Considering the correlating role of food with romance in Agatha’s autobiography, should we be surprised that this chapter begins with happy food memories? Of course not!

They are on their honeymoon in the Balkans, and at a complete linguistic loss. “We had enormous fun with the menus there. They were written in Yugoslavian [!], and of course we had no idea what they meant. We used to point to some entry and then wait with some anxiety to see what would be delivered. Sometimes it was a colossal dish of chicken, on another occasion poached eggs in a highly seasoned white sauce, another time again a sort of super-goulash.”

Later they took a boat from Yugoslavia to Greece, which surprisingly enough had fabulous eats. “Never have I tasted such food as we had on that boat: delicious lamb, very tender, in little cutlets, succulent vegetables, rice, sumptuous sauce, and savoury things on skewers.”

Unfortunately, the honeymoon ended in alimentary disaster…

In all fairness, this should have been “Slovak Novels in English #1” (that honor went somewhat haphazardly to The Year of the Frog instead), because it is the very first work of Slovak literature in English that I ever read.

The year was 1998, and the discovery was online used booksellers. Those who came of age after the internet revolution and yet are bibliophiles cannot even fathom the limitations on voracious readers then. We had what bookstores physically carried—and even if a well-curated collection beyond the boilerplate bestsellers, there’s just only so much a Waldenbooks in the mall could stock, much less make a profit on selling. Libraries had more range, but inevitable limitations as well. I remember having heard of books that I knew I’d never find, or seeing “Also by this author” in beloved books and knowing it was a lost cause. Even used bookstores tended to focus on mass market paperbacks in high-volume genres like mystery or romance.

So really, you just can’t fathom what wonder opened up when you could type in a title and author—find the book—and buy it…

This is my second review of a work by Grosman, and one of a by-now not-insignificant number of Slovak novels not actually composed in Slovak.

Grosman was Slovak, and that was his primary language; moreover, as in The Shop on Main Street, the novel (or really novella—at 113 pp. and print the size of a YA novel from the 70s, I’d bet it’s not much over 20,000 words in length) is set in eastern Slovakia. Grosman’s adult career as a writer and film producer took place in Prague, however, where Czech was naturally the language of choice.

However, Grosman was not in residence in Prague when this novel was first published in the original language. The year of publication was 1969, but the year before was the Prague Spring, followed by the Warsaw Pact invasion…

There was no question but that I had to track down this novel, one of only three from the Slovak published by Artia in the early 1960s in English to prove that good-quality literature can come from Communist nations, too. However, as only six libraries worldwide appear to have it (four of them in Denmark—uh, what’s that all about?) and I have never even once seen it for sale on any used book site, I was getting desperate.

Which explains why I finally forked over an astronomical sum to get a scan from the U.S. Library of Congress. I won’t say exactly so much; only that it made the $60 I threw away on The Heiress look like a deal by comparison.

Unfortunately, compulsion of this nature rarely pays off, and so it is in this case…

While my main project lo these many years has been to read and review Slovak novels in English, the fact is that I have also read no small amount of nonfiction about Slovakia and (to a lesser extent) by Slovaks. Sorting out the history of the nation we now call the Republic of Slovakia was in fact one of the great delights of working on my memoir. It turns out Slovakia’s history is a good window into the whole history of Europe, and to a whole range of political and economic questions.

So, for those of you out there who’d like to know more—all six of you—here’s a handful of books worth noting…

In many ways, this review marks a triumph: the completion of my quest to locate and read all of Kristína Royová’s books in English! (See the now-complete bibliography at the end of this post.) The title is not literal—in Slovak the book is called Moc svetla, “The Power of the Light,” with an epigraph from John 1:5. A whole seventy years passed between in its initial publication in Slovak and its translation into English.

It was no small thing to add this last Royová novel to my collection. The only used copies I could locate online originally cost upwards of $200! I wrote a few pleading emails to the vendors to broker a deal. None of them ever responded, but not long after, one dropped the price to $60. Still a bit much for a faded mass market paperback, but I wasn’t going to let the chance slip away. Collectors are always at the mercy of dealers!

