Note: These questions came from Frank Kuznik of the Prague Post.
Q: How did you happen to spend time in the Czech Republic and decide to write the book? I see the reference to teaching in Brno in your introduction, but am wondering why you came to the Czech Republic, how much time you spent here, and where?
A: I wish I had as good a story about getting here as the one in Gary Shteyngart’s Russian Debutante’s Handbook – fleeing the mafia – but I really just had the idea that I should spend some time abroad. After sending out a few letters to language schools in Eastern Europe, I got a reply from one now-defunct school in Brno that I could show up in September and they would arrange for a place to live. It seemed too easy to turn down. I might add that I was a big fan of Kundera’s romanticized picture of Eastern Europe – intellect and sex and all the rest – but that would make me seem even more clichéd.
I got to Brno around 1993 and taught there for about three years. I picked up Czech while I was there, mostly from textbooks and practicing on friends and unwitting supermarket clerks. After that I went back to grad school in the states – to study political science - and after my coursework and TAing, I came back to do field research in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Again, I typically based myself in Brno and took trips to the different capitals.
I guess I’ve developed a pretty close attachment to Brno, though I wouldn’t say I’m a civic booster. It’s not a particularly exciting or beautiful place. Somehow the size and familiarity make it comfortable for me. It’s also nice to identify with the underdog and be somewhere where others aren’t.
Since I finished my degree and got a job at Northwestern, I’ve been typically spending summers in and around Brno. I have an apartment there now and a not in very good shape chalupa about 30 minutes north of the city in a village called Kunicky.
Q: What specifically prompted you to write the book--was there a particular moment or incident or realization?
A: I guess the first real origins came when I was teaching, I remember there were a lot of moments when students referred to something and were surprised that I didn’t know what it was. Vinnetou was a common one even though the books are German, not Czech.
I also recall the films that students recommended I see. They were rarely the works that were internationally famous, that I had read about in books. Instead, they were films like Limonadovy Joe or Starci na chmelu. I was fascinated by the fact that there was this whole other shadow culture out there through which Czechs communicated with each other, but which foreigners never caught a glance of. It was not Smetana, Capek, or Menzel – whom everyone knew to bow down before but did not really take into their hearts. Instead it was Olympic, Foglar, and Borivoj Zeman.
Those were the moments that piqued my interest. As far as writing goes, at first I may have been trying to impress people that I wasn’t just an interloper here for some cheap thrills. I remember for a time that I carried around a two page list of terms that I would show people.
I also had some friends who were pretty serious students of Czech culture – they knew all the obscure poets – and maybe I was trying to compete with them by learning something about Czech culture that they didn’t know. I’m pretty sure that for a long time I didn’t think of this as a book. I just wanted something to show that I wasn’t wasting my time here, that I was actually doing something useful (the jury is still out on that one).
A pretty large influence was the Jara Cimrman Theater. One of their plays was the first real literary work that I read in Czech (if you don’t count Frantisek Ringo Cech’s Rusky tyden) and I was impressed by all of the allusions to Czech history and culture. I ended up translating some of their plays and in the process tracking down the meaning of all their jokes and allusions. That may have gotten me part of the way to writing the book.
I should also mention the book by Istvan Bart that I cite in the introduction, Hungary and the Hungarians: The Keywords. It’s a very similar book to mine, though Bart is a better writer (he’s a novelist after all) and a native of Hungary. After seeing that someone had done it, I realized that I could do it too. I’ve been trying to persuade CEU Press to come out with a whole series of these books about different cultures. I think they are reissuing Bart’s book – it’s not easy to get a hold of now – and are hopefully putting out a Polish version.
Q: How long did it take you to compile all the information and write it?
A: It was a very sporadic thing. I started off with the two-page two-column list that I mentioned above and it took a while before I worked up the nerve to actually start writing entries. Once I did, it was an easy project to pick up and put down. There were probably some times where I worked on it fairly regularly; others when I didn’t. I was theoretically writing a dissertation through the whole process, so I can’t say that it was my primary job. But it was a welcome break from that. I could write entries fairly quickly and so there was a nice since of closure that I didn’t get from my research.
