The Menorah (Sedmiramenný svícen)

Abstract

About the Author: Josef Škvorecký (1924–2012) was born in the North-Eastern Bohemian town of Náchod, where he attended school and did his A-levels in 1943. During the war years, he was compelled to do forced labour. After the war he studied English philology and philosophy in Prague at Charles University and received a doctoral degree. Having finished his military service at the beginning of the 1950s, Škvorecký started working as an editor in the publishing house SNKLU. In 1958, his first – and most famous – novel The Cowards, written already by the end of the 1940s, could finally be published. A vast number of novels, stories, dramas, essays etc. followed over the next decades. Many of them are based on biographic experiences, such as life in a Czech provincial town before and during the war from the perspective of a local teenager, the political difficulties of a young intellectual in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist era, the love for jazz and American culture as a form of resistance in totalitarianism etc. After the end of the Prague Spring, Škvorecký and his wife, the writer Zdena Salivarová, left Czechoslovakia and took up residence in Canada, where they founded the best known publishing house for Czech exile literature, 68 Publishers. At the University of Toronto Škvorecký held a chair for Anglophone Literature until his retirement in 1990.