I wish I could say that this almost 600-page book was worth the 10¢ per page. Unfortunately, I have to admit that the 3-star rating for The Heiress is awarded on the same arbitrary grounds that I gave the same rating to Bellevue: a split between a 5 for the book achieving its intended purpose and a 1 for the enjoyment I took in reading it.

It’s pretty funny, actually, that I would have the same issue with these two particular Slovak novels in English, because they are about as diametrically opposed in outlook as humanly possible. Bellevue is bleak and nihilistic; The Heiress is chirpy and optimistic. In truth, the best characterization I can think of for The Heiress is “religious soap opera”…

Once again I’ve chosen a novel that pushes the boundaries of my mandate to read all “Slovak Novels in English.” In this case, the issue is equivocation on the term “Slovak.” The fact is, The Shop on Main Street was not written in the Slovak language at all… but in Czech, which is why it’s been issued in a series called Modern Czech Classics. Whether and to what extent Czech and Slovak are different languages has been a neuralgic issue for a long time, and even more so in the days when the two peoples shared a country. In any case, they are mutually intelligible to a degree that native English speakers can’t even imagine. However, I will not therefore conclude that I need to cover all Czech novels in English, too!

The more specific reason in favor of counting this one a “Slovak Novel in English” is the fact that the author was, in fact, a Slovak. Ladislav Grosman moved to Prague and adopted the local lingo to such an extent that it made sense to write first a short story, then a hybrid novel-screenplay, in Czech. Still, the story is set in Slovakia and all the characters are Slovak. So the novel passes my own personal litmus test…

I little expected to find another five-star novel so soon after It Happened on the First of September. But not only does The Hot Summer of 1968 fully deserve this highest of ratings, it’s practically a sequel to the other novel, despite being by another author. I take this as evidence that the oft-overlooked Slovakia has a history and culture rich enough to repay ample fictional exploration. The more, the better! …

Ivana Dobrakovová, Bellevue, trans. Julia and Peter Sherwood (London: Jantar, 2019), 220 pp.

Of all the Slovak novels in English I’ve reviewed so far, the assignment of three stars to this one is the most arbitrary of any rating I’ve given. It’s a compromise, actually. If I were to rate the novel based on its accomplishment of its intended goal, it certainly deserves five stars. If I were to rate it on the pleasure I took in reading it, it would get one star.

But that can hardly count as a legitimate a criticism of a book that maps out the degeneration of a mind into madness…

I missed Czechoslovakia by six days.

It had been an odd sort of companion throughout my childhood, like an invisible mirror or rumored cousin, never quite real enough to manifest, never quite imaginary enough to vanish.

There was reason for its reticence, of course. It was communist, though poor little Czechoslovakia couldn’t really be blamed for that. Whenever I visited the red and gray farmhouse in upstate New York cobbled together by my grandparents’ meager construction skills, I would spin their globe, swiping the Atlantic Ocean out of sight, to locate the inverted circumflex amidst a crazy-quilt of countries small enough to be states. Surely Czechoslovakia had the most wonderful name of them all. Fourteen letters, beginning with that peerless Cz cluster, hinged in the middle by a modest but muscular o flicking upward the long fishtail of the remainder. The little orange strip, topologically ridged to represent the Carpathians, could barely accommodate its unwieldy moniker, in marked and modest contrast to the vast swath only a thumbprint’s width away, which fittingly named itself with a four-letter word: U.S.S.R.

I knew things about Czechoslovakia that other people didn’t, and not only how to spell it. Czechoslovakia, like Gaul, was divided into three parts: Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia. I assumed they were ordered according to the principle of save-the-best-for-last. My people were not Bohemians or Moravians. We were Slovaks.

I also knew that the pseudo-word “Slovakian”—usurper, pretender, and offense against eye and ear—was our private shibboleth, the unerring indicator of an outsider. It was anathema to us Slovaks; no one on the inside ever, ever said it, The New York Times notwithstanding. Ditto the equally opprobrious “Czechoslovakian” as a term for a nonexistent language.

