Synopsis

The award-winning novel by Czech author Kateřina Tučková—her first to be translated into English—about the fate of one woman and the pursuit of forgiveness in a divided postwar world.

1945. Allied forces liberate Nazi-occupied Brno, Moravia. For Gerta Schnirch, daughter of a Czech mother and a German father aligned with Hitler, it’s not deliverance; it’s a sentence. She has been branded an enemy of the state. Caught in the changing tides of a war that shattered her family—and her innocence—Gerta must obey the official order: she, along with all ethnic Germans, is to be expelled from Czechoslovakia. With nothing but the clothes on her back and an infant daughter, she’s herded among thousands, driven from the only home she’s ever known. But the injustice only makes Gerta stronger, more empowered, and more resolved to seek justice. Her journey is a relentless quest for a seemingly impossible forgiveness. And one day, she will return.

Spanning decades and generations, Kateřina Tučková’s breathtaking novel illuminates a long-neglected episode in Czech history. One of exclusion and prejudice, of collective shame versus personal guilt, all through the eyes of a charismatic woman whose courage will affect all the lives she’s touched. Especially that of the daughter she loved, fought for, shielded, and would come to inspire.

Praise

“A great book . . . Immediately after reading, [Gerta] is unforgettable . . . Kateřina Tučková wrote a novel that should be required reading.” —Jan Hübsch, Lidovky, the oldest Czech daily still in print

“The central story of Gerta Schnirch can be captured in one word, the clichéd adjective strong. Its strength lies particularly in its vivid depiction of frightful experiences immediately after World War II, experiences resembling terrible nightmares. To achieve this, the author does not need cheap effects or explicit, detailed, or shocking descriptions.” —Petr Hrtánek, iLiteratura

“The author describes, with a great writing talent and empathy for human suffering, Gerta’s life from the moment she stood at her mother’s grave in 1942…We have read of various anabases, but few are as dreadful as the one depicted with deep pity by Kateřina Tučková. And so forcefully described as if she were Gerta, experiencing it all firsthand.” —Milena Nyklová, Knižní novinky

“[Gerta] masterfully fulfills one of the potential and important functions of literature. It is a means of self-reflection for a particular community, which is the Czech nation in this case.” —Pavel Janoušek, Host

Translator’s Notes

My initial reading of Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch happened within the first year or so of its publication in Czech – 2009/2010.  My Czech cousin Eva, who lives in Brno, brought me the book when she came to visit me in New York, and I started reading and couldn’t put it down.  I finished in a matter of a few days.

Both of my parents grew up in Brno, albeit at very different times: my father, a concert pianist, moved back as a 3-year-old with his mother and two older siblings after his father abruptly died in 1915.  Blacklisted by the Nazis for his close ties with the first President of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, he fled in 1939 and returned only after the war was over in 1946, to play at the first Prague Spring Festival.  At that point he hoped to stay and make his home in Prague but had to return to the U.S. for a concert/lecture tour followed by engagements in South America throughout the summer and fall of 1947.  Hoping to be back in Czechoslovakia for Christmas and engaged to play a series of benefit concerts in early 1948, fate intervened:  he tripped on the sidewalk in Buenos Aires and fell, breaking his arm, so travel and concerts had to be postponed.  By then the political situation was again precarious, as the Soviets had taken control of Czechoslovakia’s Democratic government.  With the mysterious death, generally thought to have been murder by defenestration, on March 10, 1948 of Jan Masaryk, Minister of Foreign Affairs and a close friend of my father’s, it became clear that a return would be impossible and my father settled in New York, in time becoming a U.S. citizen.

My mother, on the other hand, was born in Brno during one of the last Allied air raids in 1945.  My grandmother told me that in solidarity, the entire family—my grandfather, an Auntie, a Great-grandmother, and an older sister—did not go down into the basement shelter but stayed upstairs in the first floor apartment while the birth was happening.  There was no doctor but a midwife, who saved my mother’s life—she came out turning blue, the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, and the midwife pushed her back in, unhooked the cord and pulled her back out again.  I never met my father’s mother, who died in 1966, but I was very close to my maternal grandparents, who were basically the same generation as my father—Czechs of the First Republic.  When they would get together and reminisce, it always fascinated me how colorful their recollections of the city of Brno were, and how different from my mother’s—while they would wax nostalgic, my mother was filled with bitterness.  If she never set foot there again, she used to say, she would not be sorry.

