Status

Říkali mu Gojele

aneb židovská dobrodružství křesťanského chlapce, když skončilo šoa

To be published: Q4 2024

Gojele. The Jewish adventures of a Christian boy after the end of Shoah. Gojele is a semi-autobiographical novel that tells a story of a twelve-year-old German boy. After World War II, owing to administrative oversight, the boy found himself with his mother in northern Moravia. It was a place in the former Sudetenland (Weidenitz – Vidnava) near the Polish border, where Jews returning from concentration camps were gathered before they were supposed to move to Palestine. Meanwhile, the intended destination for the boy and his mother was actually one of the gathering places for Sudeten Germans before their expulsion from Czechoslovakia (Weidenau – Vidnice).

Vespod

Béatrice Kahn

To be published: Q4 2024

Underwear. The compelling prose Les Dessous (Underwear, 2020) follows three different girls, all of them on the cusp of adulthood. In a small French town in 1963, Elisabeth, hidden under a café table, listens to adult conversations. It’s the day of her friend Thérese’s funeral and she is also reading the diary of Henriette, a Jewish girl, who suffered persecution during the war. Secrets kept undisclosed in the French post-war small town are gradually coming to light. The world of teenage girls is confronted with the adult world, with war and collaboration, conformity and social violence, with large and small betrayals.

Pastýřka snů

Příběh první české letkyně

Iva Tajovská

Shepherdess of Dreams.The story of the first Czech female aviator. Iva Tajovská’s latest novel takes us back to the beginning of the 20th century, to the time of the first aviators and promoters of aviation, Jan Kašpar and Eugen Čihák. The story of Božena Langerová is less known to the public, but all the more interesting, as she was the first Czech woman and the thirteenth woman in the world, to fly a plane. The takeoffs and the downfalls of her “butterfly” serve as a metaphor for the events in her life. In the beginning, Božena is confronted with the male prejudice against women in technical fields and also with the disapproval of her mother, who pressures her to live up to her traditional role.

Dvanáct Dnů

Příběh maďarského povstání 1956

Victor Sebestyen

Twelve Days. The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. The book is a day-by-day account of the defining moment of the Cold War – the inspiring but brutally crushed Hungarian Uprising. His book incorporates newly released official documents and archive material, family diaries, and eyewitness testimony. We witness the thrilling first days when – armed only with a few rifles, petrol bombs, and desperate courage – the people of Budapest rose up against their Soviet masters and nearly succeeded.

Autobiografie jednoho pařížského domu

Příběhy, osudy a deportace 1942–1944

Ruth Zylberman

The Children of 209 Rue Saint-Maur, Paris X^e. The Stories of Deportees 1942–1944. At number 209 rue Saint-Maurus in the 10th arrondissement of Paris there is an apartment building where families of craftsmen and workers, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, have lived since the 1850s. Generations have grown up here, love and friendships have been forged and daily life has been regularly interrupted by the disasters and violence of the 20th century. Among others, nine Jewish children were deported from here in the 1940s. Their fates are the key to the author’s magnificent novel’s testimony about the memory of places and the invisible threads that connect the living and the dead.

V osamění

Dorothy B. Hughes

In a Lonely Place. Psychological noir fiction with a criminal theme, which depicts post-war Los Angeles and the life of the upper middle class. The protagonist, Dix Steele, is a former World War II pilot living off his uncle’s money. At first, he appears to be merely someone, who is overly concerned with his appearance and places great emphasis on his own importance, but after meeting his former war buddy Brub, his wife Sylvia and after the encounter with an actress called Laurel, it becomes clear, that he can hardly control his aggression and resentment towards his own fate…

Pakt

Stalin, Hitler a příběh jedné vražedné aliance 1939–1941

Claudia Weber

To be published: Q1 2024

The Pact. Stalin, Hitler and the Story of a Murderous Alliance 1939–1941. Hitler’s alliance with Stalin, known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, was not only a temporary armstice between the two totalitarian world powers but practically enabled the Nazi Germany to start the World War II by attacking Poland and simultaneously enabled the Stalinist Soviet Union to occupy the Baltic states and after the war with Finland a part of its territory, too. Thus during the first twenty-two months of the World War II the collaboration of the two dictators changed the political situation on the whole continent fundamentally.

Věk Rudých Mravenců

Tanya Pyankova

To be published: Q4 2024

The Age of Red Ants. This title is the fourth novel of Taňa Pjankova. It tells a story about the so-called Holodomor period, i.e. Ukrainian famine, that took place between 1932 and 1933. The story follows three main characters – Dusya, Svyryd and Solya – whose fates are the result of almost three years of studying archival materials. As the author herself states, they are not fictitious characters. In addition to this three storylines, the author also handles the contrast between the dying traditional village and the Soviet system, interestingly working with the embodiment of Hunger as an allegorical figure.

Antikomunistické manifesty

Čtyři knihy, které formovaly studenou válku

John V. Fleming

The Anti-Communist Manifestos. Four Books that Shaped the Cold War. After retiring from Princeton University Professor Fleming devoted himself to his hobby, namely book-binding. Thus he came across a long-forgotten American bestseller: Out of the Night by Jan Valtin. Keeping to his lifelong specialization which is comparative literature and his credo that quality is best seen through comparison he compared this literary discovery of his with two best-known books of this genre and one completely unknown.

Co skrývá Jeruzalém

Pohřbená historie nejvíce znesvářeného města světa

Andrew Lawler

Under Jerusalem. The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City. The book traces the multilayered history of discovering the Jerusalem underground since mid-19^th century up to present. The account of archaeological achievements and their political, cultural and religious impact is written with historical insight and storytelling gift of an experienced journalist. The story of a city tangled on all civilization levels from religious zeal through nationalist and power interests all the way to geographic conditions is told in a most unbiased manner. In a historical depiction of war – both metaphorical and literal – over the spiritual heritage belonging not only to the Christian civilization the author takes no parts.

Kůže

Evgenia Nekrasova

Tento obrázek nemá vyplněný atribut alt; název souboru je Nekrasovova_Kuze_3D_nahled-238x300.jpg.

Skin. The novel written by the young Russian writer Evgenia Nekrasova is a story of two women, a black slave from the South of the U.S.A. and a Russian serf whose life stories overlap.

In the South of the U.S.A. a female slave is born and named Hope. Her mother tries to save her from the same fate as she herself has faced. However, they get separated and the new owner takes Hope away from America. Meanwhile in Russia a girl named Domna is born into a serf family and, being the youngest daughter, is cherished and spoilt. Than one day a carriage takes her away – her owner lost her in cards.

Hella

Alena Machoninová

Hella. The subtitle of the narrative essay debut by the Russian scholar and translator Alena Machoninová refers to the thematic basis of the narrative-essay, that is the life-story of Helena „Hella“ Frischer, a Czech Jewess who served as a model for the character of in the novel Moscow-Border by Jiří Weil. Allegedly, Hella had been executed along with her husband during the Great Terror under Stalin. However, a few years ago it turned out that after having served ten years at a labor camp in northern Russia Hella was set free and then lived in Moscow until her death in 1984. In 2017 her labor camp memoir came out in Czech.