My Last First Book / Olga Sozanská

Kdo za projektem stojí?

Spolek Symposion – FP, z. s.

Předseda spolku advokát Mgr. Radek Vachtl 

Olga Sozanská, místopředsedkyně spolku , autorka knihy

Za svoje aktivity před rokem 1989 získala Olga Sozanská "Osvědčení účastníka odboje a odporu proti komunismu".

Vystudovala Pedagogickou fakultu a Filozofickou fakultu UK, obor psychologie. Pracovala dvě desetiletí v Poradně pro rodinu, po roce 1989 souběžně vyučovala deset let na DAMU.
V roce 1992 založila se svým druhým mužem, výtvarníkem Jiřím Sozanským, a historikem umění Jiřím T. Kotalíkem občanské sdružení Symposion, které navázalo na neoficiální aktivity ze sedmdesátých a osmdesátých let minulého století. Olga Sozanská řídila projekty propojující výtvarné artefakty, divadlo, koncerty, filmové dokumenty či vydávání publikací, jež reagovaly na důležitá celospolečenská témata. Symposion celkem realizoval více než osm desítek národních i mezinárodních projektů (více v publikaci Symposion – 27 let činnosti, www.kosmas.cz).
S kolegy psychology Petrem Šmolkou a Jiřím Tošnerem založila v roce 1993 občanské sdružení Hestia, zaměřující se na vzdělávání v oblasti sociální práce a dobrovolnictví (více na www.hest.cz).
Již druhou dekádu působí jako odborná garantka programu ETELA, který finančně pomáhá dětem a mladým lidem najít a rozvinout jejich nadání a tím také pomoci jejich uplatnění v dalším životě 
(více na www.etela.cz).

Na co vybrané peníze použijeme?

Autorské honoráře při přípravě publikace Poslední prvotina – My Last First Book anglický překlad, korektury, grafická úprava, sazba, zlom, úprava fotografií, výroba a tisk publikace, PR, autogramiáda s autorkou, kulturní program, hudební produkce, poštovné

English description

We're looking for support for the English edition of Olga Sozanská's book Poslední prvotina/My Last First Book.

Olga originally wrote the memoir as a birthday present for her brother Saša. Since she described her family's hardships and troubles in a clear-eyed way and without self-pity, she was persuaded to publish it as a book. The first edition came out in 2020. After a successful print run, a second edition was published in 2023. The book received an honorable mention from the Czech Community of Writers in the category Best Humorous Book of the Year and was nominated in the Lidové Noviny Book of the Year poll.  

„With Karel Poláček's intelligent sense of humor, the hostile communist world is seen through the naive eyes of a child. This world is also mine, unlike other pseudo-worlds that far more recognized novels serve up to me over hundreds of pages. I rank this modest book among the gems of Czech literature.“ LN ssue of December 10th, 2022

Literary critic Vladimír Just

„Olga Sozanská deals with her childhood with honesty, humour, and liberating insight… Her look back into the past oscillates between the gaze of a child who can only describe what she sees and that of an adult who retrospectively analyzes situations that seem completely absurd. With her understanding of the human psyche, training as a psychologist, and amazing talent for observation, she vividly portrays not only the pathetic figures of the communist regime she encountered as a child, but also the members of her own family, about whom she conceals nothing that could spice up the pages of the book…“

Blanka Frajerová, LN issue of August 6th, 2022

„I began writing my memoirs after the death of both my parents, which allowed me to be completely open and honest. I found writing easy because the text was never meant to be published, yet I was surprised by the vividness of the memories of my childhood and adolescence. I was struck once again by the pathological monstrosity and absurdity of the communist regime, which interfered with all facets of people's private lives, including the lives of children, often in tragic ways. I can't wait for the English translation of ‚Poslední prvotina‘ (‚My Last First Book‘) to come out, because sometimes it's hard to explain to my foreign friends what living under totalitarian rule was really like. With this book, the reality of it rests in the palm of your hand.“

