Author

Publication

1995 - Steerforth Press, S. Royalton, Vt, Vermont

Language

English

Word Count

50,500 words, Guess

Page Count

202 pages

Identifiers

and 2 more
  • Goodreads410320
  • LibraryThing155283

Classifications

  • DDC943.71/2043
  • LCCDB2622 .N68 1995

Alternate Titles

  • Commies, crooks, gypsies, spooks, and poets

Description

Journeying from Chicago for a year's stay in his Czech homeland, the author and his wife and two children live high and low amidst Prague's ancient glory and modern confusion, and Novak moves through Eastern Europe with a native's ease and a westerner's eye. His vivid accounts of daily life in the Czech Republic and of the tragic war unfolding next door in the former Yugoslavia are at once highly personal, raucous, comic, painful, and memorable. Novak ties his book together with personal accounts of fighting for oranges as a child in the Stalinist fifties, of getting beaten up by state security officers as a teenager in the sixties, of being expelled from his homeland "forever" in the seventies, and finally of passing on a sense of ethnic heritage to his American children.

Subjects

Topics

AmericansCivilizationCzech AuthorsAuthors, CzechHomes and hauntsAmerican AuthorsAuthors, American

People

Jan Novak (1953-)

Times

Other Editions

  • Commies, crooks, gypsies, spooks & poets: thirteen books of Prague in the year of the Great Lice EpidemicSteerforth Press1995-01-01

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