Return to Prague

August 3, 1985
    I arrived in Prague around 5 p.m. aboard a Czech Airlines Tupolev 134. It was the afternoon flight out of Frankfurt--we missed the morning one, a Lufthansa Boeing, because the flight from New York arrived three hours late. In a way, the Tupolev was a good introduction: a small jet with engines mounted in the back, it took one back in time, to the French Caravelle of the late 1950s. Seats were two and two, as in a bus, the sides were padded plastic, not fiberglass, the aluminum eating shelves were flimsy and to stow them one had to fiddle with the catch. It (and some other Eastern technology) seemed to be a hand-crafted rather than factory-made. Near my seat was a wall box with an "escape rope" to use in an emergency, and the luggage was loaded and unloaded by hand into a compartment in the plane, through a hatch about 4 feet square.

    Above Bohemia we gradually descended and one could see towns, factories, a large quarry and near Prague, huge blocks of public housing, rather ugly, many still under construction. Prague does not dwindle into suburbs the way American cities do, but ends abruptly in fields, many of which were golden-yellow with ripe barley and wheat. The plane made a sweep over Prague and we had a brief glimpse of bridges, of the castle, of St. Vitus cathedral and of massed old houses before coming down for a landing.

    We stepped off the plane to a wheeled ramp and from it to a bus, which took us to the terminal. Our passports were given an initial check, then we were allowed into the waiting hall. The flight included several IAGA people--Ernest Deutsch, David Sibeck and Al Lazarus, next to whom I sat on the TWA plane from New York. Chris Russell, Rick Elphic and Janet Luhman, who had shared the TWA flight, rented a car in Frankfurt and drove in: later I heard that in Plzeň, while Rick was driving, he was caught in a speed trap and fined 100 crowns.

    I exchanged some money at the legal rate, 11 crowns per dollar, and waited. Trying to go down to the restrooms, I met a woman who chased me back upstairs, she had just cleaned the floor and no one was to enter. Finally the passport windows opened, we filed in and our Czech visa was stamped, a separate document with one's photo on which all money exchanges were entered. Then we retrieved our luggage and took it through customs: by that time I had joined with Ernie Deutsch. The official only checked my luggage superficially, but made a show of examining Ernie's briefcase, filled with files and files of papers, obviously scientific; he could not make much of them and finally motioned us to go.

    What next? There was supposed to be a shuttle bus to hotels, costing $5, but I had already a map and knew (from Jiří Hauner) where our hostel was, it was near the 119 bus line which went to the airport. The bus was bound to be cheaper, and besides, if the shuttle stopped at every hotel, who knew how long it would take. So I proposed to Ernie that we ride the bus and helped him with his luggage to the platform outside, where some young people were already waiting.

    In German (and some experimental Czech;"rozumíte německy?"--do you understand German?-- was always useful) I asked someone what the fare was: one crown. So I pulled out two newly-acquire crown coins, one for me and one for Ernie, and showed them to the man. He became agitated: no, we needed tickets, "lístky." He took our crowns and dashed into the building--the bus was already coming, it had been parked nearby waiting for a slack in the schedule to end--but quickly he came back, still with the money, the counter for selling "lístky" was closed, as it was late Saturday afternoon. But go on the bus, he said, everything would be arranged.

    We boarded--it was one of those jointed monstrosities with a turntable platform where its two sections met--and our benefactor started soliciting passengers, asking whether anyone could sell two tickets to these strangers here. Tickets are sold in tobacco stores, we later learned, and also by vending machines in the Metro, and people usually bought them in lots of 10 or 20. Soon someone sold us a pair and then we were shown what to do: each bus (trams too) had several punch boxes mounted on upright posts such as are used for handgrips, one inserted the ticket into a slotted handle on the top and then pulled, punching a hole in the ticket. Then the ticket was removed and kept for inspection: each had 9 numbered squares in a square array at the bottom, and by noting which of these was punched and the shape of the hole, the conductor could verify that the ticket indeed belonged to that particular bus. Very few inspections were made--I recall only one--but there was a 50-crown fine for being caught without a matching ticket. The people were friendly, and two women on the bus carried flowers.

    The ride was long. At first we rode among barley fields, then came volcanic hills (the Šárka district, I was told later by the Jůzas), a large swimming pool and a campground in the distance, with multi-colored tents crowding each other. Then we began passing high-rise tenements, and gradually the scene became urban. We finally got off near the Leninova stop of the subway. I lugged the suitcases across the street into a residential neighborhood, which was actually the beginning of the university. The streets seemed empty: one man was picking cherries from a tree growing by the street. The stucco on a house facing an intersection was marked with bullet holes--from 1945 or 1968? Later I saw many memorial tablets nearby ("here fell so-and-so for the homeland, 9 May 1945"), suggesting the former [Wiener: Not so. The 1945 impacts were repaired after the war]. Tablets like this were scattered throughout the city.

    Sinkuleho hostel stands half a block from there, on Zikova street. The fronts of all the houses on the street are joined together and the hostel resembles its neighbors, except that an entrance-roof sticks out from its front proclaiming "Kolej V Sinkuleho." "Kolej" is Czech for student dormitory (it also means "track", the subway has "kolej 1" and "kolej 2"), and Václav Sinkule was a journalist executed by the Nazis, in whose honor it is named. It is about 5 stories high, a dormitory with split levels and a long row of cell-like rooms at each level. I was assigned to room number 53 (Ernie got 54), but first we had to register and have our passports inspected by the woman at the front desk. She sat in a small room which seemed to be staffed around the clock (it had a TV, a bed and a hot plate), with a window facing the entranceway, where everyone had to pass. Helping her was an English speaking Čedok girl, Zdenka Bulanka (Bulanková?), who when we arrived was prepping up the dingy lobby, pinning up maps of Prague and posters. We were somewhat early, and the registration process took time. I asked the woman if she could wake me at 7 (I had an 8:30 tour to Hluboká), but no, there was no telephone and she could not leave her post.

    The room was austere. It had double windows, facing the yard, no screen and no curtains (windows facing the street, I later found, did have curtains), two beds with less than a bed's width between them, two small bare tables and two closets by the door. Next to one of the tables were bookshelves, next to the other a small cabinet. Below them, at the end of each bed, stood a large bin opening from above, with a wooden pole passing its length-probably for stowing the bedding (big pillow, sheet and lumpy comforter), converting the beds into couches. All seemed worse for wear and on the bin which I faced when I lay down to sleep were pinups of Nadia Comaneci and Chris Everett (Olympic gymnasts) in miniskirt. Later Zdenka came, embarrassed, and brought a bar of soap and a roll of toilet paper, its edge uneven as if trimmed by a hatchet.

    About 15 rooms lined one side of the hallway; facing them were toilets on one end and a bathroom at the other, and between these windows opened to a central airspace. All windows were tightly shut, the toilets stank and one of the first things I did was open some of the windows. The toilets included two cubicles with flushing bowls, only one could be locked and neither had a paper holder, though one day later rolls appeared propped against the pipes; flushing was by pullchain and at night the sound roared through the building. Each cubicle also had a plunger standing in a corner, just in case. Next to the toilet door was a small sink, and next to it the main plumbing pipe came down from the higher floor, inside the wall, one section had been excavated and mended, with a monstrous plastic bulge around it.

    In between the cubicles were 3 or 4 urinals, built into the wall, and on the door hung a handwritten sign "Muži", men. What about the wives whom several participants had brought along? The cubicle with the lock on the door, perhaps. A few days later I noted a man standing guard in the shower room while a woman was taking her shower inside.

    The bathroom had two shower stalls, and by turning the hot water knob all the way one could get a trickle of big drops of hot water, just enough to leaven the cold water for a shower. It never bothered me--I showered to cool down, anyway, since most days were uncomfortably hot, in the evenings I would stand under the shower for several minutes just to cool down enough to sleep. It also had four sinks, only one with a stopper, and a radiator--no hooks, no bench, no mirror until 2 days later, when one was hung from a hook besides the radiator, across from the sinks. A small elevator was located at the end of the hallway and a phone in the middle, and neither of them worked.

    I later heard that Howard Singer and a few others assigned to the hostel took one look and asked to be transferred to a hotel. Some IAGA people nicknamed the hostel "Buchenwald," but I actually grew to like it. The location was superb, one block from the subway and one long block (the other way) from the meeting--while the other dorm, the more expensive one with separate bathrooms and a working elevator, was 10-15 minutes away, as was Hotel International, and all other hotels needed a subway ride. The International was overheated and later Hank Garrett who stayed there told me he had a hard time falling asleep, the disco on the 2nd floor played loud music until two past midnight. Most important, perhaps, at the hostel I never had the feeling of being under surveillance. I could open the windows at night--flies entered, but not many, it was 3 levels up--and I could drape the pillow of the second bed over my head to shut off any noise.

    In New York, the day before I left, I argued with my mother. I had packed two towels and a bar of soap, and she said, ridiculous, it is a European country, they will provide you with all that. Well, provide us they did--each bed had what looked like a small dishcloth, totally inadequate, making me grateful for the fluffy American towels, one of which I lent to Ernie. The soap was pink and rough, and smelled of some generic ester--still I used it, and left my bar to the Jůzas. Two days after my arrival a cheerful crew of young workers went through the dorm rooms and provided each table with a plastic tablecloth and each occupant with a gooseneck lamp, which improved matters considerably.

    There was still some daylight left, and I walked to the meeting hall. The last Čedok worker was there, closing the place down--"come tomorrow." Then Ernie and I went to the Hotel International, because Ernie had heard of a paleomagnetism workshop to be held there next morning, and wanted to know where and when. The International is built in hideous Stalin-era style, a square wedding cake rising to a steep spike, with heavy ornamentation inside and out. Stalin must already be half legendary, because a man who later guided us to the Můstek station on the subway--he spoke pretty decent English and said he was a tourist guide (retired?)--apologized for its appearance but blamed Lenin.

    After Ernie received his information and met a few colleagues we went out. The line of the Dejvice tramway ended in front of the hotel, in a loop with a small tobacco shop, and there I bought a supply of tickets and also some chocolate (7 crowns) and butter cookies (3 crowns), to serve as next day's breakfast and as provisions for the trip to Tábor and Hluboká. I still thought that we could get a very good dinner in town, so against the advice of a scientist staying at the hotel, who said restaurants were always jammed, we took a bus and then the subway to Wenceslas Square, Václavské náměstí.

    The subway is fast, clean, very frequent (the interval between trains is 4-5 minutes during the day and even at 11 pm trains are no more than 9 minutes apart; clocks on each platform tell the time elapsed from the last train), heavily used and cheap: the price is a one-crown coin, dropped into a box or a turnstile in front of a glass booth, where a watchman (more frequently watchgirl) was generally reading or watching TV. The escalators are long and move faster than any I had known, and the stations are prettily decorated: the rolling stock is made in Russia, heavy and quite stable, and the doors close with an authoritative bang. Just before they do, a chime sounds and a sweet recorded feminine voice comes on: "Ukončete výstup a nástup, dveře se zavírají" ("finish getting on and off, the doors are closing"). The same voice announces stations, and it's a masculine one on the other line.

    Můstek; means "little bridge", the former location of a bridge over the moat between the "old city" (Staré město) and the "new city". The moat is now a main street "Na Příkopě" ("at the moat"; this also used to be its German name, "am Graben"), and Můstek is the center of town, where that street meets Wenceslas square. From the Můstek station we climbed out and looked for a restaurant: one was advertised right at the corner, but we soon found it was six floors up, reachable only by its own small elevator, with an operator inside.

    Ernie and I rode to the top and found the place rather empty: on Saturday night in the summer, it later turned out, many people are out of town. Furthermore, the main attraction of the place, a dance floor with orchestra, only opened later at night (one floor further up, requiring extra payment). So we sat down in a clean room, sparsely furnished, and were served--the food was good, French fries with some meat, though the portions were skimpy. To celebrate our successful arrival we ordered beer which proved to be quite bitter. The bill came to 57 crowns--the official exchange is 11 per dollar, at the congress 16, illegally about 30 or more (on the street one is continually accosted by people making that offer, but I know of no one who took it). I asked about adding a tip, and the waiter--a young man, deadpan--said that the "ober", headwaiter, would handle the payment. The "ober" turned out to be a wispy girl in black, and in answer to my question, she said (in German, I believe) that tips were shared by the entire "kolektiv."

    4 August

    I woke up around 6:30; without curtains the room got light early and in any case, around that time people started using the toilets and the sound of the flushing reverberated. Took a cold shower, shaved by touch (so did Ernie, with an old style safety razor which cut him terribly), rode the subway to the "Staré Město" station and just barely arrived on time. The tour started at the Čedok office near the Hotel Intercontinental, around the corner from Alt-Neu: we rode in a small Mercedes-Benz bus, so crowded that jump seats had to be unfolded into the passage.

