in critical condition in a hospital. In 1963, Rudolf Margolius was "rehabilitated" -- i.e., posthumously declared innocent. The end of Kovaly's memoir covers the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Soviet invasion of August 1968, ending the reform regime of Dubcek. At that time, Kovaly left Czechoslovakia for the West.
Her book is a wrenching account of her double whammy: incarceration by the Nazis and then persecution (and murder of her husband) by the Communists. More of the book is devoted to the second story, and, strange to say, it seems almost as horrific as the first. Indeed, the account of her life after her husband was arrested is Kafka-esque; as she goes around Prague trying to get some sort of sensible explanation for what is happening to her and to her husband, she is a female Joseph K., thirty years later and oh so distressingly real. In addition to the historical account of the two gruesome systems -- and the courage, endurance, and luck that saved Kovaly from their successive maws -- UNDER A CRUEL STAR is noteworthy for Kovaly's analysis of communism and its attractions for so many similarly situated eastern Europeans of the post-War years, including Nazi concentration camp survivors like her husband.
The negatives, which in the grand scheme of things are rather minor: At times, Kovaly's account is overly dramatic, or melodramatic (although given her experiences, that obviously is understandable); on a few occasions, her observations or speculations strike me as positively loopy, akin to resorting to astrology; and her frequent use of verbatim dialogue, most of which surely must have been imaginatively re-constructed, undermines slightly the overall credibility of her account, at least as reliable history. But these are cavils. UNDER A CRUEL STAR is one of the historical artifacts by which the 20th Century is likely to be known to the 22nd and 23rd Centuries, if civilization as we know it lasts that long.