My History with Czechs (part two)

One day while Little Lenka was living with us, I ate lunch at one of my favorite restaurants and my waiter happened to be Czech (I am one of those people who ask all people with an accent where they are from - I suspect all expatriate types are like that). We struck up a friendship and he invited me to get to know his wife Kate.

Kate was a graduate student at the local university and we soon were enjoying lots of time together. She was in a traditionally male field and did not have much female company. I learned so much from these two! I loved hearing their observations comparing American and Czech life.

Kate said Americans were the most uncynical people she had ever met. She loved that we had no cynicism about anything we expected from our government and instead had indignation that whatever was wrong needed to be changed ...immediately! I think she found that level of connection, identification, and empowerment unimaginable (who knows - maybe that's changed in both places by now, this was 1992).

Kate said Americans laughed at things that a Czech would find unfunny as too simple. She felt Americans had the sense of humor of children. Not much blackness to it. And she was fascinated by American parenting. This idea of constantly building up a child's self esteem was foreign to her yet she could see the benefits to the child.

One of my attractions to Czech culture is the sense that ordinary people enjoyed it at a highbrow level. Back then, everything I read about Czech culture led me to believe people would do things like play as a string quartet in their living room.

Kate and her husband told me that under communism, friends would have "samizdat" (Russian for self-published) parties. Samizdat in Soviet-block countries was writing that would never be officially sanctioned by the dominant and all-powerful state. People would get together and pass around pages of forbidden Czech writing, page by page. The whole party would be completely silent as people sat absorbed reading and taking in what they weren't supposed to know. She said "can you imagine what it was like for us? We were completely denied our own culture. Can you imagine that the minute you are able to travel, your first trip is to Paris, not to see the Eiffel Tower and the sights that everyone else in the world wants to see, but to go to the Czech Library to read the writings of dissidents who weren't published at home? To know your own writers!"

I am a First amendment fan and a lover of the printed word. At the time Kate and I had our conversations, I was serving as a trustee of my local public library board. It was my passion, back then, to make sure the people in my community had access to not only "their writers," but everyone else's writers. Still is. It was impossible for me not to fall in love with this vision of Czech culture.