    The party included Ed and Ginny Hones (LANL), John Foster (Haystack), Y.C. and Yum Ping Whang (Catholic U.) and Peter Sutcliff from the Hermanus observatory, halfway between Capetown and Cape Agulhas--he worked on Pc-3 pulsations, ca 30 Hz. There were some other IAGA members, mostly older, a young couple from Bulgaria and one from France, for whose benefit our guide repeated all her explanations in French. Our guide had snow-white hair and spoke in a bored tone into her microphone without at all looking at us, and my general impression (which turned out to hold for any Čedok activity) was that she went through her motions without caring the least bit about her audience. Mentally I named her Intourist lady,

    The day was clear and Southern Bohemia was pretty. David Robertson said later that day that it reminded him of New Zealand--rolling hills with forests on the top. David was a paleomagnetist who received his Ph.D. from Leeds one year earlier, after undergraduate studies in Aukland: I lent him 22 crowns to tide him over until banks opened on Monday, and a note in my notebook also says that he paid back two days later. His recent research dealt with ways of deriving the paleomagnetic field intensity from small samples.

    In addition to hills and forests, we saw lakes with kayaks and sailboats, and on Tábor's Jordan pond, a one-man racing shell--also rivers, flowers, and generally sunny skies, except for one brief downpour. We passed green potato fields, corn in tassel about half the height of America's, and ripe stands of straw-golden barley and wheat, overdue for harvest, some patches already blown flat by wind and rain. It was Sunday and no one was working; in the US farmers would be out harvesting, Sunday or not, just to pay the mortgage.

    The countryside was dotted with villages and towns, factories, railroads and other signs of human activity. The modern housing tenements outside Prague were big, angular and generally ugly, with very little landscaping between the blocks--and except in Hluboká, I saw no lawns that day, and no lawnmowers, the only mowing seen was done by scythe, and then the cut grass and weeds were piled up, apparently for fodder. The grounds looked particularly bad at the site of the IAGA meeting, the "Department of Bulding Engineering and Architecture," housed in boxlike concrete buildings and surrounded by patches of weeds 6 feet tall. The boxy appearance of the department of architecture (were we met) was probably a symptom of the official style, but the weeds, I was told, were temporary--they got mowed once school returned and, yes, lawnmowers were used.

    As one gets further from Prague, the architecture reverts to the Czech traditional style, or maybe it is central European, stucco-covered brick with shingled roofs, and cobbled streets. The bricks are lighter in color and softer than US bricks are, and the stucco is often modeled in fanciful ways. Most frequently it is molded to resemble large stone blocks, as was also done by George Washington at Mt. Vernon (on top of wood). The "stones" of old Prague buildings are mostly such fakes, and the curlicues and decorations are also stucco. Even the "stones" of the castle of Hluboká are stucco: now and then a patch becomes detached and flakes off, revealing a bit of the old castle underneath, but generally the stuff is durable, though it becomes dirty with age.

    Because stucco naturally has rounded edges and so do old cobblestones ("kočičí hlavy", cats' heads), Czech architecture reminded me of the hobbits in "Lord of the Rings" with their round windows and doors. Like hobbits, too, Czechs love to drink and smoke (oh, how they smoke!), they value their leisure while remaining reasonably enterprising, and seem overall gentle and friendly. These boxy new buildings outside Prague seemed just as un-hobbitlike as the new style of housing which Frodo noticed when he returned to the shire and found Saruman.

    Anyway, our little bus left Prague by the new expressway to Bratislava (393 km, the sign said) but turned off after only about 30 km, towards Benešov and Tábor. According to my father, Votice was 3 km from Vrchotovy Janovice where I attended school in 1938, but when we got there and I looked out, nothing seemed familiar. At 10 a.m. we arrived at Tábor, a large town founded by the Hussites in which my father served as attorney in the 1920s. The walled old Hussite town on the hilltop, with its city hall and church, is now a national monument: the bus was parked nearby, and we walked up to the large cobblestone town square on top of town. We were given one hour off, the lady said, to visit the museum or do whatever we liked. The museum was in the town hall, covered like so many other historic buildings by scaffolding while its stucco was being renovated: a nice museum but a static one, with many photos, some models and some old arms. Soon I left it and walked down to the battlements, which were also being renovated, and to Jordan lake below. Tábor had been the stronghold of the Czech Hussite rebellion, after Hus himself was burned at the stake in 1415: for 20 years or so his followers, based in Tábor, raided the country and defied its nobility. They represented not just a dissident church, but also the Czech peasantry opposed to its Germanized overlords, and therefore their memory was still proudly recalled.

    From the town walls I walked back to the large church, where a Sunday service was just about to begin. About 30 people were assembled (the church could have easily held hundreds) and while no one yet stood at the pulpit, some unseen person was playing the organ with great skill and volume. Then the music ended, the pastor entered and I left: by good fortune, I then managed to attach myself to a group-tour of the catacombs which were dug by the Hussites beneath Tábor, with a total length of about 14 km. I paid 3 crowns to enter, but the guide was giving a long talk in Czech, so after a while I walked out again, looked around the museum, and then tried to rejoin the group, which had meanwhile gone on. That was when the overseer lady caught me: you cannot go in by yourself, she said, no one is allowed in except with a guide. But then she felt sorry for me and escorted me to the catacombs (a second lady was left in the booth), which were quite well lit along the tour path and pleasantly cool. She followed the group a long way before we caught up; the entire tour route was 650 meters long and emerged in a house on the far side of the church.

    In the tunnels I struck up a conversation with a German couple from Karl-Marx Stadt (Chemnitz before the war). He was a gardener, he said, then explained--he tended an apple orchard. It was a private family business of a type the government has only allowed in the last 10 years, and it employed 8 people. His complaint was that for their trip the German government only allowed enough foreign exchange "either to eat, or for the hotel, or for benzin." The solution was to buy the benzin, live on simple groceries and sleep in the car. I told him that I lived close to Virginia which was famous for apples, and he asked what kinds? Macintosh, Jonathan, Golden Delicious, Queen Anne. He said he knew some of those.

    From there the bus went to Hluboká, within sight of České Budějovice, the town from which Budweiser beer got its name (I had heard that Michelob, name of its premium beer, was named after Michle, a part of Prague). Its main attraction is a castle on a steep hill overlooking the Vltava river. Along the base of the hill is the village of Hluboká ("the deep one"--in German Frauenberg, womens' mountain), and that's where my grandmother Mina Stein (Wilhelmina) was born, to the family of David Stein, cooper and fur-tanner. The village is little more than one long street and few of its buildings appear new. The bus rolled to a stop next to the Park hotel, one of those few buildings, and the lady told us we will have lunch for the next hour, then go up to the castle. Since I had other interests, I left and walked into the center of the village, marked by a large church.

    That place was near the entrance to the castle park, and many visitors were around, though only a few cars, since the public parking lot was further away to the south. Several restaurants were open and quite busy, and I bought wafers for 3.80 crowns and coke for 4.30. A white-haired fat man, wearing suspenders, was herding tourist cars in the small lot of the restaurant on the downhill side, and I asked him about the Stein factory. "Juden, nicht?" he said (Jews, isn't it so?). The factory still existed, he said, it made floortiles ("parkety") and possibly wine barrels (I'm not sure now if he said that). But it was perhaps 3 kilometers away, on the road to Budějovice.

    So I turned around and returned to the Park hotel, where our group was being served an incredibly slow lunch. I arrived in time for dessert, cake with cream, and unfiltered coffee. In the lobby, meanwhile, members of the next group sat waiting for their turn--their badges identified them as Americans, a "Bryant tour" group. It turned out that Hluboká was one of their last stops on a round-the-world trip, via Seattle, Japan, Taiwan, Hong-Kong, Thailand, Nepal and so on. They seemed dead tired.

    The bus then took us to the park entrance and we climbed up the hill, past a large display board with slogans and photos of local party leaders--we saw several such displays on the trip. The castle used to belong to the Schwarzenbergs, Bohemia's richest family, and was originally a gloomy fortress built in the prevailing Austrian-Bohemian style. But around 1840 the lady of the manor took a fancy to the English style and had the exterior completely restyled to resemble Windsor castle, and also added English-style formal gardens, a striking combinations which now attracts crowds of tourists. Next to the castle stands a glass-covered winter garden and a famous art gallery, but we did not have time to go in.

    We entered the courtyard, with horn-trophies of deer mounted high on the walls all around: the counts of Schwarzenberg loved to hunt, and the Emperor sometimes joined them. On one hunt, around 1730, Emperor Leopold by mistake shot the count dead: so we were told when we came to the poor man's portrait in the castle, and nothing could be done about it, the emperor being above reproach. Many visitors were waiting in the courtyard, and we were told there was a 45 minute wait for an English speaking guide: so we got a Czech-speaking one and our lady translated, not too well.

    Inside the castle we went up the main staircase. On the landing stood a rack of oversize slippers and we were told to put them over our shoes, so as not scratch the wooden flooring. Indeed, the floors were inlaid with great skill, often each room had a different pattern. The walls also had elaborate woodwork as well as stained-glass windows and many paintings of various Schwartzenbergs--rulers, soldiers, cardinals, scholars and so forth. Heating ducts were built into the walls, and in some rooms stood Bohemian tiled ovens, huge things covered with green or purple glaze. We also were shown suits of armor and gobelins, large hung tapestries illustrating proverbs and scenes from the Aeniad. In the last few rooms, the state put up displays of its own, pointing out how the luxury of the masters of Hluboká required the drudgery of many employees and showing as evidence a daily menu and a list of kitchen expenses.

    An interesting exhibit was a letter dated 1920, in which the owner directed his manager not to pay Communist workers for the days of work which they missed because of a strike. In America they might have been fired: Czechs are gentle hobbits by comparison. I was reminded of this again on the last day, when I went sightseeing with the Jůzas in the Hradčany. It was raining and Zdeněk offered me one side of his umbrella: "I don't need it," I said. "This is Czech rain, it is gentle. Now in America, you would be soaked to the skin."

    The way back seemed a lot faster. For dinner the Whangs invited me to the buffet at the Intercontinental. Thus I got to know Yum Ping--quite a lady, she told me that one of her daughters had an M.Sc. in engineering, another one was studying math and chemistry, and her son studied biochemistry. Then she asked--my daughter, wasn't she studying computer science?

    The dinner was nice, mushroom soup, ox tongue, dumplings, green peas, but it cost 500 crowns for the three of us, nearly a weeks wages for Czechs. The Whangs refused money, they said each of them had received from the hotel coupons for 110 crowns a day and they had more than they needed. We then walked to the Charles bridge, and I returned by subway. The bridge, built around 1360, is now reserved for pedestrians; it is famous for its style, for the towers at its ends and for the many statues along it, most of them religious. The one I remember most is a crucifix with the Hebrew inscription "Holy, Holy, Holy the Lord of Hosts." According to Nagel's guidebook, the Hebrew was put there to spite the Jews--the money for the statue came from a fine imposed on a Jew who stated publicly he did not believe in the divinity of Jesus. Near the other end stands an elaborate group honoring leaders of a society for the redemption of Christian prisoners--at the bottom is a dungeon with Christian prisoners, above them stands a swaggering Turkish jailer, still higher the redeeming benefactor, striking shackles from a prisoner.

    5 August 1985            

    From the notes--addresses in the Sinkulova hostel:
Joe Allen -- 34             David Robertson -- 83                         Chris Harvey -- (50?)
Masahiru Kono -- 51             Ernie Deutsch -- 54             Tony Lui -- 85
Igor Alekseyev -- 84             Takesi Iijima -- 46             Stan Cowley -- 51            
Mel Gellman -- 20

    When I registered in the morning I also bought meal tickets for the Mensa, the student cafeteria--lunch cost 20 Kčs, breakfast 15, tickets for any meal only good that day and not interchangable. Both meals were terrible. For lunch, parsleyed potatos, a breaded hunk of tough meat with bone chips in it and a glass of sweet tea. Also a crumbly "bublanina" layercake with embedded cherries, including their pits. Breakfast was worse--two stale white rolls (the dark bread was a bit better, though neither was crusty), butter of the "tourista" brand (good), a nondescript poorly-tasting marmalade or "džem" (jam), and thin sliced ham, which I let be. Sweet tea again, no coffee--but a coffee shop in the conference building served it, and it gained popularity as the days went by. I usually ordered a muddy "kafíčko" there, 2.50 Kčs, and two small round rolls with honey.

    Later in the conference I wised up and ordered two coffees at once, but even that did not satisfy my caffeine habit, and throughout the two weeks I felt constantly drowsy. On the other hand, except for one night (when I may have been sick) I slept well, in spite of the heat.

    I registered and attended two talks on the magnetospheric tail, but was overall too disturbed at discovering that my own talk was not on the schedule. It later turned out that the entire schedule was garbled and chairmen by and large ignored it. Olson, in whose session I was to speak, stuck to his earlier list, even though the published schedule put one of the two Czech speakers in the lead. Both talks turned out to be of near-crackpot quality.

    I took the subway to Staroměstské and walked to Maiselova 18, the address of the Jewish Community Council: that was the old Jewish Town Hall, the one with a Hebrew clock that runs backwards. A faded sign in Hebrew on the door listed the times of religious services--Shacharit at 9:00, Mincha at 20:00 and Maariv at 20:00--but no one answered the bell, and the lady in the museum entrance around the corner said the offices closed at 2 p.m. However, when I walked back, the same door opened, two elderly men came out, and I asked them again.

    They said that the rabbi had gone home, but they would show me where he lived, it was not far away. So we walked together and I told them who I was, that I was born in Děčín and so on. And one said to me, the rabbi has a visitor coming tomorrow from Děčín, Mr. Heller, the president of the Jewish community there, he will stay a few days. So I really got excited--maybe there was a Jewish community in Děčín?. Later in the evening, when the Jůzas asked me about the weekend, I said I was not sure about Sunday, for I thought, maybe I should go earlier, maybe the synagogue in Podmokly still existed... but in the end we agreed on Sunday at 8.

