Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 [Paperback]

Heda Margolius Kovaly (Author), Helen Epstein (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1997

Heda Margolius Kovaly's steady gaze at the lives caught up in Czechoslovakia's tragic fate under the Nazis and then during the Stalin era illuminates the chaotic life of a nation. Kovaly was deported to concentration camps, escaped from a death march, nearly starved in the post-war years, only to be shattered by her husband's conviction (in the infamous 1952 Slansky trial) and his execution. Resonant with lyricism, this gripping memoir is uplifting even in the midst of horror.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A Jew in Czechoslovakia under the Nazis, Kovaly spent the war years in the Lodz ghetto and several concentration camps, losing her family and barely surviving herself. Returning to Prague at the end of the war, she married an old friend, a bright, enthusiastic young Jewish economist named Rudolf Margolius, who saw the country's only hope for the future in the Communist Party. Thereafter, Rudolf became deputy minister for foreign trade. For a time, the Margoliuses lived like royalty, albeit reluctantly, but then, in a replay of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, Rudolf and others, mostly of Jewish background, were arrested and hung in the infamous Slansky Trial of 1952. Kovaly's memoir of these years that end with her emigration to the West after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 are a tragic story told with aplomb, humor and tenderness. The reader alternately laughs and cries as Kovaly describes her mother being sent to death by Dr. Mengele, Czech Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald drunk at a reception, the last sight of her husband, the feverish happiness of the Prague Spring. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

An exceptionally intimate and poignant memoir by a Czechoslovakian exile. Kovaly, a Jew, was forcibly deported to a Nazi labor camp in the early days of German occupation. A spirited woman, she not only survived the camp but returned to Prague to wed her childhood sweetheart, Rudolf Margolius. Though their fortunes rose in the postwar era, Rudolf eventually lost his life in the Stalinist purges of the early Fifties, leaving Heda to face life as a nonperson. Kovaly's recollections of her life during the purges form the core of the book and convey with brutal clarity the magnitude of suffering inflicted on thousands of Czechs. Her brief impressions of the famous "Prague Spring" of 1968 are also illuminating. Recommended for libraries with large Eastern European collections. Joseph W. Constance, Jr., Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc. (January 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0841913773
• ISBN-13: 978-0841913776
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,311 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > History > Europe > Czech Republic
  • #8 in Books > History > Europe > Ireland
  • #10 in Books > History > Europe > Eastern

More About the Author

Helen Epstein is the author of six books of literary non-fiction including the two memoirs Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for her Mother's History and the biography Joe Papp: An American Life. All three books were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She is also the translator from the Czech of Acting in Terezin by Vlasta Schonova and the late Heda Margolius Kovaly's classic memoir Under A Cruel Star: A LIfe in Prague 1941-1968.

Her work on Kindle includes Children of the Holocaust; Music Talks: The Lives of Classical Musicians; Joe Papp; Tina Packer Builds a Theater; Meyer Schapiro: Portrait of an Art Historian; Memoir; A Living Will; Training as a Shakespearean Actor (with Tina Packer);and Ice Cream Man (with Gus Rancatore). Her book on memoir, Ecrire La Vie, as well as translations of Where She Came From and Children of the Holocaust are published by La Cause des livres (Paris) and available on amazon.fr.

Born in Prague in 1947, Helen grew up in New York City, where she attended and graduated from Hunter College High School (1965). She became a journalist after the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968 when her personal account was published in the Jerusalem Post.

In 1971, Helen graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and began freelancing for diverse publications including the New York Times where her first Magazine cover story on freelance musician Ed Birdwell ran in 1974. Her profiles of legendary musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma are collected in Music Talks.

She began teaching journalism at New York University in 1974 and became the first woman in the journalism department to be awarded tenure. In 1986, she left NYU to move to the Boston area. She has an active speaking career and has lectured at a wide variety of venues including universities in Europe and North and South America; health organizations; high schools; synagogues, libraries and churches; the United States Military Academy at West Point; the Embassy of the Czech Republic and the U.S. Holocaust Museum. The mother of two grown sons, Helen shuttles between the Berkshires and the Boston area with her husband and blogs about the arts for the New England cultural website The Arts Fuse.