Altogether, I would say it took maybe four years of irregular work. After pulling it together I sent it off to CEU Press, got some nice comments back from Michael Henry Heim, and that was that. I still worry about the fact that I didn’t vet it very much or have many Czechs look at it. Too few of my Czech acquaintances are intellectuals who could have given me advice much less read it in English. Much of the research came from quizzing my girlfriend at the time (now wife) and another close friend. The process was different from the whole academic one where you present your paper at conferences and get lots of reviews. I’m sure there are still lots of errors and omissions in the book.
Q: Do you yourself have any Czech ancestry? If your wife is named Lenka, I assume that she is Czech. Did you meet her in the Czech Republic?
A: As far as I know, no Czech ancestors. The whole family though is Eastern European Jewish. It was my great-grandparents who emigrated sometime around the turn of the last century. We don’t really know exactly from where – Lvov is mentioned as is Lithuania.
My wife is Czech and I did meet her in Brno. She is a puppeteer who used to work in a puppet theater in Brno – Jitrenka – and then started her own company – PoDiv (i.e., Pojizdne Divadlo). She used to travel around to kindergartens and elementary school classes putting on plays that she had written herself. I thought it was neat that she would send around a songbook before she arrived and when she got there the kids would know her songs and sing along with them. Some of the songs have even caught on and we occasionally hear kids singing them on the street.
Q: What was the hardest thing about writing the book?
A: I suppose that I didn’t really have a research strategy. Usually, you have a plan: I am going to collect such-and-such data or visit these archives and gather certain materials. At least that’s the way it is in political science. But since I didn’t really know what I was looking for, I had to rely on chance encounters. The newspaper Lidove Noviny was quite helpful in this. They went on a pop culture binge in the late 90s, early 00s and wrote a ton of articles about communist pop culture. I remember the Lukes article about Gott being a zombie kicking a lot of it off. And so there would be these neat articles written by smart people about all the pop cultural things they had encountered under communism and beyond – whether summer camp, Spartakiada, or gymnazium. As a pretty anti-communist newspaper they also took on a lot of the ordinary hassles that people had to face during that era, but that didn’t rise to the level of prison or torture. I found those really fascinating. As a former hardcore leftist, I was always curious about how I would have behaved had I lived under a communist regime – how much I would have compromised and informed on friends. That’s getting beside the point which is that there was a lot of randomness involved in learning all of these things particularly in areas where I wasn’t particularly well-informed. I depended a lot (too much?) on serendipity bringing me interesting snippets.
Another tricky thing was knowing where to draw the line between things that should be included and things that shouldn’t. Say you were writing a dictionary of American popular culture. Obviously, you have to include Frank Sinatra; but what about Dean Martin? Or Tony Bennett? Or Bobby Darin? At some point you have to say, this is enough. Each is distinctive in a certain way, but in the end they are all crooners. This problem came up a lot with music, film, and television. I included Karel Gott, but I left out Helena Vondrackova, Nada Urbankova, Jiri Korn and lots of other. I included Vladimir Mensik, but left out Felix Holzmann, Simek and Grossman, and lots of other raconteurs. I’m still not sure if I drew the line in the right place. I didn’t want to repeat myself too much or get sucked into trivialities. In the end, I just wanted to finish the book so that I could do the other work that pays my bills. All of the tables in the book are my way of getting around this problem.
Q: How do you feel about the results? I'm also curious to know what kind of reactions (if any) you've gotten from Czechs.
A: Following up on the above, I do worry that I should have been more comprehensive. That’s what led me to start a blog where I would add new entries, a project that I’ve let slide recently under the pressure of other work. I also feel like I could have bulked up the entries a little and put in some more interpretation. I wish I could write in a more literary or even humorous style instead of the just-the-facts style which I have.
Almost all of the Czechs I’ve shown it to have liked it. A lot of them have picked it up and immediately started laughing at the entries. I get the sense that they have the kind of feeling that I get when I look at a book about one-hit wonders: “Yeah, I had forgotten about that. It’s funny to see it again.” It’s gratifying that a lot of them tell me that they are impressed that a foreigner can know such things. And sometimes they’ll even tell me that I taught them something, which was not my intention. It was really supposed to be things that everyone knows.