    The men took me to Veleslavínov 10, a short block on the other side of the metro station, and there on the door of a second-floor apartment, with no mezuzah on the doorpost, was the rabbi's name. But no one answered the bell, and I left. Following the afternoon sessions I came back, and this time I could hear children's voices inside, but no one would open the door. So I turned back, walked over the Charles Bridge and looked up Zdeněk and Zdenka Jůza.

    *** ***

    I was given their name and address by my parents, who had befriended their daughter Zdenka and her husband Jiří in New York. Zdenka was a dentist and Jiří an architect, and four years earlier, before getting officially married, they decided to defect to America. They went on separate vacations to Vienna, were married, and then stayed there for a few months while waiting for permission to enter the US, with a sponsor somewhere on the west coast--I believe in San Francisco.

    They landed in New York and while waiting there, Zdenka went to the welfare office to collect support. According to the story (told by her mother, I believe), as she was waiting there in line one of my mother's friends, a rather energetic lady named Hilda Bernstein, came by and spotted her. Zdenka somehow looked out of place and Hilda asked her who she was. Zdenka told her story and Hilda said: "Do you want to work?" She said, certainly, and then Hilda took her to a clinic run by a dentist she knew. The dentist asked Zdenka to work on one of his patients, while he stood by and watched; when she had finished, he asked her if she was ready to start working for him the following Monday.

    The upshot was that they never went west but stayed in New York. That was when my parents got to know them (through Hilda) and they took helped them get settled. Later Zdenka and Jiří asked my father to guarantee a bank loan they were going to take, to help them get started: my father, instead, lent them $1500 with no interest, which they later repaid. Jiří got a job, then changed it for a better one, and now he was with the architectural firm of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum, doing quite well.

    To become an independent dentist in New York, Zdenka needed to be certified by the state boards and had to attend school for a while. State boards in New York try to limit the number of dentists and only pass a fixed number of applicants. On her first try she failed, the next try took place during my stay in Prague and only in November did word come that she had passed. The test requires dental work to be presented as proof of professional competency, and one item was a set of dentures. Zdenka had a candidate for that, but also needed a back-up candidate in case the first one was unable to attend, and she chose my mother. This is how my mother came to get a new set of rather pretty dentures, paying only the cost of materials, some $300, for work which (according to my parents) was worth many times more. As it turned out, the first patient was available, so my mother did not even have to be present

    In any case, I was at my parents' home the preceding Thursday and met there Jiří and Zdenka, who told me about their parents. Zdenka's lived in an old house near the west end of the Charles bridge, and they also had a cottage in the country and a small car, an East-German "Trabant." Jiří's father, Rudolf Hauner, was a retired architect living a short distance from the Technical University where the IAGA meeting was held. Zdenka's parents lived with her brother Michal, a potter, with Michal's wife Eva, an author, and with Eva's old mother.

    Zdenka's decision to leave Czechoslovakia was motivated, I was told, by the way the state had treated her brother. Michal had been a student of architecture, and when one of his professors died, a dissident, he defied authorities and attended his funeral. As a result, he was dismissed from school one year short of graduation, and the best employment he could find was manual work in a pottery in Smíchov, at the southern end of Prague. He remained however an artist, and crafted artistic pottery as a sideline. Zdenka, the mother, was twice allowed to visit her daughter in New York, but always alone, Zdeněk had to stay behind. When Jiří and Zdenka receive American citizenship, they may apply for an official pardon, and if that is granted they could even visit Prague, but only after a fine is paid, in dollars of course. Leaving without permit was a punishable offense, they were probably tried in absentia and their sentences could only be overruled by a pardon from the Czech president, which carried an appreciable price. Czechs who became citizens of another country were also liable to be charged the cost of their education, but not if they became citizens of the United States, because of a 1929 reciprocity treaty signed by Masaryk, in which such claims were renounced.

    Also present that evening in New York was Paul Ort and his young wife Vikki--he is an orthopedic doctor and she a research biochemist. His first wife had left him--it was a complicated story, she was the one who broke up the marriage but afterwards she became extremely sick, and in spite of what had happened, Paul saw to it that she was cared for. Now she was gone. Paul was the doctor who operated my mother's bunion, an operation followed by infection and complications, though that might have nothing to do with Paul's surgery.

    Paul also came from Czechoslovakia, he did well in his profession and as a hobby he collected clocks. He looked that night at the clock on my parents' buffet, the one they had picked up for $5 in Portugal, and said it was probably made in America. Such clocks were built in America in the 1860s, made to look like a church steeple and sold throughout the world; he thought it could probably be made to run again. His mother, Maria Ortová, was a teacher of dance history in a ballet school in Prague, and she came to see me at the hostel, twice--once before I arrived, leaving a message to say that she was leaving town on vacation, but would be back on the 8th, and then, before I could call, she visited again and brought me a glass candy-basket, heavy and fragile but very pretty. She said it was something for my wife or for my mother, to remember Prague by. An elderly, short and heavy woman, speaking German, hard to imagine her among ballerinas.

    I already forgot how the Jůzas and I got in touch--whether I phoned from the meeting, or just walked to their home, across the Charles Bridge. Their apartment is five long flights up, on the top floor of an old building with an alley running right through it. The house has two staircases, one on each side, and in-between was a small yard in which stood a 2-wheeled wooden pushcart. It was a prop from the film "Yentel," some of which was filmed here on location two or three years earlier. The Jůzas remembered the visit by Barbara Streisand, and they showed me the door which appeared in the movie, in the second passageway, with "Privat Wohnung" written in Yiddish above it, and vine-leaf decorations on the wall across from it. The alleyway continued and emerged just below a stairway leading to the Charles Bridge, and that's where the Trabant was usually parked.

    The house was historic in its own right. A plaque on the wall stated that the French premier Chateaubriand stayed here in 1833, and my guidebook listed it as no. 197 among some 400 Prague sights, noting that Peter the Great stayed there in 1698 and General Suvorov in 1799.

    Though an old house, it was rated "class 4 residence" by the government: class 1 had neither plumbing nor water, class 2 had only plumbing, class 3 had plumbing and water but no heat. The Jůzas originally had a 3-room apartment in Žižkov, and Michal lived in a small apartment elsewhere, but when Zdenka came back from her second visit to the States, she found that her family had moved to this new place. How do Czechs change residences when everything was owned by the state? It turned out that a market existed, and people who wanted to change residence posted notices in some place which has come to serve as a general clearing-house. They could not buy, only swap, though a payment was generally made "under the table" to whoever was vacating the premises: this particular apartment, for instance, was rated at 40,000 crowns. It was however an even swap, thanks to a complex deal arranged by Michal and involving 5 families: he got 10,000 for his old one-room apartment, his parents received 30,000, so they received as much as they paid. They still needed official approval, which required a sufficient number of people to share the apartment: this was one reason why Eva's mother also lived there, to make up the quota of five people for the five small rooms. The Jůzas lived in one room (with a kitchen corner), and Michal and Eva had three--one to work in, one to sleep in and a middle one to dine and cook, none of them large.

    The hallway was lined with boxes holding Michal's many books, still packed from the move, waiting for shelves to be acquired. A small toilet stood at the end of the hall and through its window one faced a tiled roof whose gutter was filled with debris, weeds growing along its entire length. Many houses in Prague (even Alt-Neu) had such weedy gutters: tiled roofs are not easily accessible.

    The Jůzas received me with great joy. Some 62 or 63 years old, they had just come back from their country cottage in Vonoklasy, where Zdeněk and 3 neighbors together were digging a well, more accurately deepening the one which they shared. Tuesdays and Wednesdays seemed to be Zdeněk's days to help with the digging, done by teams of two, one hammering a chisel at the rocky bottom, the other handling a bucket up on top.

    Zdeněk had a small grizzled beard, he used to be an economist and now, in retirement, he worked from fall to spring, programming a computer for a government office in Smíchov. Zdenka was rather lively, though her face was noticeably wrinkled. She too was retired, from a programming job: men retire at 60, women at 53-57, depending on the number of their children. The two met during the war and were married soon after it ended.

    Their room is small and tidy--a kitchenette by the door, then a sofa-bed and by the window, the choice part of the room, a round table with chairs. From the window one can see the tower of Charles Bridge about 200' away, on the sill stand two potted geranium plants and under it is a small wall-closet for food, a natural cooling-chest. Nearby stands the Jůzas' bookcase with the collected works of Karel Čapek and many other books. They include Eva's recently published illustrated guidebook to Northwestern Bohemia, and American guidebooks to New York, Buffalo and Milwaukee, brought from there by Zdenka even though her English, apparently, did not go far enough to let her read them.

    I am welcomed with cookies and juice and then, surprise, the phone rings, it is Zdenka's weekly call from New York: I use the occasion to pass word to my parents. There isn't much time: this is the evening the conference opens officially in the municipal music hall, the program starts with speeches by dignitaries which I deliberately missed, but after that comes Smetana's "Má Vlast" played by the Western Bohemian Orchestra. I ask the Jůzas if they would like to attend the concert: I have only one invitation card, but feel sure they could get in. They change in a hurry and we all leave.

    Before this I asked Zdeněk to translate a few sentences into Czech, for me to say before I start my talk the following afternoon:

    "I am happy to be in Prague. I bring to your old city greetings from a young nation, and hope that this congress will bring better contacts between scientists in the USA and in Czechoslovakia, because we all are trying to understand the same things in nature."

    Jsem štasten že jsem v Praze. Přináším vašemu starému městu pozdravy mladého národa, a doufám, že tento kongres přinese lepší kontakty mezi vědci v USA ("ooh-ess-aah") a v Československu, poněvadž my všichni se pokoušíme rozumět stejným věcem v přírodě.

    ["In the 60s Koruna was still a good place to snack. It got bad during the Husák period. Now it has disappeared. Named after a Koruna, a crown, on the roof of the building. Still there."]

    [Wiener: "His father Arnošt was my lifelong friend (I met him when I was 15). I see his sister Eva once in a while (she lives in Geneva) and we correspond e-mail wise."]

1. Buy detergent ("prací protředky") in drugstore (drogerie), on far side of Yugoslav Partisan ave.
2. Get key to the washing machine ("prádelna") room, from the lady at the front desk. She may ask for passport as safekeeping, also log you in her book.
3. Go with your laundry and detergent to the laundry room, at the end of the basement closest to the Metro.
4. Move "Mini" machine close to bathtub and hook green outlet hose over the edge. Initially, rubber ball should close its outlet.
5. Fill machine with hot water from the valve further away from the corner (use red hose). Cover agitator wheel by 10 cm (4").
6. Add clothes and detergent. Don't use excess detergent or suds are hard to get rid of.
7. Plug machine in and use right-hand knob on it to turn it on or off (leave others alone, they control an internal heater). There is a built in timer.
8. When wash is finished, open ball valve. Let machine run and allow all water to drain to the tub (it spills to the floor, but near the drain). Stop the machine when it is empty. You can use cold water hose for this-clothes may be hot to handle otherwise.
9. Use wooden stick to take out clothes. You may cold-rinse them in the bathtub. Hand-wring out the water.
10. There is a spin dryer (actually, two, a big one actuated by a wall switch, pull in and out, and a ball-shaped knob, and a small cylindrical one. These instructions apply to the 2nd). Load your clothes into it, balance them evenly around the center.
11. Put top on, inserting hinge bar in appropriate slot. Plug in. Now, if you manually push down the lid, near the hinge, the machine is turned on. Excess water comes out of the spout onto the floor: the more you have wrung out, the less you get at this stage.
12. To stop, remove lid. Machine takes 1-2 minutes to stop spinning.
13. Before leaving, unplug everything, shut light. Useful comments may be added below.

"Chci jíst" (ch-tsi yeast, I want to eat).
    He said "Dvanáct korun. Co pijte?" (twelve crowns. What will you drink?).
"Voda" (water).
    So he added a bottle of mineral waters. Mel was nowhere to be seen. For tourists the price of the meal was 25 crowns.

From my notes: "There is something funny here. I think the rabbi suspects that I may be an associate of dissidents. Are they really opponents of the regime, or of the rabbi inside the organization? Perhaps I should now stop proposing things to the rabbi. He has not asked me anything--not about my background, not about Jews in the US, nothing."

    She further said that she and her husband (they traveled together, he is a chemist) were so impressed by what they saw that they put together a day-by-day account of their trip. I told her that I had done the same after my visit to Israel, and we agreed to exchange notes, though we would keep it in confidence, since we had named actual people whom we met.

    Wiener: "But embassies were not allowed to hire whomever they wanted. All those working for them had to be OK-ed by the Czechs."

(From Charles Wiener, also     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Bohemian_Legends)
The original legend, retold in an 1894 book, mentions only two brothers--Czech and Lech, forefather of Poles, but not a Russian one.)

[Wiener: "Gustav Vodrážka was converted by Dani Mayer, went to Israel, came back after a few years and is now member of the Altneu minyan."]

[Wiener: There was a time when photocopiers were locked and the number of copies strictly controlled, to prevent the copying of subversive materials.]

