While my main project lo these many years has been to read and review Slovak novels in English, the fact is that I have also read no small amount of nonfiction about Slovakia and (to a lesser extent) by Slovaks. Sorting out the history of the nation we now call the Republic of Slovakia was in fact one of the great delights of working on my memoir. It turns out Slovakia’s history is a good window into the whole history of Europe, and to a whole range of political and economic questions.
So, for those of you out there who’d like to know more—all six of you—here’s a handful of books worth noting. (If you’re looking for more communism than what’s covered below, take a look at my previous posts on critical memoirs of communism, an uncritical memoir of communism, and a communist children’s encyclopedia.)
Josette Baer, Seven Slovak Women. Central and Eastern Europe has had its own feminist tradition, not well known in the West, and concerned with a distinct set of issues. To paint in broad strokes, it’s generally less hostile to religion and motherhood, and more attuned to how socialism and communism failed women instead of upholding them. (See Serbian author Slavenka Drakulić’s amazing How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed for a brilliant take on this issue.) Baer is a Swiss scholar who in this book looks at historical and contemporary Slovak women, starting with author and activist Elena Maróthy-Šoltésová (a Lutheran, I might add!), moving through the first female Slovak doctor and a Jewish resistance fighter and a historian critical of the Communist Party, to three women alive today working in politics and entertainment.
Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV. This is a study of the communist era, but it’s focused very precisely on the propaganda uses of television in promoting communist ideology. In particular, sitcoms sympathized with the plight of mothers who had to work, hold the family together, and put dinner on the table—but it still promoted the idea that she could and must do it, all for the good of “Society.”
David Doellinger, Turning Prayers into Protests. The demands for democracy, freedom of speech and press, and environmental repair are fairly well known in the West as drivers of the revolutions that overturned communism. What is less well known is the role that religion played in it. This book covers religious instigators of political reform in East Germany and Slovakia. The former was more Protestant/Lutheran in scope and actors; the latter more Catholic. While student protestors in Prague finally pushed the regime change in November 1989, they were preceded in the year and a half before by religious pilgrimage and candlelight protests by Slovaks. It’s a story that deserves to be better known.
Kateřina Lišková, Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style. Communists have better sex! Or so they wanted you to believe. This astounding and frankly rather comical book examines both “scientific” research into sexuality in communist Czechoslovakia, and the curious alternation between prudishness about sex and the assumption that the socialist leveling of differences between men and women in workforce would make for more abundant pleasures of the flesh. Prepare to be scandalized, but not in the ways you expected.
Alexander Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia. In this book Maxwell overturns a well-worn platitude (one that I heard many times in Slovakia myself): namely that the present-day codified Slovak language is a “compromise” central Slovak dialect equally accessible to people in the west and in the east. The story is a lot more complicated, a lot less tidy, and a lot more political and economic in motivation than you’d think. I consider this an exemplary case study on the nature of language and its uses in consolidating political and economic power even for those without any particular interest in Slovak per se.
Kevin J. McNamara, Dreams of a Great Small Nation. This is less strictly scholarly and more an exciting yarn, but no worse for that. It tells how the Czechoslovak Legion actually managed to capture all of Siberia during World War I! Of course, all you really needed to do to capture Siberia was capture the train line that ran through it. But still. These bold Czechs and Slovaks made it all the way to Vladivostok, and when it was over many intended to return to Europe and keep fighting. Their success is partly what motivated the Allies to award them their own nation after the war ended.
John Palka, My Slovakia, My Family. This book is probably the closest kin to mine, a memoir by a Slovak-American reckoning with both his past and present. What distinguishes it is Palka’s distinguished family! He was connected on both sides to significant Slovak movers and shakers. (My ancestors were farmers, laborers, mothers, and about four hundred years ago one sole pastor-theologian, about whom no one knows anything.) It’s a personal and affectionate look at family and Slovakia, but also a great avenue into the complex history told in an accessible style.
Zuzana Palovic and Gabriela Bereghazyova, Czechoslovakia: Behind the Iron Curtain. This colorful volume from the Global Slovakia foundation is the best pictorial representation I’ve come across yet of what life was actually like during the 40+ years of Czechoslovak communism. It also treats Slovakia much more extensively than other studies, which inevitably focus on the Czech side of the country and treat Slovakia like a side show. In addition to balancing the historical portrait, this is one of the most accessible entry points I know to why communism and state control are really bad ideas. America? Are you listening?
Scepticism and Hope: Sixteen Contemporary Slovak Essays, ed. Kollar. This is in fact the only book of its kind that I know of—a range of nonfiction essays by Slovak authors in translation. They cover a range of topics but with a heavy orientation toward politics since the revolution, and more broadly Slovaks just trying to sort out who they’ve been, who they are, and where to go from here. I have no idea how representative it is, but it’s a good glimpse into the current intellectual conversation.
Slovakia in History, ed. Teich. There are a number of histories of Slovakia out there, varying from ideological and nationalistic to dispassionate and critical. There’s something to be gained from each (even the biased ones), but I liked this one particularly, not least of all for its open complication of what even counts as “Slovakia” historically.
Mišo Suchý, When I Was and Was Not at Home. This strange little book is an absolute delight. The author’s short text in both Slovak and English accompanies photos ranging from Roma camps in Slovakia to overstuffed American grocery store shelves to dog pageants. It’s a vivid portrait of being out of place—being at home and not at home at the same time.
Jaroslav Švelch, Gaming the Iron Curtain. Part of a series from MIT Press on the history of games, this book tells a microhistory set in 1980s Czechoslovakia during the last years of “normalization”—the restriction of life to the private world while the resurgent Communist Party controlled all public life. Despite its irritating insistence on critical theory bona fides throughout, and the rhetoric of pretend subversion that accompanies it, the actual story is quite interesting and distinctive. A command economy like the ČSSR’s decided that home computers were a low priority, and as such did not produce them—but it also meant that the government did not particularly surveil them. Amateur enthusiasts found ways to import computers, to take them apart and put them back together, and to pass along gaming software (amazingly enough, mostly on the medium of cassette tapes!) and tinker with that, too. It’s one of the virtues that arose out of a vicious system: a DIY ethic shared by the deprived. Gamers were also deprived of manuals or the linguistic skills to make sense of them, so they often played games without instruction or even comprehension of the goal. Clubs of gamers worked together on importing and sharing whatever they could get their hands on, and by the end of the regime even found modest ways to express political dissent.
The Tragedy of the Slovak Jews, ed. Tóth. Slovakia bears the unique and terrible distinction of actually paying the Third Reich to deport its Jews. Slovaks thought that Jews were wealthy parasites and that they were being taken away to labor camps to work off their illicit profits, not to death camps to be exterminated—but still, the collusion is horrifying. This collection of essays looks at what happened, how it happened, and the outcome of the wiping out of nearly all of Slovakia’s Jewish population. (See also the novel The Shop on Main Street which treats the issue in fictional format.) One modest victory is the recent public apology of the Slovak government for its collusion in the Holocaust.