Olga Sozanská, March 2024

„‚My Last First Book‘ reads like a movie. Olga Sozanská writes about growing up in the 1950s with ease, wit, and honesty. Far from painting a rosy picture of family relationships affected by an era that turned politically thoroughly red, she instead describes the world she witnessed in all its color. She reaches conclusions, but never judges, looking out at everything with astonished childlike eyes. In the reader's hand rests the absurdity of life under communism. With its indomitable optimism, ‚My Last First Book‘ recalls ‚The Plague and I‘ by Betty MacDonald.“ 

Hana Benešová, Kosmas 2023

Petr Blažek, historian and journalist, director of the Twentieth Century Memorial Museum

„‚My Last First Book‘ is an achievement that deserves to be commended. The author is a wonderful observer with a keen sense for minute details and larger leitmotifs. It's full of suspense and paradoxes as Olga portrays individual characters movingly but not sentimentally, but at the same time with great sympathy for their human frailties. In her description of minor and hidden events, she reveals the cruelty of the era in which she grew up.“  February 25th 2023

Excerpts from the book

…Once, when Sasha was out somewhere with the boys and mom and dad were away, two men in hats and trench coats came looking for our parents. When I told them they weren’t home, they asked if they could look around, and I was awfully proud that they were interested in us, because we hardly ever had any visitors, except sometimes our neighbor, Krahulík. I showed them around the house like a castle warden, pointing out our things, where we cooked, slept, where we stored our toys, and where Dad hid his books.

They praised me, told me what a smart and clever little girl I was, and I wanted to do even more for them. Suddenly, Sasha came bursting out of the woods and ruined everything. Again, he caused a major scene, screaming and yelling “Heeeeelp! Murderers!” so loudly that people ran out of their homes and one neighbor came over to the men who were obviously alarmed because Sasha wouldn’t stop screaming. One of them said: “We’re from the state police, I’ll show you my ID card,” but as he reached into his breast pocket for the ID, Sasha started yelling, “Get down! He’s reaching for his gun!” and fell down onto the grass.

Again, I felt terribly ashamed of Sasha, because everything had been going so nicely before he appeared. The guy really had a secret agent card, and the neighbor, evidently some poor evicted citizen, started to shake and kept repeating, “Everything’s okay, comrade, everything’s okay.”

I was only five and felt like the only sane person in this madhouse, I mean me and the two nice gentlemen, who again praised me, patted me on the head, and left. They never came round again, probably because a crazy boy would yell for all of Hvozdy to come out and help.....

…But then came the year 1948. My father refused to join the party and it was all downhill from there. Our eviction disrupted my family’s beautiful life. My mother didn’t understand the situation at all and claimed that my father was a coward who had let himself be intimidated. She was convinced that he should have stood up and said, “I have a family, and I’m not going anywhere.” Of course, Dad probably knew, correctly, that moving was the lesser of two evils, because he could have gone to jail. By then it was 1950 and the prisons were filling up at an alarming rate…

…One of our favorite destinations was a former pub, a lovely establishment that was now abandoned. Inside were lots of wonderful things, such as minuscule cups, bowls, and teapots that I thought were for dolls. These were china sets that better cafes used to have, which of course I couldn’t have known. There were also lovely little sinks that I could reach without any trouble, all in a row, but the water had been switched off a long time ago. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I had been in the men’s room and the sinks weren’t for washing hands. The restaurant was later bought by the actor Jan Tříska and his wife, and after returning from exile the director Pavel Juráček lived there.....

......The year 1953 was an eventful one. In March, Comrade Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin died, followed eleven days later by President Klement Gottwald. I turned six in May, the currency reform took place in June, and in September I went to school. By 1953, 237 people had been executed, 190 of them for fabricated political crimes. My parents followed the news closely and the general anxiety felt by the whole society somehow affected even us, especially Sasha. Once, in a fit of rage, when Sasha had misbehaved again, my father said he would have him hanged, which seemed very real. There was a lot of talk of hanging, and actual hangings as well......

......When Stalin died, the radio played terribly somber music and reporters spoke in serious tones. Some comrades wept and said that their father had passed away. I was glad that my father was still around, but felt sad because I liked sharing in this feeling of sadness with everybody on the radio.....