Hi David

    Saw your note on washing machine--thought if you could run a washing machine, you can help me out too.
        My name is Supriya (Sup) Chakrabarti. I am from Berkeley. My wife and me just drove in from Nüremberg (poor directions etc. etc.)
        I have no idea where the meeting is and how I could get there. Incidentally, I need to change some US dollars for food etc. too.
Help please.
Sup
Rm. 65

I went over to room 65, bringing a Čedok map of Prague. Sup was a young energetic fellow and his wife was already in bed. I showed him on the map where the meeting was, one block away, and told him he could change money there--then on second thought we went down to the street. We walked until we saw the building of the meeting, then turned around and went to the Leninova subway station. I showed him how one paid, how one got change and bought bus tickets from the machine--and I think I also recommended not to try to drive in Prague, because of cobblestones and limited parking.

    Wednesday, August 14

    This day's program focused on magnetic micropulsations, not my area, and I took time off to see Prague. After listening to Southwood's talk on Dungey's work on MHD waves and on its follow-ups, I went to Zdenka, who gave me a tour of the "Lesser Town" or Malá Strana ("small side"). She may be 10 years older than me, and taking two pills daily for high blood pressure (she knows about salt, but uses it anyway), but she can easily outwalk me: when that day ended, my feet had blisters on them. Zdeněk was in Vonoklasy, digging his well.

    First we went to the Kampa island, right behind her house, an elongated island which adjoins a weir in the river. Because of the weir, the channel between the Kampa and the mainland, the "Čertovka" or devil's creek, runs quite swiftly. Long ago mills were driven by the creek, and two of their wheels remain, neither working although one is under repair. Because of the fast stream, this is also where Czech kayak paddlers train and hold competitions, and near the lower end of the channel bright red slalom markers were suspended above the water. It seemed a strange place for kayaks, all hemmed in by ancient buildings.

    Much of the Kampa is parkland. In a few places one can go down to the river's edge, and at one of them a woman was feeding the river's swans which noisily congregated around her. Charles Bridge straddles the island, we entered near it and left by a small bridge connecting the Kampa to what used to be the property of the Knights of Malta.

    Next to that was a passage full of graffiti, the only graffiti I saw in Prague. They included stencils "John Lennon Lives" and a few inscriptions in English ("Fuck the War"--what war?) but most were in Czech. I asked Zdenka if they were political. She said no. I then asked her to translate a few, but it was not easy. They seemed mainly to express frustrations of young people, that life was not kind, love was not easy. Politics, except within the party, seems to have been driven far underground.

    We passed a house with a marker testifying that Beethoven slept here, then entered a small garden built on the hillside. Behind the facade of an ordinary house was an elaborate gateway, topped by a sculpture of Atlas hefting the globe, and behind it was a garden with stairs that led to a broad view of the roofs of Prague (Zdenka excused herself and stayed below). Almost every house had a lightning rod and a wire running along the roof ridge, whereas in America, Ben Franklin's invention was almost forgotten.

    A few more steps brought us to the massive church of St. Nicholas ("Svatý Mikuláš"), ornately decorated inside. Many tourists sat in the pews, because while it was hot outside, the interior stayed cool because of the thick walls. We continued to the "lane of the five churches" and from there to the abbey of St. Thomas, whose brewery and beerhall still flourished. Then we passed the Wallenstein palace (Valdštejnský palác), though we did not enter to see its famous garden. The best came last--the high tower next to the Charles Bridge. I went up alone while Zdenka returned home.

    The entrance to the tower is by a small door--the wall is 2 meters thick--and one pays a fee of 2 crowns to a girl behind a counter. I interrupted her reading when I came, and in return for the money she lent me a typed sheet of explanations in English, encased in plastic. It was a long climb, up wooden stairs between wooden landings, but in the end I emerged on the square walkway extending around the tower. The view was terrific, the bridge was right below me and from the side I was able (just as Zdenka had said) to peek past the roof of the nearest building into the Jůzas' window, distinguished by two potted geraniums. Zdenka was there, waving.

    Back in the apartment--surprise, Zdeněk had come back. He had struck water! After months of work, the well suddenly started filling up. Now the next step would be to have the water tested and officially approved for use.

    The well used to be 4 meters deep and supplied four families before it ran dry. The families then hired a dowser, who checked here and there, then pointed to a spot and said water could be found there, 30 meters down. After that he was shown the well and he said, why should you dig 30 meters at the other place, you are better off if you deepen this well, another 3 meters down you will probably find plenty of water. And so it was. Lunch (the main meal of the day) was dumplings, caraway roast and boiled cabbage, good. We then went back to the Petřín cable-car.

    All over Prague, and in other places as well, on train stations, in towns and on factories, political posters and slogans were displayed in prominent places. I suspect this was one of the stock activities of party cells and members throughout the country. One such poster board, protected from the weather by a glazed cover, was on the street leading to the cable-car station, and it showed blue and white missiles rising from the earth, trailing behind them red ribbons, the whole deliberately resembling the stars and stripes of the US flag. Rising against the missiles was a large hand, motioning "STOP", and the legend next to it (the Jůzas translated) was "Keep weapons out of space."

    In view of the undeclared competition between space research and the "Star Wars" military project, it seemed like cute thing to hang on my office wall, and asked the Jůzas where one could get a copy. They did not know, but said "there exist places which sell this."

    Next day I was walking across the old town square, when I noted across from the elaborate old clock ("orloj") an entrance bearing the initials KS, the Czech Communist party. Feeling secure with a US passport in my pocket, I went in to find out whether they had that poster. By the entrance was a counter and a man stood behind it: he was talking to a woman, I think she was getting some propaganda material on Nicaragua. Then came my turn, and I tried to communicate in German, raising my right hand to the "STOP" gesture. But the man could not understand, he had nothing like that, he was sorry, and I went out again. On Saturday evening the Jůzas and I walked across the square again, on the way to Alt Neu. As we passed the place, Zdeněk pointed at the entrance and said, see that? It is the most important place in Czechoslovakia, the headquarters of the Communist party.

    I said, I know, I was there. And he said, you what? So I told him the story. You must be crazy, he said, no one goes there.

    The astronomical observatory on Petřín was open this time and a 40 cm telescope was trained at the sun, though it only used its finder scope: since the time was close to sunspot minimum, there wasn't much to see. A young man was on hand to help with the exhibits, which included poster displays on Halley's comet and an ornate astronomical instrument of unknown use, apparently constructed for the emperor Rudolf. He was a student of geophysics and told us that a visit to the observatory was included in the curriculum of all 4th grade students in Prague.

    We continued along the "Hunger Wall" to the Strahov monastery and to the shrine of Loreto (Loretto in Italy, Loreto in Prague) which was closed off by barricades, since the opera "Werther" was being filmed there. However, the actors were still rehearsing, and since people were walking past the barricades, we did likewise. It was still very hot and while the actors sweltered in full 19th century garb (those not immediately needed huddled in the shade of a tree), the cameraman was stripped to his waist for comfort. On the road a horse carriage stood waiting its turn, and market stalls were set up next to the building, obviously part of the movie background. Later the filming started near the entrance to the shrine: taped music played from loudspeakers and the actors mouthed the words, later the sound track would be merged with the film.

    The shrine of Loreto is a historical oddity, preserved by the Czech government as a historic relic. After the 1620 defeat of Czech reformation much of the Czech nobility was exiled and replaced by Catholic rulers, speaking German, and to promote the Catholic faith, these rulers decided to import the cult of Loreto which then flourished in Italy. In 1291, supposedly, the boyhood home of Jesus, still intact but threatened by the Turks, was miraculously transported from Nazareth to some place in Dalmatia, and three years later, by the same miraculous means, from there to a site near Ancona, Italy. The pope acknowledged the miracle, the house was placed in a shrine nearby, "the santa casa of Loretto," and the cult still exists--in 1920 Our Lady of Loretto was named patron saint of aviators, maybe on account of that miraculous flying house.

    In Prague a replica of the santa casa was built, an ornately decorated box-like structure in the courtyard of the church of Loreto, reminding one of the Ka'aba of Mecca. In the century that followed, patrons of the Bohemian nobility endowed the shrine with rich gifts and gold. The gold ultimately was confiscated to finance the emperor's wars, but some richly crafted religious articles remained and were now displayed in a vault-like room, guarded all the time. Especially notable were communion chalices and monstrances, fancy contraptions for holding the communion wafers, decorated with precious metal and stones--one of them with corals, another studded with diamonds totaling hundreds of carats, the gift of a rich pious lady.

    [In November the Czech tennis master, Ivan Lendl, won the European tennis championship and was awarded a golden racket weighing 13.2 pounds, studded with 1420 diamonds. No place seems more fitting for displaying this monstrous trophy than next to the diamond monstrance of the Loreto.]

    Later, after we had also visited the display of early Czech art at the national gallery, consisting almost entirely of Christs and Madonnas, and the tombs of the Czech kings beneath St. Vitus cathedral, I remarked, how odd it was that a socialist state gave so much attention to kings and to religious gifts of the nobility. "But they are Czech!" said Zdenka.

    From Loreta we went to Hradčany square, where we had been on Monday night, only this time we entered the gate and continued into the huge gothic cathedral of St. Vitus, refreshingly cool, with many footsore tourists sitting in the pews. An impressive rose window graced the entrance, and in the galleries high above, busts of past kings of Bohemia were displayed, each in his own balcony. By the side was a chapel with Saint Wenceslas tomb, its walls decorated by elaborate old paintings, and not far from it was a door leading to the palace, reserved for the entrance of the king. Down below in the crypt other kings lay buried--we briefly visited it and also the national gallery nearby, where we saw masterpieces originally hung in Karlštejn, painted by Master Theodoric for Charles the 4th.

    From there we went to the "Golden Lane" where supposedly alchemists lived and worked, a lane of brightly painted small houses which now hold souvenir shops, and then we left the Hradčany by its lower gate and returned to Malá Strana by the "old castle steps" (Staré zámecké schody). Zdeněk felt happy and started singing a song about those old stone steps--by one Karel Hašler, had I heard of him, or of his songs? He wrote before the war and died in Terezín, in 1944.   (Not true: he froze to death after being tied up, by the Nazis in the wintertime outdoors of an Austrian concentration camp.) I had not heard of Hašler, but I knew another song in Czech, by an unknown author, and I asked Zdeněk if he knew it:

Ta naše písnička česká
Ta je tak hezká, tak hezká
Jako když na louce kytička
Vyroste ta naše písnička.

This is the little Czech ditty
It is so pretty, so pretty
As in the meadow the flower grows
So our little song here arose
When this song will end
Then we will no longer be
Nothing will remain, no one will remember
Then we will no longer be

Sing, little people, our little song
In Slovakia, Moravia, land of Czechs.

    I learned that song 1938 and 1939, when I was 6 or 7, my parents were refugees and Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Nazis. In 1968, when the Russian army ended the brief "Prague Spring", I was impelled to do--something. I felt impotent, Americans all around stood aloof (it happened in the Soviet sphere, Frank Jones argued) and this song seemed somehow appropriate. Someone gave me the address of the singer Theodore Bikel, who in those days sang in many language, voicing the causes of freedom, and I sent him a letter with the song, begging him to sing it and thus carry to the public the message of what was happening to the Czechs. He never answered.

    Zdeněk knew the song well and sang it. It too was written by Hašler--as early as 1932, as if he knew of things to come. It is still one of few songs which can bring tears to my eyes.

    Thursday, August 15

    David Klumpar (now with Lockheed) has found his family. His late grandfather came from a village near Chrudim where the family had a butcher shop, and David brought with him a copy of his grandfather's birth certificate. During the weekend he rented a car and drove to the area, where he was directed to a village near Castle Rychburk. There he stopped a local man and showed him the certificate: the man became excited, took him by the hand and led him to a door marked "Klumpar", in the cottage where the Klumpar family still lived. He was received with great joy and was asked to stay for the night. Communicating in broken English and German, the family showed him a family tree extending back to 1730, and he added to it his own branch, and noted down parts he was not aware of. The high point came when the family pulled out a box of old papers and photographs: among the pictures he found one of himself, because his late grandfather used to correspond with the family and had sent them David's picture.

    The conference has been winding down. In the coffeeshop this morning I met Wilfried Schröder, he asked me why I did not answer his mail. He worked on stratospheric ozone and on history of geophysics, and promised to send me his writings about the aurora and about Emil Wiechert, the founder of the Göttingen school of geophysics (he also asked me for reprints). I said I have seen some of his writings, but since I could not come out flatly and say that they were tedious, I suggested that he should put less stress on chronologies and more on the development of significant ideas. He said that he found it harder to express ideas in English than in German.

    Later, around 11, I went into town to see the president of the Jewish Community Council, Dr. Dezider Galský. I had written to Dr. Galský from Greenbelt and learned from the reply that he would be away (in Switzerland, in fact) until the 14th.

    Dr. Galský's office was one floor upstairs from the rabbi's and was a much more dignified-looking place. He had a secretary, Mrs. Orlíková, and I waited in her room while Dr. Galský discussed some matters with a slightly younger man, later introduced as Arty (Arthur?) Radvanský, former chemical engineer. Dr. Galský's degree was in history, specifically European history of the 18th-19th centuries, and he used to work for the Czech foreign office before becoming president of the Jewish Community Council, five years ago. He was slim, had steel-gray smooth hair and spoke excellent English.

