Hello Gentle Reader,
There is a perverse irony to Ivan Klima’s life. The absurdity is almost nihilistically comedic. Klima’s life is sandwiched between two totalitarian horrors. First Nazi persecution and the holocaust. As a boy, Klima was incarcerated at Terezin, a former aristocratic holiday resort repurposed as a ghetto and concentration camp under Nazi occupation. More then 150, 000 Jews were interned here, of which 15, 000 were children, who remained there for months and years before being transported to an extermination camp – either Treblinka or Auschwitz. From 1941 tor 1945, a child turned prisoner, Klima lived under the constant shadow and threat of being sent to Auschwitz. This experience became the cornerstone of many of Klima’s memorable and powerful works, such as “Judge on Trial,” which touches on these inhumanity and extraordinary horrors of those years. Yet, the majority of Klima’s work took aim at the Soviet Communist regime which followed liberation, and spread like a corrosive rust throughout Eastern European in the postwar years. As in the case of many quixotic youth, Ivan Klima first hedged his bets on communism being an adequate replacement after the expulsion and defeat of the Nazi’s. The Soviet bureaucracy was equally as absurd in function and autocratic in its deliberations and delivery. In 1968 during the Prague Spring, Klima saw firsthand communisms own vicious form of oppression, when an estimated 750, 000 troops marched on Prague and disbanded the protestors. This harkens back to the line from Viivi Luik’s novel poetic novel “The Beauty of History,”:
“A Czech boy pouring petrol over himself and then lighting a match does not really go with the carpets in the living-room of Europe, so the television is switched off.”
Unlike other writers who entered exile – Milan Kundera as an example – Ivan Klima would return in 1970 from a state approved sabbatical abroad in the United States. Upon his return, Klima became an important underground literary figure and publisher, working towards smuggling texts to the west, and hosting a prohibited literary salon, populated by dissident writers and intellectuals. This endurance and talent for survival, first in the appalling conditions of Terezin, then the never-ending political oppression of Communism, Ivan Klima became one Eastern Europe’s greatest distillers and surveyor of the human condition. This is evidential in that Klima’s narrators are never heroic or grandiose in their political dissention, they like everyone else made compromises carved out caveats in order to live. As a dissident writer, Klima was inevitably forced to take menial jobs throughout his life to support his hidden literary ambitions. These included street sweeper, brick layer, and a hospital orderly. These positions would later inspire many of the stories that make up “My Golden Trades.” After the fall of Soviet Union and its iron curtain blockade of communist satellite states, Ivan Klima observed and wrote about the form officials and servants of the old regime, who found themselves displaced and adrift within a thawing democratic society full of freedom and choice. Throughout his literary work, Ivan Klima confronted the weight of history and the consequences of memory, both shared and collective. Klima’s witnessed the serial horrors of the 20th century, and his memoir “My Crazy Century,” recounts it with bellowing anger in its testimonial regarding the faceless, merciless, and unrelenting oppression of totalitarianism, with particular vitriol aimed towards communism, which he views as a conspiracy and ever-present threat against democracy. Despite the dour subject matter, Ivan Klima was a writer whose work carried within its pages, a sense of hope. All dissidence and criticism at their core maintain a sense of hope.
Rest in Peace, Ivan Klima.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
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