Writer Jana Prikryl on how her parents’ escape from Czechoslovakia shaped her life – and language
Jana Prikryl was five, and called Jana Přikrylová, when her parents fled communist Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s and built a new life in the West. She has since gone on to become a successful poet and a top editor at the highly respected New York Review of Books. But how much did initially speaking Czech shape the writer’s approach to language? I discussed that question and many more with Prikryl, who was speaking from her home in New York.
Please tell us something about your background. Your family got out of communist Czechoslovakia in 1980 or 1981, after escaping through then Yugoslavia. What had your folks been doing in Czechoslovakia before they left the country?
“It was 1980 that we escaped. My dad had been working as an engineer at what was called Bohumín, in Ostrava. And my mom was a metallurgist, so she was also working, full-time.
“They were very ordinary middle-class citizens. They weren’t doing anything at all political. But my dad had wanted to get out for some years and he actually tried to leave legally 10 years earlier, in 1970.
“He sort of bribed the right number of people and he got permission to take a temporary position, in Glasgow of all places.
“My dad had wanted to get out for some years and he actually tried to leave legally 10 years earlier, in 1970.”
“The plan was that he was going to drive out of Czechoslovakia and then, I guess, take a ferry across the Channel and go up through the UK; then his wife and son – that was his first wife – were going to join him afterwards.
“In any case in 1970 he was stopped at the border and held for a couple of days and interrogated, and ultimately they didn’t allow him to leave.
“He always thought that he basically targeted by an envious colleague at work.”
You were about five years old in 1980. Do you have memories of your Czech life?
“I do, I do. I think because the departure was so absolute – I didn’t go back again until I was 14, and at that point I went back alone, in the summer of 1989, just months before the Velvet Revolution; my parents were not able to go back at that point, because they would have been arrested, and I myself had to give up my citizenship in order to go back safely.
“But so it was very distinct line, so I remember many things: the apartment we lived in, the neighbourhood, the park nearby, my nursery school, my nanny, various relatives. I mean the things you would expect a five-year-old to have taken in [laughs].
“But I do remember a certain kind of tension in the air. I remember my parents arguing, which I think was directly related to the decision to leave.”
For you, at that age, was it a wrench? Was it exciting? Was it both?
“I remember being told we would be moving countries and I remember distinctly asking, What is a country, what does this mean?”
“At first it was just baffling. I remember being told we would be moving countries, we would be moving to a new country, and I remember distinctly asking, What is a country [laughs], what does this mean?
“And then of course we arrived in Austria, thanks to the extreme kindness and generosity of an old friend of my father’s who had settled in this village in Austria. He basically told us to come to their house and they put us up for two months.
“Yes, it was hard to learn a new language. There was a great sort of extended experience of bafflement, I think.
“But, you know, when you’re five and six you’re also just highly adaptable as well as impressionable.
“It was lovely in Austria. I remember adoring the sort of new routine there. I don’t remember feeling any sense of homesickness or sorrow about what had been left behind, which I guess is kind of surprising in retrospect [laughs].”
After a year or so in Austria your family settled in Canada. How was the actual reality for your parents of living in a foreign country and adapting to this new environment?
“Well I think it was very different for each of them. The whole idea to move had been my dad’s and the whole impetus had been his, and I think my mom went along reluctantly.
“His English was also better than hers in the beginning. The reason we moved to Canada in the end was that he got a job offer there, so he was stepping into a position and he sort of had a future paved for him, in a sense.
“She had been working full-time in Czechoslovakia and she became effectively a homemaker in Austria and that’s what she was in Canada for the first few years as well.
“I think that was a pretty bitter change for her. And the trouble with the English language – I think it was a hard period for her and exciting for him, because he had in a way fulfilled his lifelong dream of moving to the West and particularly to North America.”
Then your mum eventually became a courtroom sketch artist, I read.
“First she actually got a job at a local university as a metallurgist. It was part-time while I was growing up. But she did eventually work for at least a decade using her degree and her knowledge as a scientist.
“Then eventually after I left home yes, she started exploring her own visual arts interests. Her father had been a sort of Sunday painter. He was a lawyer who really just spent every spare minute he had painting.
“She really has a gift in that direction as well, so she started doing that more in the ‘90s.
“So it took her a few years, but I don’t think either of my parents regretted the move in the end.
“In fact they moved back to the Czech Republic in the early 2000s, again for a position that my dad had, for a couple of years, and I think it was a sort of interesting novelty for them. But curiously I don’t think they ever felt like they might move back permanently.”
Language is clearly central to your work. Your first spoke Czech of course, then German – and then you became a native speaker of English. Did that kind of journey affect how you see language, or how you use language even?
“I don’t know [laughs]. I wish I had an ability to replay it in just Czech and see if my interest in language, in the Czech language, would be similar.
“But it definitely I think gave me a kind of detachment from the use of language. I certainly feel like English is not my native language but it’s my first language, it’s the language in which I think and dream and so on.
“I was already six when I was starting to learn to speak English, so I was much more conscious of it as a language as I was taking it in than most kids are of their first language.”
“I still speak Czech but my vocabulary is sadly limited. It’s just very rusty. I feel confident that I would become a native speaker within a matter of a month if I lived there again, but it doesn’t feel like it’s part of my brain tissue in the way that English does.
“But nonetheless I was already six when I was starting to learn to speak English, so I was much more conscious of the language as a language as I was taking it in than most kids are of their first language.
“So I think that’s always been part of my experience of English – that I’m in some sense aware of its contingency in my own brain.”
When did you first begin writing in any kind of serious way, or start thinking, I’m actually good at this?
“Well it wasn’t serious and I never thought I was good at it but I started to write poems when I was a teenager, I think as early as 13.
