Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (26 page)
Read Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia Online
Authors: Mariusz Szczygieł
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #Writing
I don’t know who does the Gods’ laundry
I do know it’s we who drink the dirty water
And that this should have been the book’s motto, but I forgot to add it.
Strangely, I’ve noticed that this explanation reassures people who object to the title.
In 2002, Václav Neckář suffered a stroke. After several years of rehab, he managed to learn the words to some of his songs again.
In view of this, a decision was made to reunite the Golden Kids pop group.
Marta Kubišová, Helena Vondráčková and Václav Neckář got ready for a concert tour to mark the fortieth anniversary of the group’s formation. The concerts were brought to a halt by a legal dispute between Vondráčková and Kubišová.
According to the press, Kubišová wasn’t able to accept all the ideas proposed by Vondráčková’s management, and as there was no written contract between them, she withdrew from preparations for the tour.
Helena Vondráčková’s husband, who is her manager, demanded 1.3 million crowns (about U.S. $70,000) from Kubišová in compensation for the resulting losses, but after a court case, which went on for several years, the plaintiffs lost.
As somebody said, what matters is that communism failed to drive a wedge between the first lady of song and the national icon.
A reader from the Czech Republic wrote to tell me that the Czechs have been making beer for several hundred years, but they’ve forgotten that it’s meant to have a bitter taste, and thanks me for reminding them about it with this book.
Patrik Ohera, a reader from Slovakia, informed me that there’s a mistake in the book. The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, was not carried out by two Czechs, but by Jan Kubiš—a Czech from Dolní Vilémovice, and Jozef Gabčík—a Slovak from Poluvsie.
I replied that I had received several hundred emails from Czech readers, but not one of them had pointed this out to me.
“I don’t want to look like a Slovak nationalist, but the fact that nobody has drawn your attention to this illustrates the relationship between Czechs and Slovaks. I have noticed that all sorts of things from the days of Czechoslovakia are described as Czech, though they were not,” he wrote back.
Some readers from Chełmek, in southern Poland, who belong to a Bata fan club protested that I had only described
the company on Czech terrain. Bata was active in Chełmek, where it built its own factories and housing, so they ask me to write my next book about Chełmek.
Despite this oversight, this book has its own monument in Chełmek. Or rather mini-monument, in the form of some concrete paving stones, which an artist called Magdalena Magdziarz has imprinted with text from the first chapter.
When efforts were being made for
Gottland
to appear on the French market, I heard that there were fears that it might not attract any readers. It wasn’t certain if anyone in the West would be interested in what a Pole has to say about the Czechs. I could understand that—a representative of one marginal nation writing about another marginal nation is unlikely to be a success.
Yet Margot Carlier, the French translator, had faith in this book and was tenacious, for which I am extremely grateful to her.
So when
Gottland
won the 2009 Europe Book Prize, I said in my speech: “I’m pleased that a book by a Pole about the Czechs has been recognized as a European’s book about Europe.”
And that in the “prose” category (including fiction and nonfiction), fact had won over fabrication.
Besides, I get the impression that in today’s world there’s so much happening that there’s no need to fabricate anything anymore.
My thanks are due to my Czech friends and colleagues for their support, namely Tomáš Blahut, Václav Burian, Roman Chměl, Viola Fischerová, Adam Georgijev, Michal Ginter, Joanna Hornik, Pavel Janáček, Mirra Korytová, Alexej Kusák, Michal Nikodem, Štěpánka Radostná, Martin Skyba, Helena Stachová, Dalibor Statník and Pavel Trojan.
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