My crazy century /

WHY DID PEOPLE join the Communist movement back in the day? Ivan Klima, the distinguished Czech writer, raises the question in the prologue to his memoir, "My Crazy Century," and he raises the temperature, too, by defining Communism as "a criminal conspiracy against democracy." People did join, though. Klima acknowledges a little sheepishly that he was among them, in his younger years. He offers a schematic preliminary explanation: Young people need to rebel, they yearn for simple theories of the world and so forth. And then, with his prologue behind him and his anger and mortification exposed, he devotes the next 400 pages to the real explanation, which turns out to be sadder and more complicated. Klima was 7 years old when the Germans took over Prague, where he lived. His family was Jewish, if only barely, and he spent three and a half years interned with his family at the Terezin concentration camp, or Theresienstadt in German. The Terezin camp was an oddity in the Nazi universe, a showcase intended to deceive the Red Cross and the world into believing that Nazis were merely herding Jews into shiny new ghettos, and nothing worse. In reality, masses of Jews were shipped to Terezin as a staging point, then were sent to Auschwitz or Treblinka. Still, some people needed to stay behind to keep the deception going, and Klima's father was an industrial engineer with skills that seemed necessary - though Father ended up being shipped out anyway, and managed to survive only because the German Army collapsed before he did. Klima gives us a child's-eye picture, heartbreakingly simple and naïve, of these wartime experiences: the camp barracks; the line-ups for food and water; the grayhaired schoolteacher who began to give classes, then disappeared; his playmates, who disappeared; Father's friends, who disappeared; the nameless populations that arrived, and disappeared; and the strangeness of returning to Prague and looking for people he used to know. "But no one at all returned." He shows us his father's political outlook, and this, too, displays a touching quality of naïve simplicity: "In the Soviet Union, in his telling, mankind's ancient dream of a society governed by simple people, in which no one exploited anyone else and no one persecuted anyone on the grounds of his racial or ethnic origins, had come true. The Soviets persecuted only capitalists - the owners of factories or landowners - but that was a just thing to do because the capitalists had become wealthy from the labor of their serfs and led a profligate life, while those who worked for them went hungry." One of Father's friends remonstrated with him. "You can't be serious. Do you think people are prospering under Communism? ... They've got concentration camps there, for heaven's sake." But Father replied by inveighing against English and French colonialism and the sufferings of the poor, which showed he had mastered the technique of not listening. He dwelled in a world of ignorance and dream, and for that matter, so did a lot of other people in postwar Czechoslovakia, sufficiently to abet the Red Army in bringing the Communists to power. The anticapitalist program duly got started. Klima maintains, a little heatedly, that almost 200,000 people died in the Communist camps in his country, though more conventionally it is said that a couple of hundred thousand were interned. Prague began to resemble, in any case, the Terezin he remembered, if only because of the tendency of people to disappear. The landlord - gone. The drawing teacher. The persecutions veered in the direction officially known as anti-Zionist, which meant anti-Semitic, which meant that Father, for all his Communist ardor, was once again taken away, this time on a charge of industrial sabotage. And yet Klima, as if sleepwalking, joined the party while in high school. This was not out of rebelliousness. Conformity was the draw. Also, he shared his father's ignorance. A Communist, one could almost say, is a good-hearted person who knows nothing about Communism. Klima began to realize the scale of his delusion only well into adulthood, when his wife's aunt, a veteran of Auschwitz, introduced him to a book by Isaac Deutscher about Stalin and Trotsky, where he learned the ABC's of Soviet history. Still, as a writer who had the support of the authorities, he kept looking for Communism to reveal its humane side - as seemed to happen in 1968, when Communist reformers came to power in Czechoslovakia. But the Red Army and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded, and Klima's years as a party member were behind him. Downward he plunged from the ranks of state approval, which meant he could no longer work for the official magazines and publishing houses, though publishers in West Germany and other countries continued to take an interest in him. Visiting American writers lent a noisy solidarity - Philip Roth, most sympathetically, together with Arthur Miller and William Styron (who, for all his solidity on free speech, seemed to Klima to have inhaled the Communist vapors). Foreign publishers and friends were of limited help, though. He swept the streets for a living. He worked as an orderly in a hospital staffed by nurses so embittered as to euthanize patients for their own convenience. Czech dissident literature has a characteristic tone, sober and sardonic, almost as if, under Communism, the fantastic half of the Czech imagination had fled upstairs to the drunken gargoyle rooftops of Prague, and the grumpy writers were left down below with their brooms to mutter truths and make sense of street-level realities. Klima, as translated sometimes awkwardly here by Craig Cravens, is not in the business of making hearts pound. He is antilyrical. Still, in recounting the next phase of his career, he ends up willynilly striking a few notes of the fantastical. He and the writer Ludvik Vaculik and a few other stalwart souls set out to produce typewritten, carbon-copy editions of proscribed literature, in the hope that even a minuscule edition might achieve wonders. Overthrow Communism, for instance. A forlorn aspiration. And yet, in November 1989 the democratic-minded students of Prague took to marching in the streets. Klima tells us, all too characteristically, that he declined to participate, out of a former Communist's sour distaste for mass political action of any sort whatsoever. Still, the Velvet Revolution was underway. He admits that, at a crucial moment in the events, he addressed a public meeting at the National Theater. And he discovered that, merely by stepping onto the stage, he had caused the audience to break into applause. Maybe his heart does begin to pound. "I was overcome with an excitement similar to what I had felt when I stood by the collapsed fence at Terezin and waved at the passing soldiers who I knew were bringing with them the end of the war" - though, on a personal note, I add that when I had the opportunity to call on Klima at his home a few weeks after his triumphal appearance at the theater, he had resolutely returned to a demeanor of anti-ebullience. "My Crazy Century" contains a final section of more than 100 pages of brief and variously tedious and brilliant philosophical essays on the nature of supremely oppressive political movements, with shrewd comparative remarks about Nazism and Communism, occasionally touching on Italian and Spanish fascism, too, and on the Islamic radicals of our own time. The essays tag along somewhat oddly after the memoir, and yet, considered from an artistic standpoint, they have the effect of amplifying, as if through giant loudspeakers, an emotion that Klima is otherwise intent on expressing in a modest tone. This is a bellowing anger at what has happened to many millions of people, himself included, victims of the serial horrors that used to be known, and maybe still are known, as totalitarianism. PAUL BERMAN, a senior editor of The New Republic, has written about the Velvet Revolution in "A Tale of Two Utopias."

