Book review
A Country Lost, Then Found
Discovering My Father’s Slovakia by Rick Zednik
Fine writing from a journalist is not surprising but the ease of shifts in time and glances from the personal to the political are always astonishing when done right. Rick Zednik was co-founding editor in 1995 of The Slovak Spectator. He has written for, among others, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Columbia Journalism Review.
Now with this memoir that begins with him gaining Slovak citizenship, he does more than offer a personal account, although he does this as well, he also attaches personal significance to political events that happened to his ancestral and newly found country.
There‘s a sense of looking through a family scrapbook and finding clippings of political leaders and revolutionary change. Not every family goes through this and few combine it all in quite such a readable fashion.
His father, JuraJ Zednik, was a student abroad in the summer of 1968 when Warsaw Pact tanks invaded Czechoslovakia and given the choice, he decides not to go back home. He effectively loses everything as the Communist regime force him to renounce his Czechoslovak citizenship.
Juraj has no choice but to embrace the immigrant life and then passes on this same route to his son who in later years goes back to his father‘s city of Bratislava. Rick, however, doesn‘t speak the language and is only just out of university.
The innocence of a new life combined with the dying of a country‘s political system and the illness of his grandfather make surprisingly compelling writing. Dedko, his grandfather, and Babka, his grandmother, are our link between old and new in Slovakia.
They are the constant in Rick‘s new life and they gain much importance in this tale. They connect all the generations and the personal and political. The are the moral compass against which we decide whether abandoning an entire country and family is ultimately worth it.
The Zedniks aren‘t the only family to have to evaluate the importance of family and country through the toughest means possible, losing everything with no choice to go back. But they do have a chance many expatriates don‘t get. They have the chance to go back and examine it all after the Velvet Revolution topples Communism in 1989.
This is an alluring tale which must have taken a lot of dedication and note-taking over the years as past and present are told with an eye to even the finest detail. Sometimes it can be overenthusiastic with exact heights of family members recorded and some anecdotes included perhaps just because they could be.
Overall though there is something very touching about this story which covers both political and personal but never veers too far on either side.
No comments:
Post a Comment