My Seven Lives by Jana Juráňová

Author:Jana Juráňová [Juráňová, Jana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612497198
Publisher: Purdue UP
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

But meanwhile, in the summer of 1967, Ladislav Mňačko had defected to Israel—how did that come about?

Until then none of us, at least not in Kultúrny život, had given much thought to matters of foreign policy. We regarded the Iron Curtain and the whole “anti-imperialist struggle for peace” palaver as a given that we had no way of influencing anyway. But the Six-Day War in the Middle East gave many people pause, as we saw a defenseless country like Israel being attacked from every side and defeating them all, a David against Goliath. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, saw it differently. It cut diplomatic ties with Israel, and the government of Czechoslovakia slavishly followed its lead. This provoked extensive debate, and for the first time in years people began to discuss the Holocaust in this context. The subject started to crop up both in literature and the movies. The Slovak-Czech film Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street), directed by Kadár and Klos, adapted from a Slovak novella written by Ladislav Grosman, had a Slovak cast. Around that time Novomeský gave a rather unpleasant speech at a writers’ meeting, objecting to the fact that the Jewish question was gaining prominence. He said something to the effect that these Jews kept going on about millions of victims of the Holocaust, whereas the number of Russians killed had been far greater.

Unlike most people who only started thinking about this issue for the first time, Mňačko had been very clearly and unequivocally pro-Israel for a long time. Although he wasn’t Jewish, he had visited the country in 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli War, as a reporter for Rudé právo. The Soviet Union had initially backed Israel, thinking that it would become a socialist state and a Soviet ally.

So in 1967, after the Writers’ Congress, Mňačko was already pretty furious with Novotný because of his uncalled-for condemnation of Israel, and also because of the party political games the latter played to thwart democratization efforts. In the fall of 1967 Mňačko went to Paris, quite legally, and held a press conference where he announced that he disagreed with the general thrust of Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy, specifically its position on Israel, and that was why he was leaving for Israel: actions spoke louder than words. This was an extreme provocation aimed at Novotný and his policies. Mňačko was given a hero’s welcome in Israel, as this gave the country enormous moral satisfaction. Few people in the Soviet bloc had stood up for Israel at the time, and probably no one had done so publicly. While in Israel, Mňačko made several public statements opposing Novotný’s policies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.