    He said that Mark Talisman, of the Washington Jewish community, was a friend of his, and that the Jewish community had many visitors from abroad, hundreds of them, right now they were expecting three groups, I believe from Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. What they needed was not money, not even books but more Americans visiting Prague. The visitors would be inspired, they would see services at Alt-Neu and other evidence of Jewish life, and something would be infused into the Jewish Community.

    The Czech government, he said, was by its own declaration atheistic, and it treated the Jewish community no differently than it treated any other faith. But Jews were allowed to receive books and their kitchens were supported, even non-Jews came there to eat. And he added, I must admit that people were not living badly, whereas in America there were 30 million poor. In the villages people actually lived better than in Prague [Wiener: due to the fact they grew vegetables and kept poultry and rabbits.], while there were many poor people in the countryside of the US.  [Wiener: With me Galský skipped this politically correct chatter.]

    I said, people here seemed to live OK. In the US, some people lived better, some less so, and here it was also thus. But something seemed lacking. Take for example the bread. My mother said to me, before I left, "ah, you are going to Prague, they will overfeed you." But I have not been able to find one bake shop. Prague was always famous for its bread and baked goods, and you cannot say it is a question of money, it takes just as much flour to make crusty fluffy bread as it takes to make the hard dense type. Yet no one seems to bake good bread or pastry any more.

    I then said, but all this is politics, and I don't care about politics now. I am worried about the Jewish community, because most of the members I see are old. In America, we have different styles, Jews do not restrict themselves to matters of faith and ritual, but stress culture, singing together, history and so on. He said to me (this is an attempt to reconstruct a conversation far longer and more detailed than what I recall): "I want to ask you a question. What do you think will happen to the Jews in the US?"

    I said, they too have problems. There was a lot of assimilation. Some Jews were orthodox--but they retreated from modern life to a style which belongs several centuries back. Some intermarried--and when the couple became interested in its roots and history, chances were that it was the non-Jewish partner that converted. However, few Jews were deeply interested in either roots or history.

    He then said it was much the same in Prague, they too had two different styles. The pre-war Judaism of Bohemia was liberal with many cultural overtones, and not particularly orthodox. I said I knew that, my father had told me about the organ in his synagogue in Lovosice. Galský said, there was also an organ in the Jeruzalémská street synagogue, but it was only played on High Holidays.

    The war, he said, destroyed that community and brought in Jews from Slovakia and Carpatho-Russia, ["Galský was one of them, as he came originally from Mihalovce in Eastern Slovakia"],    also people like Cantor Feuerlicht, who had studied with the Rebbe of Satmar and who had a chassidic slant. Many liberals disagreed with that style, but it would be crazy to subdivide a small community still more. To complicate matters, the few young people of the congregation are relatively orthodox, and the few converts among them are quite extreme in that.

    Are they active? The cantor of the Jeruzalémská (Dr. Blum?) had a relatively young assistant. When he is ill, the assistant takes over and performs quite well. They did get help from the Joint Distribution Committee and from various organizations--for instance, Rabbi Arthur Schneier of New York has printed 2000 Czech-Hebrew Chumashim and the same number of prayerbooks. They got help to equip their kitchen, which was quite modern. And they published a monthly newsletter, and a quarterly in German and English, and also a yearbook. Could I have copies? He proceeded to find and give me some, along with a stack on greeting cards for the new year, with the picture of the Jewish town hall.

    Jews in the US can send almost anything to the Czech Jews, he said, only material directed explicitly against the government is prohibited. He said I was welcome to write to him and he would answer.

    I then said, I wish that Alt-Neu were a living synagogue, not a museum. Yes, he said, he knew. He once attended a Bat-Mizvah at Temple Sinai in Washington, and was impressed by a girl reading, she actually used a melody quite similar to the one he knew in Prague. And afterwards there was a party, and the music was rock: it was a different style. He then returned to the division between orthodoxy and liberalism.

    He was not sure where the rabbi stood. Rabbi Mayer had studied in Budapest, under a certain Rabbi Schreiber who had recently passed away, he belonged to a religious movement "Neolog", standing between orthodoxy and liberalism, "like your conservatives." I said that I did not get any clear impression of the rabbi, "whatever I say, he says 'yes', and he never asks me anything." Galský said it might be because he was still young.

    I had one additional question. I had seen the Jewish museum and was greatly impressed. It was extremely well put together, its scholarly level went far beyond that of the rabbi. Who did it?

    Dr. Galský said: "Well, the rabbi must know quite a lot." He had studied 6 1/2 years, and that was more than he, Dr. Galský, had needed for his doctorate. But there was the National Jewish Museum, based just around the corner at 3 Jachymova Street, with more than 30 staff members, most of them non-Jews, they were the ones who had assembled the "Precious Legacy" exhibit shown at the Smithsonian in Washington. If I wished, I could go there, he said, it was the summer season and many people were on vacation. I should ask for one of the people in charge, Dr. Sadek or Dr. Nosek--I probably would have more to talk about with Dr. Nosek, the younger of the two.

    At lunch in the Jewish dining hall I was invited by Dr. Galský and Arty Radvanský to their table. Radvanský said that he had spent his high school years in Buchenwald, "a very tough high school." He spoke no English but knew Yiddish, allowing us to communicate in German.
    I told him the story about my cousin Liesel, who escaped the Nazis and reached the Russians, but since (as a Czech Jew) she spoke no Yiddish, they thought she and her friends were German, until they recited "Shma Yisrael." He said he knew a man who similarly escaped the Nazis, changed clothes and hid until the Russians came. He then came out and told the Russian soldiers that he was Jewish, and one of them immediately asked him: "What is your Jewish name?

-- "Chayim".
-- "Yobtwayoumat, ya tozhe Chayim!" (*** your mother, I'm Chayim too!)

    Then I was off to 3 Jachymova street, a bland house with a narrow passage through it, leading to an inner yard. The house is entered from the passage, and is guarded by a barred door with an electrically operated latch: a woman in a reception booth asks for one's business before the door is unlocked (there was a further barred door on the stairway inside, but it was open). Close to her door, on the inside, was an ornate brass bell activated by a pull string, probably a relic from some extinct synagogue.

    I said: "Pan Nosek" (Mr. Nosek). She corrected me, "Dr. Nosek", and dialed a number on her telephone. No answer. She then called up the stairs, talked to someone, and finally opened the door and asked me to sit in the lobby and wait. Two minutes later Dr. Nosek came down.

    He was fairly young, dark hair with a few silver threads, a thin man with a lively style. I felt warm towards him from the first minute. He took me upstairs to his office, an old room in what once must have been a residential building. There were book cases, a heavy table, a thick concordance of the bible and a chest of drawers with two of its drawers down on the floor, their contents carefully covered by newspaper sheets extending over their entire area and tucked in at the edges. On the wall were Jewish pictures, one showing a rabbi of around 1800, sitting with a tallith over his head, and Dr. Nosek told me his name, describing him as "not a chassid or a misnaged (opponent of Chasidism, liberal Jew) but a scholar, a liberal."

    But the most remarkable object, one which seemed to say that I had come to the right place, was a statue carved of wood, about 50 cm (20") tall, of a man with a big bushy hairstand and large feet in snub-nosed boots, holding a big drawing portfolio under his arm. I knew of this man. When I asked, Dr. Nosek said this was "quite a famous man, a painter, his name was Guttman and he said he was always wandering." I then told him that my mother had a large water-color of him in her living room, and she had told me his story.

    Dr. Nosek is indeed a scholar, very much concerned with Judaism. He loves Jewish history and has put together much of the Jewish Museum and of the "Precious Legacy," in fact he had just returned 3-4 days earlier from Hartford, Connecticut, the last stop of the exhibition. He leads one team of scholars, Dr. Sadek another one (or so I understood), and the museum employed ten scholars among a total staff of 38.

    He was a delightful man and we talked at great length. I told him of my Czech roots, in Podmokly, Lovosice and Hluboká, and he said that his father used to work for the railroad in Podmokly but was dismissed by the Nazis because of his partial Jewish ancestry. He confirmed what Galský had said about the decline of Czech liberal Judaism. "Until 1944 there was still hope, because most Czech Jews were still in Terezín. But then the Nazis stepped up their transports to the East and murdered practically all who were left."

    He has taught a few courses at the University, on old Jewish history, liturgy etc. However, courses in Judaica were sporadic, because the government allowed them to be given only when enough jobs existed for Judaica graduates (so characteristic of the thorough institutionalization of science, and so unlike America!). The museum published a journal "Judaica Bohemiae," and he gave me the current issue, no. 1 of vol. 21. After scanning it, he remarked that this was a special issue, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Terezín. He himself had seen Terezín and had tried somehow to get its meaning across to his two children. I asked Dr. Nosek: do you consider yourself a Jew?

    He thought it over. I have no religious faith, he said. But I am very much interested in Jewish culture, in Jewish history. They have a meaning for me. In that way, you might say I am Jewish.

    He was concerned with many things. Consider dampness: it was hard to find places where old relics may be kept safe from humidity. The space beneath the High Synagogue was too damp, so one exposed balcony of the Maisel synagogue was now used as storage space. It was dampness, too, which crumbled the memorial wall in the Pinkas synagogue, the wall on which the names of over 77,000 murdered Czech Jews were written. Air conditioners cannot remove the humidity because the rooms cannot be properly sealed, especially in synagogues which also serve as museums and are open to the visiting public. When the Pinkas will be rebuilt, one sealed room will be available there.

    Right now he was studying the life of a Moravian rabbi, Shmuel the son of--I have forgotten the rest, but "a remarkable man." The result was to appear in Judaica Bohemiae.

    When I left, he volunteered to show me the Pinkas synagogue, though it was closed to visitors since it was still being restored. On the way we passed an outline of the Prague golem, traced on the sidewalk in white paving stones among the usual grey ones. How clever, I said to him. Yes, he said. However, tourists who saw it sometimes thought that the winehall next to it, "U Golema" ("at the sign of the golem") was actually the Jewish community's kosher dining hall, "and some of the things there are very tref (non-kosher).

    The sheet-metal door to the yard of the Pinkas synagogue was padlocked, and no one seemed to be around. And so we parted.

    In the evening I attended my laundry chores, following my own instruction sheet. I then went to room 84 to see Alekseyev, whom I had promised to see before the meeting ended. Around 9 pm I brought to his door some cookies and a cold bottle of lime-pop "Lift" made by the Czech Coca-Cola company, but no one answered. An hour later I was returning from a second or third visit to Alekseyev's room when we met on the stairs, he was just returning from a party. We ended up in his room, talking, eating, drinking and generally being friendly. Alekseyev smoked--he showed me the warning message "smoking is bad for your health" on his box of Russian cigarettes (Czech cigarettes have one too) and said that few people paid attention.

    Alekseyev spoke at length about himself, his work and his teen-age son, though now I only remember fragments. He belonged to the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Moscow State University, one of four institutes there, where he worked with Shabansky, and another theory group there included Tverskoy and Antonova.

    His current interests were collisionless dissipation processes (which led to his talk on the resistive approximation) and magnetic reconnection. He has programmed a derivation of the tensor B.gradB for a variety of fields, to study particle drifts, especially on split particle shells in the dayside magnetosphere. His interests were mainly mathematical and he did his own programming. He asked me to convey his regards to Voigt who had sent him years ago some codes, though they had never met. We also talked in some detail about parabolic harmonics, but I no longer remember what was said.

    Yasha Feldstein came into the room to give Alekseyev things to carry back on the train, for he himself returned by airplane and had to stay within a weight limit. He asked me for a copy of my "Energetics" and also asked to convey his greetings to Don Fairfield.

    Friday, 16 August

    This was the day of the plenary meeting, which I chose to skip. Instead, I arranged to go with Zdeněk and Zdenka to see their cottage in Vonoklasy and the Karlštejn castle nearby.

    We met at the Staroměstská metro station at 8 am and rode streetcar #12 to Smíchov, the southern section of Prague west of the Vltava. Smíchov has Prague's second railroad station (the main one is near the National Museum on the east bank) and we arrived in plenty of time for the 9:05 train passing Karlštejn.

    Concerning Czech trains, a story was told at the conference about a group of scientists who planned to return through Vienna, boarding the Berlin-Vienna train in Prague. They arrived at the station well ahead of the time and took all their luggage to a platform where a sign hung "Berlin-Praha-Vienna". No train arrived. However, at about the right time a train pulled up to another platform and people got on and off, while the scientists became more and more concerned. After about 10 minutes, a girl working for the railroads dashed over to their platform. She grabbed the sign "Berlin-Praha-Vienna", unhooked it from its attachment, carried it over to the platform where the train was standing and hung it up there. And immediately, before they could do anything, the train pulled out.

    We had no problems with our train except that it was slow and took nearly an hour reach Karlštejn, 35 km away. It was an electric commuter train and the ride was pleasant, along the Vltava and then along its wide tributary Berounka, with many stops. From the window one could see vacation cottages next to the Berounka and children standing waist-high in the shallow river. A while later we caught a glimpse of Karlštejn, high and imposing among forests across the river, and at the next station we got off. Zdenka went to visit an acquaintance in the village, while Zdeněk and I walked the mile or so to Karlštejn.

