Latest Read: Czech Lessons by Jessica Kendall Hankiewicz
I met Jessica when I first came to Prague in 2009*. Perhaps she told me then, but I’d long forgotten, she’d arrived in 2003 when the Czech Republic, and its capital city, Prague, were as yet undiscovered country so to speak. Some other friends have been here since the 90s, but they are fewer and far between. But I digress.
This is not a book review. This is more about a book I read. :-)
If you see a book titled Czech Lessons in a bookstore, your first thought may be that it is about How to Speak Czech. This is not that book. Though Jessica does speak Czech fluently, and so well to the point that once she had to ask a Czech colleague who spoke English how to say an English word. She knew the word in Czech but had long forgotten the English for it. No, this book is about a culture that has survived two invasions, WWII, communism, a Velvet Divorce from the Slovak Republic, the Velvet (student-led) Revolution, and more. The subtitle ‘Reflections on a Post Communist Society’ begins to put things more immediately in perspective.
It is part memoir of a young woman’s experience moving abroad at a time and to place few people knew and the story of her growing along with her adopted country. Every few chapters, there are chapters dedicated to her asking Czechs questions about their country, and their answers which reveal so much more than we could uncover. Those of who came later, who did not live through the things they lived through, and who cannot understand except at best the surface level.
For my own part, when I came in 2009, I remember being quite upset to see a blue Best Western sign on a building that had been around for thousands of years. So, I can only imagine how she must have felt in 2008, when Starbucks first arrived and set itself squarely at the end of Charles Bridge in lesser town and around the corner from the oldest coffee shop (1881) in the in the city.
Back to the book, one of my favorite chapters, surprisingly, is about a sport I know nothing about. But in it, Jessica shares a story about how she learned to love a sport and this new country through it and through the heart of the players, or rather a particular player of the sport.
She walks the reader through how she chose to learn this language that is quite difficult and is spoken nowhere else. How she learned to get around before there were translations in English making it easier for tourists to find their way. A peek into teaching English in a Foreign Language before the city was flooded with language schools. And, of course, there will be dancing.
Music and dance are still very much a part of the culture. In schools, if I understand correctly, the seniors have balls in which they spend their last year learning to dance things like waltzes and other similar dances. Schools pair a teacher with a student for one of the dances, and the parents dance with the students as well. One of my own students, an adult, would invariably skip lessons from time to time, so he could take a ballroom class with his wife, so they could dance with their son and his partner, and ‘not look foolish’. (His words, not mine).
Sometimes not even Czechs remember their history so well as one Czech friend put it when Jessica first shared her book. There are those who didn’t live through the storied past but have only come in recent years. Their memories have only just begun, but a book like Czech Lessons offers lessons from the past that should not be forgotten, lest they are repeated.
I have barely scratched the surface of what the book entails in its 140 pages. I have skipped over the darker parts of the history mentioned in the book, but I will leave you with this, if you come to visit the country, live here as an expat, or just want to learn about and understand this culture, this book is a great start.
Notes:
*If you follow me on Prague Diaries, you know that I left for a while and have now returned.