Velvet Recall: 'I Didn't Believe It Would Last'
Velvet Recall: 'I Didn't Believe It Would Last'

Summary/Abstract: A renowned writer on the fleeting joy of November 1989. A TOL special report. On 17 November 1989, police in Prague cracked down on a student demonstration, triggering 10 days of mass protest and political action that peacefully brought down Czechoslovakia’s communist regime. To mark the anniversary, all this week TOL features prominent Czechs offering their recollections of the Velvet Revolution. Today: novelist Ivan Klima. For more memories of 1989, see the Recollections section of our 20 Years After website http://20years.tol.org/category/recollections/. *** One of the Czech Republic’s most celebrated and prolific authors, Ivan Klima was born in Prague in 1931 to Jewish parents whose ethnicity he did not learn until the Nazis invaded. He spent four wartime years of his childhood in the Terezin ghetto, where, reading The Pickwick Papers and writing his first stories, he discovered literature as a vocation and an escape route. Klima joined the Communist Party in early adulthood but was soon disillusioned by its assaults on free speech. He published his first collection of short stories in 1960; his first novel, Hodina ticha (Quiet Hour), about the hopeless attempt of a group of farmers to halt the collectivization of their land, followed three years later. When Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968, Klima was in London, but he soon returned, explaining, “Most of London’s street names have no associations for me.” Blacklisted during communism, he held weekly meetings for banned writers (until they were infiltrated by the secret services) and became an important figure in the production of samizdat magazines. Since the revolution Klima has maintained a high profile in the Czech media, commenting on politics, environmental issues, history, and literature. His work, balancing harsh political satire with humane warmth, has been praised by Philip Roth for a tenderness “unchecked and unguarded by irony.” Klima’s novels have been translated into 31 languages, and in 2002 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, an international literary award.

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