Czech Books | All stories

In the last days of World War II, nine-year-old Ota Heller picked up a revolver and fired it at a German soldier. He did not wait to see if the man was still alive. For decades afterwards he talked to no one about the experience, and only recently has Ota Heller – or Charles Ota Heller, as he is now called – felt able to return to his memories of the war, collecting them in his book “Out of Prague”. In this week’s Czech Books he talks to David Vaughan.

In today's Czech Books we meet a writer who is a master of the short story. Andrej Gina, who won the Open Society Institute's Roma Literary Award in 2003, lives in the western Czech town of Rokycany. He writes in the Romany language spoken by generations of his ancestors from the rural Romany settlements of Eastern Slovakia. Andrej was still a small child when the family came to the Prague after the Second World War, leaving behind an ancient and rural world, where Roma life had changed little for centuries.

In a recent edition of Czech Books we looked at the Prague-inspired poetry of the Scottish poet, Edwin Muir. But it was not just in his poetry that Muir evoked the atmosphere of the Czech capital. David Vaughan finds out more in this week’s Czech Books.

In Czech Books this week, David Vaughan meets the poet and novelist, Olga Walló. In recent years she has become something of a literary phenomenon in the Czech Republic, even though she was over fifty when her first novel was published in 1998. Prior to that, she was better known as a translator and dubbing director, a career which she describes as a form of “inner emigration” from communism. Her novels are strongly autobiographical and Václav Havel has described them as a way of “tracing the path which our nation travelled not so long ago.”

Earlier this week we remembered the 72nd anniversary of the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia on March 15 1939. Much has been written about the years that led up to the occupation: the growing tensions with Czechoslovakia’s German speaking minority, Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and then the Munich Agreement of September 1938 that ceded a quarter of Czechoslovakia’s territory to the German Reich. There is a sense of inevitability about the events, but could things have been different and could Czechoslovakia’s President Edvard Beneš have

The British writer, director and film producer, Stephen Weeks, is fascinated by the past and he relishes exploring the unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable details that tend to be left out of the history books. This is certainly the case in his novel Daniela, which is set mainly in Prague in the last months of World War Two, and is steeped in historical detail. In the week’s Czech Books Stephen Weeks talks to David Vaughan about the book.

Věra Chase is one of the most original voices in contemporary Czech writing. She has just finished putting together a collection of her poetry, both new poems and old, some dating back 25 years, to when Věra was a teenager during the dying days of communist Czechoslovakia. Her writing is intensely physical, full of energy and irony, and over the years has lost none of its freshness, or as one critic humorously puts it – stickiness. David Vaughan looks at the collection and meets its author.

If you want to find out more about the long history of Czechs and Slovaks in the United States, the place to start is The National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The museum was devastated by floods in 2008 and some 6,000 flood-damaged volumes from the library are still being painstakingly restored. But the pace of recovery has been remarkably fast, and within the next couple of years, an ambitious project to rebuild and expand the museum should be complete. With it the library will also be up and running once again. In

For this week’s programme, we have something of a treat: a long forgotten interview from our archives with someone who is nothing less than a Czech legend. If you ask just about anyone in this country who is the best loved Czech actor of all time, you will almost certainly hear the name Jan Werich. Several generations of Czechs have grown up to love the larger-than-life roles he played, his distinctive and deep voice, and his wonderfully expressive and humorous face, immortalized in films that span a career of fifty years. Born in 1905, Werich first

The major literary event of last year was a sad one. One of this country’s foremost writers, Jan Balabán died in his sleep at the tragically early age of 49, a huge loss for the Czech reading public. On the occasion of what would have been Jan Balabán’s 50th birthday, David Vaughan looks at his work, and talks to his brother, the artist, Daniel Balabán.