[Editor’s note: Jaroslava is leading our June 2027 tour A Literary Journey Through Czechia. Join her for a tour centred on the joy of discovering a place through literature.]
“Is all Czech literature so sad?” someone asked at the end of my recent webinar, Crossing Thresholds: Women, Memory, and Modern Czech Literature. It was a fair question. We had been discussing books about life under communism, which many people faced with utter cynicism, much like the main character in Kundera’s The Joke. We had touched on works by contemporary Czech women writers, Radka Denemarková, Kateřina Tučková, Bianca Bellová, and Alena Mornštajnová, whose stories confront us with our past, family secrets, and the raw, harsh realities of human survival.
Yet when I think about travelling through Czechia with these books, I feel happy and I look forward to the reading, the conversations, and the pleasure of sharing these places with readers from Canada, which I have called home for nearly thirty years.
As a Czech language teacher, I am often contacted by Czech Canadian families hoping to find a new home for books they can no longer read but cannot bring themselves to discard. Before accepting them, I sit with their owners and listen to their stories. Then we explore the boxes together: Czech classics, children’s books, a fifty-year-old primer, or a dedication in grandmother’s handwriting.
Surprisingly, there are not a lot of books in these donations from 68 Publishers, the Toronto publishing house founded by Josef Škvorecký and Zdena Salivarová to give a voice to writers banned back at home. Perhaps it was particularly difficult to part with those paperbacks? For sure, I particularly treasure these myself. Visiting Škvorecký’s birthplace, Náchod, will bring this Canadian part of my reading life back into the Czech landscape.
And there is always a copy of Božena Němcová’s Babička (The Grandmother). As children in Czech schools, we mostly dreaded this book as painful compulsory reading. Now I find myself reading bits and pieces of this nineteenth-century bucolic village novel again and again. However, I am still failing to persuade my students to do the same! Next June, we will visit Grandmother’s Valley in Ratibořice to pay tribute to Němcová, to the village world she described so masterfully, and to all the copies of her masterpiece that have made it across the ocean.
Karel Čapek’s books are another staple in these boxes. How I wish every reader could experience Čapek in the original, fighting with his never-ending sentences packed with colorful synonyms and conversational charm! There is so much more than just the word “robot” that the Čapek brothers gave to the world. I look forward to exploring their artistic world with you on our journey through northern Bohemia.
What is missing completely from those boxes full of memories is contemporary literature. For that, I must keep coming back to Prague, and I do so with the same pleasure as when going through treasures from Czech Canadian attics. We are lucky: Contemporary Czech literature is drawing global attention through English translations. While Milan Kundera’s The Joke anchors our journey as a timeless classic, it is our main contemporary book, Alena Mornštajnová’s Hana, that shows the work of our modern translators. Translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood, it proves how good English editions build the bridges that allow Czech stories to reach readers abroad. Other contemporary works, like Bianca Bellová’s The Lake, have similarly found great success and won international awards.
Ready to join me for A Literary Journey Through Czechia, on June 14–23, 2027? Bring your curiosity and your own thoughts about the books; I look forward to reading, walking, and talking with you. My deepest wish is to accompany you on a journey of discovery, showing how language and literature can bring a country to life. I hope to share with you my beautiful homeland, my love for Czech literature, and the writers and places that continue to inspire me.
At the end of our journey, when we return to Prague to admire the historic Klementinum library, we should all find time to visit the Globe Bookstore again. Let’s all come home enriched not only by our common reading of The Joke and Hana, but pack one or two new novels into our suitcases to read over the summer back home in Canada.
Until we meet in Prague!
– Jaroslava
Image credit: Prague Infinity Book Tower, George Royan/Wikimedia Commons