    The road crosses the Berounka on a girder bridge, then turns sharply right and shortly afterwards climbs uphill into the village of Karlštejn. There it follows a steep gully, with a rectangular man-made channel beside the road; red-roofed houses are strung out along it, and each of those on the far side of the channel has its own little bridge. Then one enters the wooded approach to the castle and passes souvenir stands, where one can buy picture postcards, books and slides, Soviet champagne (77 crowns a bottle) and various souvenirs: for 1.60 crowns I bought a souvenir curved metal plate, the kind one attaches to a walking stick. An artist displayed his prints and on the way down I bought several of them.

    The castle and especially its huge central tower (Donjon, from which the word "Dungeon" is derived; in English, "keep") are imposing, both from afar and when one stands next to them, though the inside is only sparsely furnished. We paid 5 crowns each to join a tour and the guide who explained everything in Czech continually unlocked doors ahead of us and locked those we had passed. We climbed to the entrance hall, then went on to the yeomen's hall, the royal bedroom and several other rooms, to the paneled audience hall and the chapel, whose 19th century restoration was later carefully undone, because too much had been added. The portraits painted for the castle by Master Theodoric were on loan to the National Gallery, but we had already seen them in the Hradčany: the gold-covered chapel was not included in the tour, and neither did we get to the top of the tower. Overall, the place was more a modern museum than a castle, and Inženýr Ingeduld from the faculty of civil engineering of ČVUT (the technical university where IAGA assembled), who later gave us a lift from Vonoklasy to Radotín, said that he knew castles in Moravia whose original interior was still intact and which had far more to show. But Karlštejn remains a powerful national symbol.

    As we walked out we met a bride wearing a tulle hat and holding a bouquet, escorted by the groom and by a man who must have been her father, he wore a festive white ribbon decorated with myrtle. About five additional people made up the wedding party and Zdeněk said they would have a civil ceremony in Karlštejn, it was often done (maybe that was why the stalls sold champagne). Outside the gate two cars were parked which must have belonged to the wedding party, for in each window was a white ribbon, hanging V-shaped between the two top corners with a thin 5" wreath of myrtle threaded through its middle. Myrtle wreaths were also under the windshield wipers.

    On the way down we joined a line waiting to buy Italian ice cream (zmrzlina) dispensed from a truck, then met Zdenka at the station and caught the 12:15 to Černošice, a short distance back the way we came. In Černošice we still had time to go down to the Berounka and also to order beer at the local tavern, then at 13:15 (the bus was exactly on time) we caught the bus to Vonoklasy.

    Vonoklasy means smell (voní) of ears of grain (klasy), and the area is covered by fields of ripe barley, wheat and oats, overdue for harvest. The village sits on top of a low ridge following the north side of the Berounka and contains the retirement home of Czech president Antonín Zápotocký, Zdeněk said it was a relatively modest home, befitting a relatively modest man   ["But he was placed on the list of war criminals by the Dutch for being a Kapo in Sachsenhausen"]  Zdeněk's own cottage was beyond the village in the corner of the national forest preserve of Karlštejn, and was reached by a deeply rutted gravel road. From the bus station one followed the road downhill towards a forest, to the second cluster of cottages, hidden by the slope and only visible when one got quite close.

    Their wooden cottage was built over masonry foundations, it had one room divided by a partition into sleeping quarters with a bunk bed and a small kitchen (water must be carried in). A porch lined the front, facing downhill; the Jůzas kept there a portable TV and reception must have been terrific, for facing the porch on the opposite ridge was the TV tower of central Bohemia.

    The cottage was erected from a kit in 1967, in little more than a day, and the price of the kit was 7000 crowns. The whole outlay was 12,000 crowns, while nowadays such a cottage may be worth 100,000, especially if one counted the new well, down in the gully near a small stream. Zdeněk removed the cover of that well to let me peek down: the old casing consisted of three concrete culvert pipes stacked to a depth of 4 meters, and below them the hand-carved section continued into the chalky rock. An iron pipe ran down the middle of the well, and has already been extended to the new section. A few swings of the pump handle brought up water, still yellowish from the digging: two months later Zdeněk wrote that official tests have found it fit for drinking. One neigbor had installed a pump to draw drinking water from the well, and Zdeněk had set a similar pump to draw irrigation water from the creek.

    Beneath the highest corner of the cottage was a tiny root cellar where Zdenka kept potatoes and also stored eggs in a "cold chamber" with doors, set in the wall. Growing in her garden were tomatoes, kohlrabi [kedlubny] and strawberries, small but sweet. The garden also had several fruit trees, one of them recently broken by a storm, still alive but probably beyond saving.

    Zdenka whipped up a sumptuous meal--bread, cheese, sausage, eggs, tomatoes and radishes from the garden, also sardines, coffee and juice, all brought outside to a small table. We had an enjoyable outdoor lunch, for the day was pleasant and not as hot as the earlier part of the week was. One jarring note, Zdeněk was stung by bee that blundered into his sandal on the way back from the well: the sting was lodged in the thick sole-skin and was soon removed.

    We met one neighbor, inženýr Ingeduld, who offered a ride in his car back to the railroad, and in the end he drove us past Černošice to Radotín, at the southern end of the Prague bus line. On the way he gave us some news--an earthquake had hit Hungary, in Budapest its intensity reached 6 and in Bratislava 5, but no damage was reported.

    As the bus carried us back, Zdeněk pointed out the sights. A bridge over the Vltava with long shallow arches was "the bridge of the intellectuals", built in 1954 by prisoners of the Gottwald regime. About 70,000 intellectuals were in jail at the time and this particular bridge was built even though no need existed for it, no road ever crossed it and even now it was only used by the railroad and as a pedestrian overpass.

    We passed a factory for prefabricated concrete panels, used in high rise tenements. The workers included some Vietnamese--part of a group who came to Czechoslovakia to learn this kind of construction and who have stayed. Many foreign visitors came to Prague: on the street I have met an Egyptian, in the Sinkulova I ran across an Ethiopian student of engineering, and apparently there were many visitors from Nicaragua (I might have seen some in Terezín), for political reasons ties to Nicaragua rated high in newspapers and on posters.

    High on the hill to the left of the road was Barrandov, "Prague's equivalent to Beverly Hills" where Czech films were produced and where many actors lived. At the foot of those hills was Misha's pottery, in an old house with a massive rectangular chimney. A little further, in southern Smíchov, Zdeněk pointed out the house where Karel Hašler was born. It was empty, waiting either to be rehabilitated or to be torn down, Zdeněk was not sure which. Finally, the bus reached the end station of streetcar #12, which took us back to Malá Strana.

    I had bought tickets for a cruise on the paddle steamer "Vyšehrad", leaving 7 p.m. from the Palacký Bridge ["Named after František Palacký, 19th century Czech historian and politician"] . But it was still early, and Misha and Eva invited me to their part of the apartment. With them was Asbjørn Restan, a psychiatrist from Bergen, Norway, a close friend who had stayed with them some time, though he would be leaving the next day. Since neither Misha nor Eva knew much English, Asbjørn did most of the talking, though the two others listened and smiled to show they understood. Asbjørn's sentiments were close to theirs.

    His ancestry was mixed, Norwegian, Czech and Russian, he learned Czech at home and studied in Prague for seven years, graduating three years earlier. He said it took the first four of those years before he really got to know the Czechs, and he loved Prague.

    We sat in their tiny dining room and talked. I wanted to sit in one of the regular chairs, but was asked by Asbjørn to take the seat of honor, an elaborately crafted folding deckchair, much like the deckchairs on ocean liners, its footrest capable of being tucked in below. What made it the seat of honor was its history, for it used to be the personal chair of Josef Jan Frič, founder of the Ondřejov observatory, designed by him for his own retirement.

    In 1898, when the Czech nation was struggling through music, art and literature to assert its own identity, Josef Frič founded a Czech astronomical observatory, not just as a scientific enterprise but as a cultural one too. He built it in Ondřejov, 40 km southeast of Prague; in 1928 he donated it to the Czech people and it has now become the main Czech astronomical institution. I had seen a detailed account of it in the February 1984 issue of "Sky and Telescope" (p. 113, vol. 67), and posted a xerox copy at the IAGA meeting.

    It turned out that the children and grandchildren of Frič were close friends of Eva and Misha, who viewed Frič as a Czech hero: I was reverently shown a photograph of him, in old age. Asbjørn had large blueprints made of the chair and planned to have it reproduced in Norway, and with the blueprints he had an English text, describing the background of the chair and its historical significance.

    We discussed why a rich country like Czechoslovakia was reduced to such a grubby existence. The problem was politics, Asbjørn, and nothing could be done about it, although if the climate changed, as it briefly did in 1968, it would take but a few years for the nation to become lively again. "We Czechs have a tradition of independence from the time of Jan Hus" he said. I was also told that Russians were greatly resented, and anyone speaking Russian in a store, or recognized there as a Russian, was likely to get poor service. And did I notice there were no Russian soldiers to be seen in Prague? They were only allowed to enter in civilian clothes. I said that I had originally thought that German would be the language to avoid, because of the memory of the Nazis. No, said Asbjørn, the war was too far back and few remembered it.

    Misha was not just a potter but also a singer and a frustrated poet. Unable to publish his poems, he put them to music and sang them. He gave me two tea-cups hand-crafted by him, with elegant flowing handles, and Eva said that their olive-green glaze was characteristically Bohemian and was also used on the tiles of ceramic stoves for heating homes.

    Our conversation could have gone on for hours, but a cab had been ordered for 6:30 p.m. As I took my leave, I asked Asbjørn, what was it I could do for their sake? Nothing could be done politically, he said, either here or there. But I should visit Prague again.

    The paddlewheeler "Vyšehrad" takes tourists on a three-hour evening trip up and down the Vltava every Tuesday and Friday, and the weather this Friday was nearly perfect. The ship was tied up next to the eastern embankment, halfway between the old town and Vyšehrad itself. Two similar steamers were moored nearby, next to some smaller vessels, remnants of the pre-war Elbe (Labe) fleet, steamers with folding funnels just like the river ships I remembered from childhood. Indeed it could be that I had ridden the Vyšehrad before--according to its registration plate it was "ship number 187" built 1937-8 for the Czech-Saxon Steamship Co. at Ústí-nad-Labem.

    Most of the passengers riding with us belonged to a tour group of East-Germans, and when we arrived they were already crowding by the gangplank, clamoring to get aboard, while a crew member and a large lady from Čedok wearing a lavender dress barred their way. There was loud argument and suddenly the way was opened and everyone rushed aboard, including us. In the confusion no tickets were checked, neither then nor later.

    The ship had three decks. Down below was the dining room into which most of the Germans crowded, eager to be together. Also down below was the engine with its huge piston and crank, visible from the passenger area above through windows. The main deck had two large rooms, separated by the engine room: the one on the front side had a bar, and in a corner next to the bar we found a table with a good view of the river. At the other end of that room was seated a 7-man wind orchestra, brass instruments and clarinets. Their sign let it be known that they came from Žižkov, and they all looked past the retirement age.

    "Probably earning their 20,000 crowns" said Zdeněk, explaining that Czech retirees were allowed to earn up to 20,000 crowns per year without having their pension reduced. He himself had such a job in Smíchov, programming computers in Cobol and Fortran from October to spring every year. "That's how we paid for our trip to Yugoslavia", he said.

    Wide stairs led to the top deck, the one with the best view, where we sat for much of the trip. It was amply provided with benches, and in its front part a steersman stood in the open, as we later found out his cabin had been temporarily removed, probably to allow the ship pass a low girder. In the middle of the top deck were engine-room windows, propped open, a large round hole to let out the engine's smoke, and next to it in a boxlike compartment the folded-down funnel, like a giant penis at rest. A Czech flag flew from the bow and one of the "German Democratic Republic" from the stern, possibly a concession to the many German patrons.

    Apart from Zdeněk and Zdenka no Czech passengers appeared to be on the ship, and soon all seats were taken except for a few scattered ones. Then our Čedok lady arrived with four Italians in tow and proceeded to bully some of the Germans at the table next to ours, moving them down the room so that the Italians could sit together. "Look, we have for you at the next table seats even better than the ones you have now, they are such nice seats, you will want to move, and then these people will all be able to sit together." She made it sound like a personal favor, ignoring their protests and finally getting her way. Then the lines were cast off and the ship backed out.

    A waiter brought beer for everyone, except for Zdenka who wanted none and who instead got a stein of lemonade. As the ship was gliding towards the other bank, Zdenka opened her pocketbook and showed me some photos she had brought. One was of her daughter Zdenka at 4, already recognizable, and another of herself as a young girl, very much resembling her daughter. And a picture of her and Zdeněk shortly after their marriage in 1945, both young and fresh, sitting in an orchard and feeding each other cherries.

    Soon dinner arrived, dumplings with meat, far too much meat (I left most of it on the plate), and a printed sheet (German on one side, English on the other) telling about the ship and its route, and also giving a recipe for Czech dumplings, with club-soda to make it fluff up rather than yeast (my mother's method too). For desert we received a dish of Czech fruit tarts, "koláče". "A Czech family can live on this for a week" says Zdenka, and before we left she crammed what was left of the tarts (most of them, actually) into her pocketbook. I said no, no, you have your old photos inside, and she said, don't worry, the photos are below, they won't be touched.

