Writer, teacher, and dissident Ivan Klima died on October 4 at the age of 94. He was born Ivan Kauders in Prague on September 9, 1931. His family changed their last name to one less German-sounding after World War II. Klima was not aware of his Jewish heritage until after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. He was incarcerated in the Terezin concentration camp from 1941 to 1945 and lived with the possibility of being transported to Auschwitz at any time. Some of his best work, including Judge on Trial, reflected on those horrors.
In 1986, My First Loves was Klima’s first book published in the United States. At the time, he was enduring a two-decade “period of silence,” blacklisted by the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia and forced to take menial jobs until 1989. Unlike some Czech authors who left their country or were pushed out after the suppression of the Prague Spring, Klima had returned to Prague in 1970 from a sabbatical at the University of Michigan. He then found himself prevented from publishing in the state-run printing houses and official media.
Klima wrote more than 40 books. He received the Franz Kafka Award in 2002 and the Magnesia Litera, a Czech literary prize, in 2010 for his memoir, My Crazy Century. The author looked back on his youth in My First Loves, a collection of four stories he wrote in middle age. They were first issued in Prague in the 1980s in samizdat, the underground literary network that circulated typescript copies of banned authors’ works to readers in the Eastern Bloc.
In the story “Miriam,” the protagonist is among nine people cramped into his aunt’s little room. They managed to celebrate a relative’s engagement despite being in ghetto lodging infected with bed bugs and fleas, as they waited for deportation orders to Terezin. Miriam, the girl who ladles out the milk ration, starts smiling at him and giving him larger portions. Very young and shy, he imagines what he’d say to her, but doesn’t work up the courage until it is too late. I found this story, the shortest, to be the most moving.
In another story, “My Country,” the war is over and the young man and his family are on vacation. He becomes infatuated with a doctor’s pretty wife. He accompanies her to an opera, and when she speaks to him, “she smiled at me in such a way that I immediately if only for a moment, soared upwards and out of the hall. I was flying with her like a bird, like a balloon, across the wide sky, and our arms entwined and our lips touched.” I found Klima’s writing throughout the book to be gentle, sensual, and charming.
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