A Life Caught Up in Historical Moments

WHEN EVE WAS NAKED

Stories of a Life’s Journey

Josef Skvorecky

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

352 pages, $25

“I had lived through nearly all the types of society that had ever existed--including modern forms of slavery and feudalism,” writes Josef Skvorecky, one of the finest, internationally celebrated authors of his generation in the preface to “When Eve Was Naked: Stories of a Life’s Journey.” The Czech native, who grew up during Nazi rule and came of age as a writer under communist oppression, was recently urged by friends to write his memoirs. “Thinking about my oeuvre, I saw that there was very little worth telling that had not already been told in my stories and novels.” Instead of writing a straight autobiography, the novelist has taken 24 of his short stories that came most directly from his life and pieced them together in chronological fashion.

The resulting work, as much history lesson as biographical sketch, is a thoroughly rewarding read, masterfully written and heartbreakingly real. Reminiscent of the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer (though from a Catholic rather than Jewish perspective), these stories give intelligent, unique insight into some of the most eventful and traumatic happenings of Eastern Europe in the last century. We visit prewar Prague, witness the terror of Nazi occupation, are shocked by the destruction of World War II and later, experience the artistic persecution by the communist regime.

Many of the tales are narrated by Skvorecky’s fictionalized self, a character named Danny Smiricky. The title story tells of 8-year-old Danny falling in love with 6-year-old Eve. The two meet while on a bus tour of Prague for winners of a toothpaste-cap collecting promotion. As we notice Eve’s innocence though Danny’s eyes, we can’t help but imagine an innocent Europe on the cusp of horror, and watch--helplessly--as that naivete, both in Danny and in Eve, is destroyed. The story’s climax comes when Danny sees young Eve stripped naked for an ocean swim. “She looked like a baby bird. Her tiny body was white except for her legs, shoulders and arms, which were the colour of light brown coffee.” The sight triggers his first experience with life’s anguish. “I suddenly felt faint,” Danny tells us. “Then strange. Then incredibly sad, so sad that words can’t convey it.” The narrator’s innocence makes an incisive mark on all the stories. Coupled with Skvorecky’s desire for words to convey what perhaps they are unable to convey, the innocence provides an aching, artistic perspective on that tragic time and place. For instance, we watch Danny worrying over his love life as Prague falls to bits. Like the rest of us, Danny has no ability to see the happenings from a historical standpoint; he can only witness them as they affect his own comings and goings and throw difficulties, or in some cases advantages, on his romantic pursuits.

In one of the strongest stories, “Spectator on a February Night,” the author recreates the Communist coup of 1948, which ushered in 40 years of totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia. The story is told from the point of view of a young man who is exhilarated by the excitement. “I could tell something was about to happen. I couldn’t wait. We were in the middle of it and it was great. I felt the mob move .... I felt splendid. I felt alive, and alive when it felt good to be alive.” The need for commotion, after all that had happened in Prague at that time, was great, even if the commotion was leading somewhere awful. “Just think if it all hadn’t happened. We’d just rot. In all that peace. Good that things happen.”

As the narrator and his friends make plans to flee the country, again, love concerns are paramount. The seating arrangements in the getaway car may provide a chance to sit close to the mysterious Kitty and be forced to touch legs with her.

“The End of Bull Macha” tells of the governmental suppression of jazz music and jitterbug dancing and the young jazz player Bull Macha’s fight against being “made over” by the new regime. When Macha discovers a rollicking jazz joint, the “desperate rebellion that had been building up inside him all afternoon ... gave way to a victorious sensation of certainty that all this would last, that they wouldn’t manage to suffocate it after all, that it was the same jazz it had always been ... that no one in the world could wipe out this music, this world, the only one he had ever wanted to belong to.” His hopes, though, are in vain.

By approaching these critical moments in history from such a personalized perspective (such a self-centered and human point of view) Skvorecky succeeds in giving us a genuine taste of them. His is not the history of dates and textbooks, but of individuals swept up in happenings they’d never requested nor, at the time, fully understood.