Gerta is set in the Brno where my father and three grandparents lived during the brief First Republic (1918-1938), and where my mother was born and grew up.  I had always been interested in knowing more about what Brno had been like, and by 2009 had even visited the city several times, but no one had ever talked about what happened to the ethnic Germans in the immediate aftermath of the war.  One time only did I hear my father respond to a comment saying:  it was not right, what was done to those Germans.  This episode of history leapt up from the pages and I read with bated breath.  By the time I finished the book, I had found the events so disturbing that I gave the book away to a Czech and Slovak library.  But I couldn’t get the story out of my head, so several years later, I asked my cousin to buy me another copy.  I read it again and thought: this is a novel that needs to be translated into English.  In 2016, I was invited to contribute to Lit Hub a title and short description of a novel for a list of books by Czech female authors who had not yet been published in English, and say why the work deserved to be translated.  My choice was instant:  Kateřina Tučková’s Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch (The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch).  My next trip to Brno I made some inquiries, trying to find out if an English translation was in the works.  To my amazement, I learned that at that point there wasn’t.  The novel had been such a best-seller in the Czech Republic that everyone was sure there would be translators beating down the door to get at it, but it hadn’t happened.  I couldn’t believe my luck:  I wanted to have a go at this translation myself.

At some point during fall 2017, I started to translate the novel on spec, having mentioned to Tučková’s agent, Dana Blatná, that if they had no one else in mind, I would love to do it.  Sometime around Christmas I got word:  Amazon Crossing had expressed interest in an English translation based on the Lit Hub article, and was I interested?  I didn’t even blink—YES!  This fearlessly courageous novel that dared to confront the unsavory truth about a long-hidden episode in Czech history, and dealt with globally relevant themes such as the devastating effects of collective guilt and the transformative power of forgiveness, had to be available in English.

My goal was to create an English translation that would carry anglophone readers along with the same intensity and appeal as the Czech original.  I was hugely inspired by Ann Goldstein’s translations of Elena Ferrante’s novels and was after the same seamless, natural English flow.

In spring 2018, I was invited to Brno by the Meeting Brno festival, co-founded by Kateřina Tučková, to give a talk about my father.  Tučková and I finally met in person, and I joined Tučková and her colleagues, along with some 250 other participants, for the Pilgrimage of Reconciliation, which retraces the 32-kilometer route walked by the expelled Germans in 1945, but symbolically in reverse, from Pohořelice back to Brno.  I had the opportunity to join the festival’s guided, themed city walks, accompanied by historical commentary, and Tučková personally gave me a tour of Gerta’s neighborhood, known today as the “Brno-Bronx.”  I stayed an extra week and had the opportunity to visit the villages of Perná, Klentnice, and Dunajovice, as well as the beautiful town of Mikulov, where a friend pointed out the house in which one of the women whose wartime experiences had inspired the story of Gerta still lived – she had become a recluse.  It was important to me to familiarize myself with the setting so that my descriptions would capture the atmosphere as authentically as possible.

Work on the translation began in earnest in summer 2019.  The more I immersed myself into the text, the more the story and its characters drew me in.   With each re-reading, my faith in this novel grew.  I am thrilled to see it become available in English, honored to have had a hand in the process, and eager for English readers to be introduced to Gerta Schnirch.

About the Author

Kateřina Tučková is a Czech playwright, publicist, biographer, art historian, exhibition curator, and bestselling author of Gerta and The Žítková Goddesses. She has won several literary awards, including the Magnesia Litera Award (for both Gerta and The Žítková Goddesses), the Brno City Award for literature, the Josef Škvorecký Award, and the Czech Bestseller Award. Kateřina is also the recipient of the Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights Award by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, and of the Premio Libro d’Europa at the Book Fair in Salerno, Italy. Between 2015 and 2018, she was a founder and first president of the Meeting Brno festival, focusing on international and intercultural dialogue. Kateřina currently lives in Prague and Brno, Czech Republic. Her books have been translated into seventeen languages. Gerta is her first to be translated into English. In December 2020, her novel Bílá Voda will be published in Czech. For more information, visit her website.

About the Translator

Born in Switzerland to Czech parents, the late pianist Rudolf Firkusny and his wife, Tatiana, Véronique Firkusny grew up in a trilingual, musical household that sparked a lifelong passion for language, literature, and music. She translates primarily from Czech to English, and her most recently published English translation is Daniela Hodrová’s novel A Kingdom of Souls, co-translated with Elena Sokol. Forthcoming publications include, in collaboration with Elena Sokol, Daniela Hodrová’s Puppets. Firkusny serves as the executive director of the Avery Fisher Artist Program of Lincoln Center and also coaches opera singers in Czech diction. A graduate of Barnard College, where she received a BA in Italian literature, she resides in New York City.