I knew, moreover, that it made no nevermind that three generations of us had never actually been there. American citizenship was a mere epiphenomenon, a fact that my classmates, most of whom hadn’t the faintest idea of their own ethnic heritage, seemed unable to grasp. Whereas I knew that if sentimentality for the lost motherland gripped the church ladies in my grandfather’s Slovak congregation, the sure result was to be cabbage rolls, boiled with an inch of their lives. Plus ziti. Contradictions were allowed.

There was something else I knew, of which Czechoslovakia was but one of several echoes reverberating back to me from afar: I knew how always to be homesick for somewhere else…

I’ve been working on this book for five years, gone through drafts and beta readers and research and “killing my darlings,” and you’d think that would be enough. But I think any author will tell you that nothing makes it real like seeing the cover!

The basic concept was mine. I wanted an image of St. George in honor of the starring town of Svätý Jur (St. George in Slovak), but I wanted him spearing not a dragon but a heart—namely, mine. And in the background I wanted the SNP Bridge, which I like to think of as the Eiffel Tower of Bratislava, at least of its iconic status if not quite the same level of architectural distinction. Strictly speaking, the title doesn’t refer to this bridge, but I must say it’s pretty handy that Bratislava boasts such a distinctive bridge to make for a great visual tie-in!

However, my skill set definitely does not extend to the execution of visual design, so I found two great artists to make the dream a reality…

Just about a month away now from the launch of I Am a Brave Bridge, my memoir with recipes of a year in Slovakia 1993–1994, I thought it was time to give a little love to an unjustly neglected cuisine at the four corners of a defunct empire.

The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire is how the Time-Life “Foods of the World” characterizes it and accordingly entitles that entry in the renowned series. I imagine the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be rather irritated by their absence from this name, but as usual, Slovaks have more cause to complain: author Joseph Wechsberg fails to include a single recipe attributed to Slovakia (even “Liptauer Cheese,” the German name for a spread from the Liptov region of Slovakia), presumably assuming—as Czechs are wont to do—that Slovak is a subset of Czech.

For all that, it’s a marvelous cookbook and a good place to start if, as is generally the case in the English-speaking world, central Europe is kind of a blank on your mental map…

This is the fifth novel by Royová that I’m reviewing, following upon Sunshine Country, Three Comrades, Only a Servant, and Kept by a Mighty Hand. But, as it turns out, Martinko is the very first book she wrote!

It was published originally in 1893 until the title Bez Boha na svete, or “Without God in the World,” though the protagonist does bear the name Martinko. Royová wrote it in response to a general challenge for someone to produce some kind of children’s literature “for God.” It now stands as the single most translated work of Slovak literature—the introduction to my copy notes that it has appeared in innumerable German editions as well as Hungarian and Russian.

So that’s pretty cool. However, Royová went on to write nearly seventy novels, and frankly it’s pretty obvious that this one is her first. I’ve spoken warmly of the emotional and spiritual complexity in some of her other works, but this one is so pious as to border on the saccharine. A poor little orphan boy, kept alive but not well-loved by the townspeople, yearns for God, finds a Bible and some mentors, inadvertently re-enacts certain aspects of Jesus’ ministry, and dies tragically from injuries gained while saving a lost sheep, young but saved and an inspiration to the half-hearted Christians all around him. The christological allusions are heavy-handed, at best.

But as so often is the case with Slovak lit translated before the Velvet Revolution, the circumstances of its translation proved to be the really interesting facet of this story…

Now that I am—finally!—counting down the days and not the years until the launch of I Am a Brave Bridge: An American Girl’s Hilarious and Heartbreaking Year in the Fledgling Republic of Slovakia, I have found myself more and more curious about the other contenders in my subgenre: the memoir with recipes.

It came as no surprise that memoirs with recipes lean heavily toward the crosscultural and international. Nothing evokes the reality of having a foot in more than one reality than the different, even conflicting tastes you develop along the way. Being an international person means always being hungry for something you can’t get…