I’ve had a few colleagues enquire with publishers to see whether they would be interested in translating it into Czech, but no one has bitten yet. I can understand why. Most everybody knows everything that is in it and I haven’t produced a particularly humorous or interpretive take that would give them value added (like Benjamin Kuras has done in his Czechs and Balances book). On the other hand, Czechs seem to scoop up reference works that are really pretty mediocre, so maybe there is some hope.
Q: Are you planning an updated version?
A: It would be nice to go back and correct mistakes as well as bulk things up, but for the time being I have to focus on my career as a political scientist. I’ll try to keep the information flowing on my blogs, but that’s all I can promise.
On the other hand, I have been sitting on another book about Czech culture that consists of a bunch of essays (about three-quarters of them written) on various aspects of Czech culture. A bunch on popular films, the nostalgia craze here in the late nineties, the Masin brothers, International Women’s Day, and various other stuff. When I find some free time, I’d like to finish it up.
Q: What's your take on Czech culture and society? You do an excellent job of writing it about it dispassionately from a Western viewpoint, but I'm wondering how you feel about it, or if you have an overall take on the Czechs that perhaps did not fit the scope or framework of your book
A: I suppose one of the consequences of writing this book is a certain disillusionment about Czech culture. Most of us I think have this sense of Czechs as a very cultured and literary nation. My view is much the opposite. While the average Czech usually knows the facts of their high culture better than the average American – who the best writers, artists, musicians were – their personal tastes have not impressed me.
Take a look at what passes for entertainment on TV. Czech television has spent the summer revisiting Karel Gott’s concerts from the seventies and eighties and showing the same low brow Luis de Funes comedies which they have been showing every year for the last thirty years. The most popular programs of the year are these god-awful New Year’s Eve variety shows that are modeled on the former East German “hit” Ein Kessel Buntes. Karel Gott still wins these people’s choice awards year in and year out.
And I am long past being fed up with the offerings on the radio which never stray beyond the European top forty and Czech adult contemporary from the eighties. (Maybe Prague is better than Brno on this score.) I wouldn’t mind so much if these same stations weren’t playing in just about every café.
Maybe this isn’t the fault of Czechs, but of their media outlets. I haven’t noticed them complaining though. Maybe American tastes are not much better, but there is a degree of quality in our popular TV, music, and film that I don’t see in the Czech hits.
I don’t mean to get too down on them. There are some things in Czech culture that I do really like. On specifics, I am a huge fan of the Jara Cimrman Theater and have translated several of their plays. I think it really is unique and deserves international recognition. I also like most of what Oldrich Kaiser and Jiri Labus do, especially their radio show Rodina Tluchorovych. I think they hit the bull’s-eye on the Czech character. As a resident of Brno, I’d be remiss not to mention Bolek Polivka and his unique theater. Musically too, there is a lot of good stuff from Buty to Jaromir Nohavica and Zuzana Navarova. There are of course many other niches out there where Czech culture is thriving, but the mass scene is atrocious.
More generally, I envy Czechs the fact that they have a culture that encompasses just about everyone. You can sit down at a bar anywhere, pull out a guitar, and start singing songs that everyone knows. I always ask American friends what songs we could sing together and the list is always pretty short. The common cultural language that Czechs have is something that I miss in America. It seems like we have a thousand different cultures that never intersect, which of course also has its positives.
Strangely enough, while I’ve been down on Czech culture recently, I’m more optimistic about Czech politics. I think it is in much better shape than most Czechs give it credit for. Yes, there is corruption, yes, many politicians are not very smart, and yes, many reforms still need to be adopted. But the distance they have gone in a decade and a half is really incredible and is often forgotten. Even on an absolute standard, politicians seem to me very responsive to the public; they usually do what citizens want which is one of the hallmarks of democracy. And voters aren’t hesitant to hold politicians accountable for their missteps.
If I had to remake the Czechs I would probably give them a little more spine. I’m always surprised that they don’t revere Jan Zizka and that they do revere Good King Wenceslas. I would have reversed these priorities. The same goes for the Masin brothers. Without ignoring their flaws, I’m not sure why they don’t get more respect from ordinary Czechs. (I’ve actually written a little piece on this.)
On the other hand, I admire their lack of aggressive nationalism and their areligiosity. It’s nice in this age that there is a country where people don’t take God very seriously. Their rational materialism is probably what most draws towards them. It fits best with my perspective on the world.