Photos show Helen with late author Heda Kovaly and son Sam, with her Czech researchers Jiri Rychetsky and Jiri Fiedler in 2001; speaking with Jean-Gaspard Palenicek at the Centre Tcheque in Paris; lecturing at SUNY Geneseo; at the El Ateneo bookstore in Buenos Aires; in Rome with her Italian editor Annalisa Cosentino and translator Elisa Renso; and at Freud's birthplace in Pribor, Czech Republic. To see a video interview of Helen, please cut and paste: http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/2007/02/05/uo-today-229-helen-epstein/

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why Communism appealed to so many after WW2, August 20, 2003

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 (Paperback)

Kovaly writes with precision and a welcome lack of sentimentality about the attractions for East-Central Europeans to communism after the war, especially for Jews who had survived fascism. In the first half of this memoir, she avoids the overly and sadly familiar vignettes of camp inmates to instead explore in detail the unfamiliar story of what happens to an escapee from the death camp who wanders back to Prague, while the Nazis still rule the city.

Her scenes of homelessness and fear, as her former friends often become terrified at seeing her alive and sheltering her from the Germans, reveal a fresh persective on a refugee who ironically seems to be more endangered outside Auschwitz than if she had stayed within the lager. After the war, she shows how the Jews returning to their homes found their possessions and livelihoods stolen, and how many of their fellow Czechs had brazenly or surreptitiously commandeered the houses and the property for themselves, since the Jews could do little to regain these items.

Kovaly then explains how the appeal to a more just system, rather than the beleaguered democracy that tried to revive postwar Czechoslovakia, began to fool idealistic Czechs into supporting a communism based more on the lies of those who dared not tell the truth of Stalinism, as well as those who genuinely sought--as her first husband Rudolf Margolius--to bring about a better world through Marxism on more of a Titoist model.

Many pages that follow could serve as a primer for exposing how communist dreams began to replace harsh reality for many Czechs. In incisive prose, with well-chosen metaphors and vignettes, she excels in comparing her own search to that of her husband and his fellow believers. This gradual conversion, she finds, could not be based on the facts, since these were hidden from the "masses," but doomed the Czechs to repeat the failures of Soviets, who pretended that no prejudice or nationalism tarnished the record of their CCCP--an inspiration for Czechs weakened by the Nazis, the camps, and only two decades of fragile post-WWI uneasy peace under an attempt at humane democracy. Their self-confidence beaten down, they were ripe for the idealism and self-sacrifice that communism promised.

Also, she notes, the servile, the opportunists, and the conniving rose quickly in a system that rewarded the disciple, often an incompetent member of the "proletariat" over qualified managers and leaders. She shows in the next quarter of the book how her husband was forced to become a foreign minister, and how quickly the climate shifted and led to his show (Slansky) trial and execution. Then, the pace shifts for the last section into a quick leap forward to 1968, and evocative descriptions of the "Prague Spring" and her eventual flight to the West at last.

Readers who select Ivan Klima's novels of Czech life before and after communist dictatorship, Sandor Marai's "Memoir of Hungary, 1944-48," or Gyorgy Faludy's account of prison in Stalin-era Hungary "My Happy Days in Hell" will appreciate this memoir.

P.S. It appears in earlier translation as part of "The Victors and the Vanquished" or "I Do Not Want to Remember" in 1973 versions. I cannot determine if "Prague Farewell" is another title for this work, or another volume of Kovaly's recollections.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The history of Europe in one woman's life, February 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 (Paperback)

This book should be required reading for all students of the 20th century. I am continually struck by the amazing life Kovaly lived and the great skill with which she writes about it. The only weakness of this book is that it occaisionally goes out of print, which is a crime. It is an unrecognized classic and should rank alongside Primo Levi and Anne Frank as the most telling memoirs of the war and its aftermath.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Under A Cruel Star & Reflections of Prague, August 6, 2006

By 

Ivan Margolius (Bedfordshire, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 (Paperback)

My mother's book, in print since 1973 under various titles, the last being 'Under A Cruel Star', inspired me to write my own side of the story about my lost father, JUDr Rudolf Margolius. Now published and called 'Reflections of Prague: Journeys through the 20th century' it fills gaps in my mother's book provided by further research and historical information, some of which was not available to her and which many readers of her book had asked us for over the years. Hopefully this companion volume provides answers to these questions. I hope you find this book interesting and would welcome your feedback.