Klima was seven in 1941, when his family was taken with other Jews living in Prague to the Terezin concentration camp. Because of happenstance and possibly because his father was an electrician and particularly useful, the family survived, only to fall under the tyranny of communism. He found some pleasure in writing essays in an impromptu school in the camps and later drifted into journalism, learning the severe limitations of truth telling as he adjusted to the expectation of glorious reports of progress. Klima traces his personal journey through belief in communism that he shared with his generation, an appeal having more to do with the search for high ideals than the actual ideology, and a growing disillusionment after his father's arrest and trial. All through the postwar spread of communism, the liberation of the Prague Spring, the Soviet invasion, and the eventual collapse of the Communist regime, Klima grew as a writer and a human being, joining other writers in the revolt against oppression. A sweeping, revealing look at one man's personal struggle as writer and individual, set against the backdrop of political turmoil.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist

Acclaimed dissident Czech playwright and novelist Klima (Love and Garbage) surveys several varieties of political insanity in this absorbing memoir. His life began in deranged horror as his Jewish family barely survived internment in the "model" Nazi concentration camp in the Czech city of Terezin; after the war, he grew disillusioned with the irrationality of the new Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, especially when his father, an ardent Communist, was arrested on trumped-up accusations of sabotage. Most of his narrative takes place during Czechoslovakia's post-Stalinist "weary dictatorship." Klima, then a prominent editor, wrestled with censors and adapted to the idiocies of official literary ideology. After the Prague Spring in 1968, his books were banned and his life became a labyrinth of police harassment and cat-and-mouse games with government interrogators who barely pretended to believe their own prosecutorial gambits, while a seemingly futile samizdat movement simmered underground. The author relates all this with a mordant humor and a limpid prose that registers both the overt fear that repression engenders and the subtler moral corruptions it works in victims and perpetrators. He finishes with a series of penetrating essays on the underpinnings of totalitarianism, from its utopian fantasies to its sordid practical compromises. Klima's searching exploration of a warped era is rich in irony-and dogged hope. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In his first autobiography, Franz Kafka Prize winner and acclaimed Czech novelist and playwright Klima (Waiting for the Dark; Lovers for a Day) depicts the brutality and anguish he and his countrymen suffered under the Nazis and then under the communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc. Klima focuses on both the personal and professional battles he faced from an oppressive government and traces his life from survival of the Terezin concentration camp in Prague to joining the Communist Party as a young man to his eventual expulsion from the party and the banishment of his books. Beyond his portrayal of the terrible conditions in which he lived, he also provides an illuminating portrait of a writer struggling to perfect his craft. Interspersed within the narrative are excerpts from essays by Klima on politics, government, and ideologies. VERDICT While fans of the author and those seeking Eastern Europe during the Cold War will find this account of particular interest, it is also essential for all readers with an interest in accessible and emotionally affecting memoirs. [See Prepub Alert, 5/20/13.]-Ben Neal, Sullivan Cty. P.L., Bristol, TN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From the Nazi concentration camps to the communist show trials, Klma (No Saints or Angels, 2001, etc.) shines a vibrant light on the machinery of oppression and the struggles of artists and intellectuals to subvert government control. For decades, the author was one of Czechoslovakia's most prolific and influential writers of samizdat, but he has never told his own story in such detail. After miraculously surviving Theresienstadt, he enthusiastically joined the Communist Party ("It was as if the walls of the fortress where I had been forced to spend part of my childhood had hindered me from seeing the world in its true colors") and decided to pursue writing. The travails of his father, an engineer prosecuted for running a factory that failed to meet its production quota, and the growing sense of paranoia in the literary and publishing communities in which he was beginning to establish himself gradually opened his eyes to the futility of communism, "a nefarious confederacy that in the name of grand objectives stole the property of society and destroyed what it had taken generations to create." More than a memoir, the book is the intellectual history of a city and a memorial to its inhabitants, who, laboring underground, kept the idea of democracy alive after the Prague Spring. Encompassing all the major journals, movements and personalities who shaped Prague's cultural and artistic life in the latter half of the 20th century, the author also touches on some of the themes--tension with Slovakia, postwar depopulation and stagnation of the countryside, the ongoing struggle to integrate gypsies and other minorities--that continue to shape the Czech Republic's identity. A fitting capstone to a distinguished literary life and an exposition of one of the main flaws of communism--that "the betrayal of intelligence leads to the barbarization of everyone."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.