“It’s funny because even in Czechoslovakia when my parents would read me bedtime stories there were certain books that I became obsessed with and I insisted that they be read to me over and over and over, which my parents – to their credit [laughs] – really did.
“There was this really lovely rhyming edition of Hansel and Gretel that I memorised and they recorded me saying when I was three years old, and I was absolutely obsessed with the rhythm and intoning it properly – the drama of the rhythm of the thing more than anything else.
“So I think it was always there. But it wasn’t until I was 17 or 18 that I decided, Right, I guess this is what I want to study at university and this is what I would like to do, even though it was never clear to me how you would make that kind of interest into a career. There were no models in my family for that kind of thing.”
You studied at the University of Toronto and later at NYU in New York. You also spent time in Dublin around the turn of the millennium – what were you doing in Dublin?
“In a way I got super lucky, because after I graduated from the University of Toronto with an English degree I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be in the world of publishing, but I was just amazingly innocent in a way – I just didn’t know how to go about it.
“And somehow, I think partly because of my family’s history of just sort of hopping between countries [laughs] I felt like it would be easier to do in a place where I knew nobody.
“I started out just temping in offices and then I discovered – I don’t know if you ever knew of something called the Event Guide, a free cultural listings paper?”
I remember it quite well.
“So I brought my little university clips of movie reviews and things to them and begged them for an assignment, which I eventually got. And then I ended up writing for them regularly on movies and did a literary column.
“That was really my first experience of being a working writer to some degree.”
A lot of young people with Czech heritage, or Czech background, came here to Prague in the 1990s. Did you ever consider spending time here?
“Oddly, I didn’t. My older brother went there and lived there from the early ‘90s and had a very good job and it looked for a while like he was going to settle there permanently.
“But I think I was just already so aware of my connection to English and to language that I couldn’t imagine myself living anywhere where it wasn’t the dominant language.
“I also considered places like France. I spoke some French thanks to the Canadian school system, but I really wanted to be surrounded by the English language.”
You started working at one of the world’s top literary magazines, The New York Review of Books, which to me is hugely impressive, starting as an intern and rising all the way to executive editor. What exactly is an executive editor?
“Good question, I wish someone would tell me [laughs]. Yes, I got very lucky again with the internship, right after I finished grad school at NYU.
“I heard that there was an internship position opening up and I applied, which is something which really wouldn’t have occurred to me [laughs] without the sort of hopeful guidance of a friend, who was leaving that internship.
“And then I just sort of stayed, partly because I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else. I’ve been there now for 19 years and I just loved the kind of prose that we were publishing and that I got to read every day, and it was hard to imagine switching to a different magazine’s style.
“As for my title, it’s just partly the acquiring of a kind of institutional memory.
“It was just such an education for, I would say, fully the first decade. I think it’s just a form of judgement and a kind of literary taste that you learn very slowly over time.
“And I think that’s what I do – I try to exercise my taste as much as I can [laughs].”
Your poetry is published in top literary magazines like The Paris Review. I was reading that your first collection, The After Party, was partly focused on your childhood. I have to confess I haven’t read it, but is that also informed by your Czech childhood?
“Certainly, yes. Certainly there are at least a handful of poems that think about that part of my family history.
“There are at least a handful of poems that think about that part of my family history.”
“There’s one in particular – a kind of fairy story or fable, I guess more of a fable – called A Package Tour, and it sort of plays out the scenario of what if you could take 32 of your great-grandmothers, going back to, I think, the 17th century – I did the math at one point [laughs] to see how far back that could actually be – if you could gather them all up and take them on a bus tour, say, of Europe.
“It was kind of my attempt to think through what it means to have a different kind of background in North America. I think I certainly feel slightly different from most Scots-Irish background, Anglo-Irish background North Americans.
“I certainly feel slightly different from most Scots-Irish background, Anglo-Irish background North Americans.”
“But what does that really mean? Because when you look farther and farther into your family’s background it’s, I found with my own ancestors, harder and harder to ‘identify’ with anyone [laughs]. And the differences become, I think, more interesting than the similarities.”
Do you often visit Czechia? If so, how do you find it when you’re here?
“Sadly, I don’t get to visit anywhere near as often as I would like. It’s just hard for me to travel. I have an eight-year-old son and I have a full-time job and it’s just hard to get away as regularly as I would like.
“But all of my extended family is still there. My half-sister, my sister, lives in Prague and I’m in touch with her certainly, regularly.
“It’s kind of shocking to me, but I haven’t been there since 2012, and that was a very brief visit. But my impression at that point was that it did seem radically changed from even the visit before then.
“I think really my dominant memories of the place from my early childhood and that visit in the late ‘80s, before the revolution, are really foundational – it’s hard to shake those memories of the place.”
Maybe this is a really silly question, but do you ever think about if your parents hadn’t made that decision to escape from Czechoslovakia, or if they had failed to achieve that goal, that you today would be Jana Přikrylová not Jana Prikyl, and the different life you would have lived?
“I do think about that. And oddly mainly all I think about in that sort of counterfactual is the English language.
“I’m unable to conceive of what my life in the Czech Republic would look like in any kind of detail, but I’m always struck by the incredible luck of my having learned English.
“Quite often a Czech word will pop up in my brain as being the right word for something.”
“I think it’s become such a central feature of my own inner sense of myself that it’s amazing to think that I might well not have been someone who expressed themselves in this way. And it’s very hard to imagine [laughs] who I would have been without it.
“Quite often in everyday life a Czech word will pop up in my brain as being the right word for something, more right than the English word, even though I think in English and so on.
“So I do feel this frequent tug between [laughs] the particular ways that the world ought to be conceived.”
