BuzzFlash Reviews

July 2005

Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968
by Heda Margolius Kovaly, translated by Franci Epstein and Helen Epstein with the author

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Under a Cruel Star is the extraordinarily moving memoir of Heda Margolius Kovaly, a Czechoslovakian Jew who survived the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and then the horrors of Stalin's Communist reign of terror. It would be easy to classify this as a personal story of survival against all odds, but it is written much too eloquently to leave it at that.

Margolius begins her story this way: "Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird in my rib cage an inch or two below my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the bird would wake up, lift its head, and flutter its wing in rapture. Then I too would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant."

Being a BuzzFlash book selection, you may be asking why we chose Under a Cruel Star beyond the raw power of the prose and the strength, insight and humanity of the author, who lived through such terror, cruelty and moral depravity?

In part, a recent reflection on the book in the Columbia Journalism Review answers that question. E.J. Graff, resident scholar at Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center and a senior correspondent at The American Prospect, states: "When I first read Under A Cruel Star, it illuminated Pol Pot's and Pinochet's reign of terror. Rereading it last year, I kept thinking of more recent events: The American government manipulating fear and idealism to justify torture camps in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. The Iranian revolution forcing grown women to walk around in large black bags for the sake of a pure society. The Israeli government using historical evils to justify a barbaric occupation. If you're temperamentally a pessimist, as I am, you could react to these situations by locking yourself in your room for the rest of your life. But the great challenge and joy of Kovály's book is that she refuses you that option."

Graff goes on to conclude: "Under A Cruel Star cured me of my own youthful utopianism, and taught me to be suspicious of political theologies that do not respect what people say they want from their lives. It taught me to beware of anyone who tries bullying others into wanting the "right" thing: ...politicians who want to bomb other countries into freedom; TV and radio hosts who humiliate rather than debate their guests. It taught me to be less interested in competing labels - Democrat or Republican, black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Jew, Muslim or Hindu - than in a far more essential pairing: humane or inhumane. Under A Cruel Star taught me that the good - those who act out of compassion, decency, kindness, consideration, and even a recklessly arrogant love of life - are better than the great."

Under a Cruel Star was first published in Czech in 1973. It covers the period of Margolius's deportation from Prague by the Nazis through the aborted Dubcek Czech democratic revolution, crushed by the Soviets, in 1968. It ends with the author becoming an exile in Boston, where she worked at the Harvard Law School Library.

This edition was translated into English by Helen and Franci Epstein with the author.

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