.....But miracles also happened from time to time. For example, a balloon would appear in the sky and release leaflets stating that the communists would soon be finished or something, and the adults would hide them and secretly rejoice. We liked to see them coming down from the sky like paper angels and then dashed around the forest collecting them to see who ended up with the most. One day, gold coins fell from the sky with a bell and some writing on them and chocolate inside. Dad explained to us that the bell was not an ordinary bell or a Christmas bell, but a “freedom bell"” from America. At school, the teachers told the children to pick up the gold coins and bring them in right away because the chocolate in them was poisoned. But my brother and I kept them because we liked them, and we also wondered why anyone would want to poison us. I remembered my dad saying repeatedly that those bitches on the radio were lying, so what if this was a lie, too?…

.......Our school also participated in drives to collect the potato beetle, an American insect that the imperialists would toss in at night to eat all our potatoes so that we’d have none left. Unlike the balloons from which leaflets and chocolate money fell in Hvozdy, we never saw any balloons in Stračov with the potato beetle pouring out of them.

The potato beetle was a pretty striped bug, not dangerous at all, but we treated it horribly. We collected the beetles in jam jars and Principal Faltysová made a bonfire at the edge of the field. We then dumped the contents of the jars onto it. Some tried to fly away, but it was no use, they were all swallowed up by the flames......

.....We weren’t very nice to the maybugs either. Comrade Faltysová ordered us to collect them in large pickle jars, because the maybugs were much bigger than the potato beetles, almost as big as my longest finger. When they flew around us, and sometimes in the evening there was a lot of them, they sounded like an airplane. We only ever picked up the ones that landed on the ground. Then, we pounced.

Some of the maybugs stuck their pointy butts together and couldn’t be pried apart, so in they went like that into the jar. I didn’t feel too sorry for them, unlike the potato beetles, because I thought they were really dangerous. They would fly around us wildly, and whenever they sat on your head, their little legs got tangled up in your hair. The maybugs would thrash and growl, and you couldn’t get them out. I hated when that happened.....

.....The school decided that the pupils shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to see the first worker president, Klement Gottwald, who had been dead for five years, but thanks to the care of Soviet embalming experts looked to be alive. Before visiting the mausoleum on Vitkov Hill, we were issued a strong warning to behave with dignity, not to speak, not even in whispers, and to dress properly as if we were going to the theater. And it really was a theater. As we entered the monumental building of the mausoleum, we began to feel anxious. Exceptionally, the teachers didn’t have to admonish us. We moved about in the gloom, almost in darkness, with candles and red lights burning all around, and Klement Gottwald was indeed lying in his coffin, completely yellow, the first corpse most of us had ever seen.

As we approached the catafalque in the dark, we didn’t notice that there were live soldiers standing guard. The girl in front of me somehow moved out of line and touched the soldier who stood silent as a statue. She started screaming like mad and tried to run out, and all of us, not knowing what was happening, began running after her. There was panic, there was crying, our dignity forgotten, we just wanted to get out of there, into the light, away from that terrifying building, away from that dead body.....

......Grandmother liked me and I liked her, too. In the twenty years we knew each other, we never had a single conflict, which was a miracle, because otherwise Grandmother fought with everyone, especially Ota, whom she annoyed beyond belief. Whenever he became furious and started to break things, she would add fuel to the fire by saying “put a sugar cube in your mouth, it’ll calm you down.” Of course the opposite would happen, and Ota would go outside and finally cool off after a few hours of jogging.....

.....She found in me a kindred soul always willing to listen to the stories of her life with Grandfather, which was unlike anything I had ever known. I loved it when she sat down after work, lit a cigarette, and reminisced about life in Berlin and Paris, where Grandfather worked on films between the wars, and about his friendship with the actress Anny Ondráková and her boxer husband Max Schmeling and other actors I knew only from the movies.

She told me how ridiculous they had found Hitler and how they didn’t take him seriously at all at first. His speeches were great fodder for the actors to parody, and only belatedly did they realize that this bad comedian was a dangerous psychopath. Sadly, many of them ended up in concentration camps.....