Under A Cruel Star

[leyla]

I'll post a long review of this brilliant memoir this after the different, shorter version has been published, just in case of any overlap.

[leyla]

Here's a link to my short review of this book:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/under-a-cruel-star-a-life-in-prague-19411968-by-heda-margolius-kovly-6290953.html


And here's a longer review:


Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 by Heda Margolius Kovaly
Translated by Franci and Helen Epstein, and the author

Granta £12.99

Reviewed by Leyla Sanai

Heda Margolius Kovaly worked as a graphic artist and translator of
authors including Roth, Chandler, Bellow and Steinbeck. Beneath her
professional capability lay a tragic personal history. As a youngster
she had been forced from her native Prague by the Nazis to the
concentration camps where her family were murdered. Incredibly, she
escaped, but relief was short-lived: reunited with her sweetheart in
Prague, they married and had a son, only for her husband - a dedicated
Party member and Deputy Foreign Minister - to be a victim of the
Communist show trials in 1951. He was hanged by the Party in 1952. This
is the first British publication of her memoir since 1973, and arrives
two years after her death.

For a slim volume, Kovaly's memoir packs a more gut-wrenching punch
than any other book I've read in years because its true horrors are
almost beyond the power of human imagination. In 1941 the mass
deportation of Jews from Prague was instituted by the Nazis. 'We were
not yet inured to sounds of gunshots followed by agonizing screams, to
unendurable thirst, nor to the suffocating air in the crammed cattle
cars.' Before they reached the Lodz ghetto, where 100,000 Polish Jews
were crowded into derelict tenements, many perished on the long march
in the snow, naked and barefoot. Kovaly's first encounter with the
death of someone she knew was when she found a gentle intellectual she
had befriended dead on a filthy mattress, surrounded by his books, lice
crawling over him and the Botticelli Venus painting he'd been looking
at before he passed. The juxtaposition of innocence and beauty -
sublime art, young girl, preventable death of decent man in sickening
conditions - is shockingly painful. The employers who worked the
prisoners inhuman hours were often unaware of the circumstances -
Kovaly's had assumed they were convicted criminals.

From Lodz, Kovaly's family were moved to Auschwitz, where her parents
were murdered. Kovaly managed to escape en route to Belsen - a fellow
escapee was caught and shot - and made her way back to Prague. When she
was finally reunited with her beloved Rudolf Margolius, and the end of
the war came, they assumed their life would be easier.

Not so. Although Margolius, an idealist, was enthusiastic about the new
communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Kovaly had her doubts.
Nevertheless, with Margolius landing a job as Deputy Foreign Minister, she
too joined the Party. But their dream of forging a strong, fair,
socialist state with links to the rest of Europe was shadowed by the
emergence of the class-conscious element of communism whereby
intellectuals and the middle class were viewed with suspicion.
Thousands were arrested. 'When the arrests first started, it
was...assumed that the accused were guilty.' Kovaly's suspicions were
aroused by the stilted Party jargon used in confessions:'There is more.
in my limitless hatred for the popular democratic order, I also
committed the crime of...'

Kovaly's writing is of the finest journalistic order. She vividly
depicts the misery of the Communist era: food shortages and queues;
false rumours of currency devaluation fabricated by the government to
precipitate mass buying when warehouses were full of defective goods;
moonlighting at many jobs; continuing anti-Semitism. But those worried
about a morale-sapping read should cast fears aside - not only is
Kovaly feisty enough to avoid any semblance of victim-hood, she also
infuses her story with moments of dry humour. 'His articles
suggested...he had not overcome his intellectual limitations'; 'the
short, very fat wife of the President...resplendent
in...green...waddled between rows of obsequious, bowing backs.'

The translation is excellent, showing familiarity with popular argot
such as 'sloshed'. Very rarely the syntax is slightly off: 'I still
was' and 'we all can' instead of 'we can all'. 'Had the nerve to'
is also used once when 'dared to' would be more appropriate since it refers
to a laudable act, and 'nerve to' carries derogatory connotations.

This is a brave and beautiful book about how humans can overcome
atrocious abuse. At one point, Rudolf and Kovaly travel to a favourite
spring in the woods, only to find it dessicated - a metaphor for the
shrivelling of their beloved country. The Prague Spring of 1968 saw the country rise
as one to peacefully protest Russian totalitarianism, but the tanks rolled in to crush the uprising.
It is a comfort to the reader that Kovaly lived long enough to see her country finally liberated from the shadow of communism
following the fall of the Iron Curtain.