    Meanwhile the ship slowly edged into a lock on the other bank, to by-pass the weir in the river. It barely clears the walls of the lock and to make sure it does not scrape, crew members stand ready with planks, prepared to interpose them where required. But everything goes smoothly and soon the large gate shuts behind us and the ship slowly eases down, to nearly 2 meters below its entrance level. Then it glides out of the lock and passes a riverside monument to Czech rivers, each represented by a slender but vigorous woman: flanking two sides stand figures representing the Berounka, the Otava, two more face away from the ship, and on top is the triumphant Vltava.

    Zdenka explains that each All Souls Day (November 1st) the statues are decorated in memory of those who had drowned in the river. We float alongside the Kampa and pass under the Charles Bridge. Crowds of people on the bridge stare at the ship and wave at it, and we wave back--by that time, dinner is over and we are back on the top deck. One girl waves to us as she sits atop an abutment, on the very brink. The air is clear and cool, the sky is partly cloudy and the view of Prague is excellent. Soon "Vyšehrad" is beneath the Hradčany, with the building of the Czech parliament below it--that is, the statehouse of Bohemia, not the legislature of all of Czechoslovakia.

    Then comes the Svatopluk Čech bridge, elaborately decorated with statues and pillars, leading into a tunnel above which are public gardens. Here, says Zdeněk, a giant statue of Stalin used to stand, gazing over the river. Was it just taken away, or was it broken up? Zdeněk is not sure, thinks it was broken up [Wiener: "Taken apart, stone by stone. I watched it.]. On the far bank of the river is the old city and further downstream is the law faculty building of the Charles University. My father graduated here in 1922, and he asked me specifically to pay a visit to the great aula, the antique hall of the university where he received his diploma. However, the aula was being renovated, along with the Tyl theater next door where Mozart's "Don Giovanni" was first performed, and both were closed to the public.     ["Your dad might have received his diploma in Karolinum, the old Charles University hall that is effectively next to Tyl Theater"]

    Finally, as factories and a large island loom ahead, the "Vyšehrad" turns around and heads back to the Charles Bridge. All that time, on and off, the band played light brass music in the Czech style, echoes of which rose to where we sat on the top deck. I asked Zdeněk whether the band could be asked to play Hašler's music. He thought it could, and said he would ask them later (afterwards I realize he wanted them to play it as we passed Hašler's birthplace in Smíchov).

    But I felt they might be more likely to respond to a tourist, so I went down and asked the band leader--"Sprechen sie Deutsch?" "Ein Wenig" (a little). Did the band know a song "Ta naše písnička česká," and could they play it? Yes, and they could. I return to the bench upstairs, but soon Hašler's melody rises up to where we sit, and we all hurry down, stand by the bar and join the singing. The song penetrates the soul, I sing and cry and suddenly all of this Czech experience, all the sadness of this unfortunate nation echoes inside me. Zdeněk sings loudly and his voice is good. The orchestra takes its time, playing the bars again and again, and when the song ends, we applaud with all our strength. Then the next melody starts, and it is something else.

    The ship returns to the lock and continues south, and after it passes the railroad bridge, the large funnel slowly and silently rises. Vyšehrad looms over the skyline, and on an island across from it is a grandstand for viewing boat races. Hašler's birthplace is somewhere inland. Slowly, the day turns into night.

    Suddenly, the Čedok lady comes up. She orders everyone to sit, nobody should remain standing, and she proceeds to enforce her edict without any explanation. Only later, when the funnel starts to retract by folding down, does the reason become evident. The ship is approaching the Antonín Zápotocky bridge, still under construction, and a falsework girder supports it from below, barely high enough for the ship to pass. Anyone standing could be bashed on the head, indeed when I stretch up my hand my fingers get slapped by the edge of the steel. The bridge passes and the funnel rises again.

    Finally, past the "bridge of the intellectuals" the ship stops and turns around. We are already beyond the city itself and the river has become so narrow there is barely enough room to turn. In the dark reeds by the edge of the water two boats are anchored together, with two fishermen: they surely don't appreciate the ship suddenly looming over them and then churning up water all around. But the ship clears them safely and heads back to the city's lights.

    The tour guide now brings the orchestra to the topside deck and Zdeněk sings with them, he likes those old melodies. Zdenka goes to them to ask them to play another song by Hašler, but they do not have it: perhaps it is also that they cannot use notes on the top deck where it is dark. It is nearly 10 when the ship docks, but the guide says no one may leave, because the tour is supposed to last until ten. The band is now back in the central salon, it plays dance music, and the guide encourages couples to dance.

    A few minutes later it is ten, and now the guide says we all must leave. The band strikes up a brisk march:

Na tom pražkém mostě
Rozmarýnka roste
Nikdo ji tam nezalejvá
Ona sama roste...

("On the Prague bridge, grows a daisy, no one ever waters it, it grows by itself").

We walk back to Malá Strana, stopping by the great building of the national theater (Národní divadlo), an ornate landmark of Czech culture, atop it rises a great sculpture of the goddess of victory (or whatever) driving a team of three horses. Slightly further down the street stands the new national theater, a rounded cube all covered with rippled glass, a showcase of the current regime. The Jůzas tell me that their son-in-law Jiří, an architect, did not like it, saying it was too much in the style of a Hilton hotel.

    Not far down the road is yet another monument, a square spire with an elaborately carved top and many lower figures all around it, exquisitely made. But the central focus is missing, the statue of Emperor Franz the First which, Zdeněk says, used to stand in the niche of the spire. Yet another statue (Prague is filled with them!) stands on the river bank facing Charles Bridge, on a little round overlook near the weir: a thoughtful pose of the composer Bedřich Smetana, larger than life. We cross the Charles Bridge amid tourists and students as lightning begins flashing across the sky.

    Saturday, 17 August

    The Congress ended on Friday and I meant to sleep late, but was woken at 7:30 by someone knocking on the door. I opened it and faced Dr. Atsuhiro Nishida, chairman of Division III of IAGA. What contrast! Me, rumpled and barely awake, in front of an unmade bed in a beat-up dorm room, while Nishida wore a neatly pressed suit and was obviously bent on official business. I listened to him as well as I could, then sat down and asked him to repeat everything while I took notes, since I doubted I would otherwise remember.

    He told me that at the concluding session Ching Meng and Bill Olson proposed for the 1987 IAGA Assembly in Vancouver, the next one scheduled, a session devoted to "Quantitative modeling of the linkage between the ionosphere and the magnetosphere." Nishida liked the idea, but for various reasons (perhaps politics) did not want either of them in charge, and at the recommendation of Larry Lyons proposed me as convener and Alekseyev as co-convener (later adding Lou Frank to represent experimentalists). He went on to describe four other scheduled sessions and their conveners and co-conveners, and after brief reflection I said, yes, I will do it.

    The congress building was still open, though Čedok workers were already dismantling their offices. I retrieved the "Sky and Telescope" article about Ondřejov for Eva and Michal and typed a last letter to my parents. After that I rode the subway to the old town square for last-minute souvenirs, then crossed the Charles Bridge to the Jůzas.

    The previous day began with overcast skies and my raincoat ended up folded in Zdenka's bag. This time I left the coat behind, which was bad judgement. It rained all afternoon, though mostly a gentle Czech rain: when it got heavier I shared Zdeněk's umbrella, when it tapered to a drizzle I just ignored it. Yet even rain brings an unexpected dividend: it allowed me to see the gargoyles of St. Vitus in action, spouting water. For they are really downspouts carved in stone, hanging down diagonally from the roof right above the road on which we walked.

    Since this was my last full day in Prague, each of us had a surprise for the other. I gave the Jůzas most of my money. I did not want to trade any of it for Czech crowns, there seemed to be nothing worth buying and no time to look properly anyway. On the other hand, the Jůzas had been quite kind, and when they protested, saying it was too much, I told them, your Zdenka has made new teeth for my mother, this was the least I could do. I also said, you need not use it here, but if you go on a vacation to Yugoslavia, it will help.

    As it turned out, the money was more timely than I realized. Zdeněk had always dreamt of visiting Italy, but could never afford it, and after 1986 the laws for trips abroad would be tighter, making it uncertain he would ever go. Now suddenly the dream became possible: little more than a month later they were in Italy, and a card from Rome told of a good time and many thanks. Their little Trabant gave no trouble and they spent a total of 16 days in Italy.

    I also brought my good towel and the unused bar of American soap. Good towels were said to be in short supply, and I had more than enough weight to carry, "but please wash it, I used it here for two weeks!"

    They had presents to, impressive ones. A beautiful large picturebook of north-western Bohemia, including color plates of Děčín castle from the top of Shepherds' Wall and of Ústí and its river, just as we saw them.

    They showed me a somewhat similar book about north-eastern Bohemia by their daughter-in-law Eva, in a slightly different format, a larger ratio of text to pictures, essentially, a guidebook to the region. Czechs overall publish an enormous range of books, as Americans did 50-100 years ago; many bookstores exist (there is even one on the middle level of the Leninova Metro station near the hostel, underground), they are well-stocked and books are cheap. I saw many people reading books while riding on the metro (hardly anyone with a newspaper), and Zdeněk said private libraries of 500-1000 books were common. He also told me that every month a list of new books was sent to members of the "book club," they first went on sale on Thursdays and on such days lines formed outside bookstores early in the morning. Zdeněk showed me such a book list--the selection seemed somewhat random, and the translations were of relatively dated works, e.g. books by Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Mann.

    Of course, they planned to mail the book to the US, along with others I had bought, they were are too heavy to take on the airplane.

    And other presents: Michal's cups, carefully wrapped, Czech playing cards with suits such as "acorns" for my father who used them, and a record of old Czech songs, from movies of the 1930s, starting with "Písnička česká" sung by Hašler himself. They played the record, a slow melody sounding like an old-style record (it probably was copied from one), and I cried again.

    Zdenka served a vegetarian lunch of fried cauliflower, new potatos, slices of tomato and cucumber, beer for Zdeněk, soft drinks for us (she drank neither coffee nor alcohol). We have a busy schedule ahead, she said, we must see what we had missed in the Hradčany castle.

    We catch tram 22 at Malostranské náměstí, near the big church of St. Nicholas, and follow the winding road past President Husák's house, where guards and dogs are said to be posted. On top of the hill stands Belvedere, the summer pavillon of royalty, but we continue further to the side entrance of the castle, where we alight in the rain.

    The entrance road crosses a greenery-covered moat, "Jelení příkop" or buck's moat, quite deep with a tower built into its far side. And then we walk and walk, until my blisters hurt again, but what can one say? This is the last day and one ought to cram into it as much as one can. Into the Czech museum we go, ancient relics, rusty broadswords, goblets and chain mail, real medieval stuff which Ilana's friends would have loved. On the wall hang maps of the "Great Moravian Empire" which once stretched from Silesia to the Adriatic sea, and in a glass case in the last room are crown, scepter and orb of Czech kings, the crown a wide golden band with four equidistant fleur-de-lys and many large rough saphires and garnets attached to individual settings. It is just a replica, crafted in a vocational school, but Zdenka saw the originals in 1979 and said one could not tell the difference.

    Then to St. George's 12th century church which looked quite new, perhaps the stone inside was recently cleaned. In the church is the grave of Ludmila, mother of kings.

    Then to the Vladislavský hall where coronation ceremonies were once held. It is a large hall whose big windows stand out in any view of the Hradčany from the city, elaborate stone arches hold its ceiling and its wooden floor constantly creaks as the many tourist walk over it. The hall is filled with visitors like us and suddenly, in the middle of the hubhub, my ears pick up Hebrew. This had happened once before, in a crowd near the Old Town Square, where an American tourist (it later turned out) commented in Hebrew to his wife that with all these people, he still had not heard any Hebrew.

    This time the speaker was a Czech woman, Hana Heitlingerová.
["I knew her. Her daughter Alena is professor of sociology at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario]   
In May 1939, two months after the Nazi occupation, she managed to escape to Israel where she attended a trade school in Nahalal. After the war she returned to Prague and here she was guiding a former Israeli woman, now living in Italy. Around her neck hung a "chai" but she said she was not affiliated with the Jewish community of Prague, "I am not religious."
["Her parents stayed in Israel, she returned with her husband, who much later became Executive Director of the Jewish Federation.]

    There isn't much to see in the hall itself, but it has many side rooms. On the side facing away from the city is a room on whose walls are painted heraldic shields of the nobles of the land in order of lineage, then a room of shelves filled with thick numbered books of land deeds. And finally, the throne room, appearing just as one would expect a medieval throne room to be, austere yet dignified.

    On the other side of the hall is the historic room where in 1618 the emperor's two emissaries were hurled through a window (guides point out which one) into the moat, precipitating the thirty-year war and the downfall of Czech reformation and Czech self-government. The moat's bottom sloped and was filled with rubbish, and thus the two survived, unlike Jan Masaryk, who in 1948 fell (no one tells how) from the building of the Foreign Office behind the Hradčany.

    And not far from there a small balcony offers what may be the most perfect view of Prague. Although it is raining, the balcony is crowded and I must wait before a place opens by the bannister. Zdeněk has brought binoculars, and in them Prague stands out, almost within touch. Just then, a disturbing memory: "didn't Hitler stand right here, at this spot?" No, says Zdenka, the photograph (there does exist a famous photograph) was taken over there. But yes, Hitler probably stood here, too.

    We must go on, to the Czech national gallery. Pictures by Lucas Cranach, drawings by Breughel, paintings by Rembrandt--one gets spoiled about such art by living within the range of the US National Gallery, whose pictures are not just more numerous but also much brighter, having been carefully restored. But I enjoy the two Kokoschka canvases in the last room, sunny impressionistic renderings of the Charles Bridge. Next to them hangs a crazy composite painting of Hitler and Mussolini, Hitler wearing the sign of the double cross used by Charlie Chaplin in "The Great Dictator."

    Down and down we go to a gallery of French painters, Delacroix to Piccaso. As we leave the castle by way of the "new castle stairs" (to be distinguished from the old ones of which Hašler wrote), I feel thoroughly saturated. We have coffee and cake at the apartment while the weather clears almost miraculously, and then the Jůzas escort me back over the Charles Bridge, it is crowded as always and this will be the last crossing, at least on this visit.

    I walk to Alt Neu (the Jůzas call it "the Jewish church"), to attend Mincha services which start at 8. We cross the old town square with its "orloj" clock and its large statue of Jan Hus, go down Paris avenue and say our farewells; the Jůzas will see me off at the airport next morning. At the synagogue I am let in by a fairly young man, Leo Pavlát, a writer of children's books, he tells me [currently, director of the Jewish Museum] . I ask him what could we in the US send? Send books, he said, Hebrew books with vowels--books, any books. Send books to Dr. Galský, books sent to private citizens may or may not arrive.

    The service is again led by Feuerlicht, and I now notice how short he stands, no more than 4'6". The man who seemed to be a policeman sits in the same place as before, wearing a nylon windbreaker over an undershirt--rather casual for a worshipper, must be a cop. Some visitors stand in the back and there is argument--perhaps they were not expected to be there. But finally the service starts, visitors in the rear, regulars in front, the Torah is lifted by Pavlat from its safe-like depository, is carried to the center, and as on the preceding Sabbath, a short portion is read. Joseph ben Mordechai Goll is called up first, in place of a Cohen, and I am called up last of three. Then the Torah is returned and the service continues, very rapidly, as before I am continually losing my place and only the kaddish helps me reorient.

    "El Maley Rachamim", the memorial prayer, is recited three times in memory of a member who has just passed away. Then comes the "Barchu", the call to the evening service, which itself is read very rapidly, the "Shema Yisrael" is almost lost in the stream of words. Then another standing prayer, and I see people folding their prayer shawls, soon it will be time to go to the women's gallery for the "3rd Sabbath meal" which again consists of stale bread and hard apricots.

    This time the rabbi is away and Feuerlicht leads. We sing "Psalm of David", "Yah Ribon", "Shabbat Menuchah", all at breakneck speed and all dominated by the cantor's voice. Then we all symbolically wash our hands, an inch-high plastic tumbler with water is passed and people dip their fingers. We number little more than a bare minyan, the prayer quorum of ten. Then Feuerlicht gives a sermon, a "word of Torah" about the reading of the week, which is "Re'eh" and which begins, "See, I give before you this day good and evil, choose good." Why does the scripture say "I give"? The cantor explains, citing Rashi's commentary (around 1000 years old), but he speaks Czech and I cannot quite follow.

    He expounds another phrase from the reading, "aser te'aser", "surely thou shalt tithe." Why "surely"? Rashi says, you tithe so that God will give you the wealth from which you tithe. And there is a hidden sign: the numerical values (gimatria) of the four letters of "te'aser", "thou shalt tithe," are 400, 70, 300 and 200, add them up, take one tenth and you have the number of "mazalcha", "your luck."

    And he ends with a story supposedly told of the Besht, the "master of the good name" who founded the Hassidic movement 250 years ago. A Jew was walking through the forest, he met the Besht and they walked together. Suddenly they came to a fork in the road and did not know which way to choose--whichever road they chose, it might be a wrong one and lead into danger. And then the Besht said, when two roads are open to you, and each one may be bad, maybe the right road is the third one. And somehow he found that third road (my Czech failed here, indeed what I write is guesswork) and they reached safety.

    Some day later the same Jew was imprisoned and falsely accused. But the accuser lacked definite evidence, so the judge ("procurator") decreed that the Jew be given a choice between two folded slips of paper, on one was written "life" (život) and on the other "death" (smrt), and whatever he picked would be his fate.

    The man's enemies contrived to have both slips labeled "smrt," but this was found out by one of the Jew's friends, who told him. And the man remembered the Besht's words: when two bad ways are open, find a third way. So when the day of the trial came, he picked up the slip so, he rolled it up so, and he tossed it into his mouth so. What could they do? Then the procurator says, let us look at the other slip! Which they did, and it said "smrt," so they figured that the other slip must have said "život" and set the man free.

    After that we all returned to the sanctuary for another quick service and yet another brief standing prayer, and then the Havdalah, the lighting of a candle which symbolizes the end of the Sabbath (on Sabbath itself no lighting of fire is allowed). Everyone came forward, the candle was lit, a kiddush was said over a glass of wine and several close standers sipped from it, leaving enough to douse the candle. An ornate spice box was passed and the service stopped until everyone had a sniff, "a gite woch" (a good week) was hummed and later sung, candlelight was used to examine fingers, putting the light to a profane use and thus showing the Sabbath to be over, proper blessings were incanted and finally the wine left in the glass was poured into a flat dish and the candle was extinguished in it. Worshippers addressed each other, "A good week!" And Feuerlicht did something I have not seen before: he dipped his finger in the wine four times and quickly dabbed with it the four corners of his face. Maybe to be absolutely sure of a good week.

    On the way out I passed the charity box and unloaded my Czech currency except for some small bills, then headed for the Metro. Back in my room I packed my bags--discarding the old shoes which Audrey hated, winnowing from many papers those worth keeping. The job took until close to midnight.

    Sunday, August 18

    Not much more happened to me in Prague. The Jůzas showed up as promised at 8:45, and the things meant to be left for the next occupant of the room--the remaining half-jar of apricot jam, my 6-crown knife, my beat-up Sears towel and my old shoes, all of these they took. You don't throw away things in Prague.

    On Leninova street the 119 bus was exactly on time at 9:05 on time and it took us along Hanspaulka hill, past new tenements, past the towns edge, past the rocky black hill named Šárka, to wheat fields and, at the end of the line, the airport. And we drank a last espresso together, kissed and said good-bye.

    Then through customs, and a long wait in a segregated lounge, and finally, a walk across the tarmac to a waiting Lufthansa Boeing 737. As we emerged from the building those waiting to see us off became visible, standing atop the terminal. Zdeněk and Zdenka were waving frantically, big waves of both arms, and I waved back and blew back kisses. Then I stepped into the jet, into another world and another century, and that evening I was in New York.

    *** *** ***

    It was a long flight, time enough to start to sort out thoughts. So much to remember. Czech words--"no no", which means yes-yes ("no" is short for "ano", Czech for "yes"), "kočičí hlavy" or cats' heads, meaning paving stones, "kachlovy kamna", tiled oven. "Nebozízek", gimlet, also the name of the drinking-house halfway up the cable-car tracks on Petřín, and ježek, the hedgehog which scurried across our path on Petřín and into the darkness of the bushes.

    I had discovered my Czech heritage. I had always felt as belonging to several intersecting circles--as being American, also Jewish, also an Israeli, also a physicist, also a historian or someone interested in history. Never before in my memory have I felt Czech, except as a transient and distant phase of one's life, and I never counted Czech among my languages. This may now need amending--one more circle, one more tradition to keep.

    What does one make of this country? Why isn't it as rich as its busy industry and green land seem to promise, why isn't it the Sweden of central Europe? Zdenka said that even social services, on which the government prides itself, were not as good as those in Austria, that Katka, daughter of the Hauners, received there a longer maternity leave and better maternity pay than she would have got in Czechoslovakia.

    Why? Because the government tries to run everything, manipulate everyone, and repress any mode of communication which isn't official. Zdenka said that when she worked, she had to attend 10-minute indoctrination sessions in the morning and in the evening. Once she was asked to come up with an essay on the socialist economy: "How can I do that?" Zdeněk was denied a promotion because he did not join the party, and for the same reason his daughter was denied an opportunity to enroll in graduate school, towards the "kandidát" degree. Zdenka showed me a letter from America which was slit open (there were photos inside): the post office stamped it "damaged in transit."

    That impression I had of stepping back a century also held true in a different sense. In the 1800s the Czechs were ruled by outsiders, whose language and culture were German. The rulers built schools and railroads and made the country fairly prosperous, but the Czechs wanted more, they wanted to be free. Denied self-rule, they did the next-best thing, they cultivated their Czech identity: restored castles, composed music, built a National Theater, published books, even built an astronomical observatory.

    Fulfilment came with the first republic. But then came the Nazis, later the Russians, and now, through a cruel trick of history, the Czech nation was back where it was a century ago. The place of the ruling nobility was now held by the party, "they" wanted people to do such-and-such, always "they." "They" may have built a great subway, "they" instituted retirement at 60, but as before, what Czechs wanted is to be free.

    What can a young Czech do? One cannot get rich, no one earns much more than the average, about 3000 crowns per month (Zdenka's pension is 1300, her monthly rent 300). But one can write, sing, draw, perhaps make movies: there seems to exist an enormous outpouring of individual creativity (individual because it is difficult to communicate, one cannot organize without arousing the antibodies), all distinctly Czech. You can read in Czech, and cultivate Czech memories, it is an existence familiar to a Jew.

    I have stayed in the country too briefly to note enough, and was only a visitor, not someone speaking the language. But the heavy hand of the government is evident, it stifles communications and initiative. The independent social circles which bring interest to life are not allowed to develop freely, and the thousands of small improvements of life due to individual creativity are missing, all the patented gadgets and clever twists Americans so dearly love. There is no reward for initiative, no feedback to provide it: the indifferent service at restaurants, the waiters at the Flora and at the International who forgot orders, the clumsiness of Čedok, they all point at this.

    Yet someone must be working, for factories produce, the subway gets build, bread gets baked, even if it is a horrible dense bread, seemingly days old when bought. I suspect that whenever the job is such that people can be ordered to do it, it gets done, under watchful eyes perhaps, at state factories which can reward workers beyond their salaries. But where willing diligence is called for, it may be a different story. A lot gets done as labor of love (such as Michal's cups), but not officially.

    I don't know if I ever will go back. One feels depressed in Prague, one wishes it would shed its grayness. If times change, if some day a statue of Jan Masaryk stands on the square outside the Hradčany, by the Foreign Office building, the temptation to go back will be very strong. I have no doubt whatsoever that one day that statue will stand there. Whether I am going to live so long is a different question.

    ****

    Postscript, 1995

    Zdenka's friendship with my parents and myself has continued: divorced and remarried, she now has a 7-year old son Andrew and a successful dental practice in New York. Her parents have visited the US several times and even came to our house in Greenbelt. Her mother, alas, suffered a stroke several years after my Prague visit, she recovered but much of her memory of previous years was lost, including all recollections of the events described here.

    After the visit I corresponded for a while with Rabbi Meyer in Hebrew, and also sent him the Bialik-Ravnitzky book of Jewish lore and some texts teaching Hebrew. I also sent a note to Dr. Nosek, but all these contacts gradually dwindled away. Dr. Galský was removed from his post shortly after my visit, and Heller was appointed in his place.

    Came the "velvet revolution" of 1989. Dr. Galský was reinstated, while Rabbi Meyer was removed from his post after being exposed as a paid police informer, not so much of a willing supporter of the regime as a weak character caving in to pressure. The "Washington Jewish Week" of 14 June 1990 cited the New York Newsday of June 12 and wrote:

    "Mayer admitted to 'making regular written reports to the police for his entire career and accepting instructions for monitoring the activities of the community', the Newsday story said. According to Mayer, the secret police targeted him almost from the moment in high school that he decided to go to rabbinical school. He said that under 'great pressure' from the police, he signed a commitment to collaborate with them in 1979, during his second year at Budapest's rabbinical seminary.

    'I tried to have as little contact as possible and not expose anybody' to the police, writer Roy Gutman quotes Mayer as saying. 'I was trying to help the Jewish community survive.'
["With the exception of one official, all those listed here that I knew had collaborated. The question is what they really did"]

    ... Mayer said he believed that most of the Jewish lay leadership had collaborated similarly with the police. The president and secretary of the Jewish community, Bohumil Heller and František Kraus, were removed from their positions last year, the only religious leaders in Czechoslovakia who had refused to condemn the police beatings of student demonstrators that led to the overthrow of the communist regime."
    "(Kraus) was in several concentration camps, fought in the Haganah, after return was arrested as an Israeli spy, spent many years in uranium mines. Was told to sign or he would not be released. Said he would not have survived, so he signed."

    The issue of the Jewish Week also carried an interview with Galský, who unfortunately died not long afterwards in a traffic accident. It also had a long article about Leo Pavlát, who became Czech cultural attaché in Israel. A later article in The Jewish Week on (6 August 1992) stated that the community expected the arrival of a new rabbi, Karol Sidon.

    I have yet to hear about a memorial to Jan Masaryk outside the Hradčany, but chances of seeing one within my lifetime have dramatically improved. Miracles do happen sometimes, after all.
          [Postscript: there is one outside the Černín Palace]. .