By turns cunning and brutally honest, Slovak literary man Jan Rozner’s fictionalized autobiography also works as a depiction of his times.

Seven Days to the Funeral, by Jan Rozner. Translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood. Karolinum Press, 2024. 488 pages.

No one except historians will miss the 20th century, which went out, aptly, in the throes of the end-times fantasy of the Millennium Bug. There was bloody conflict almost every year, with an estimated 231 million people dying as a result. And the century also gave us the communist regime of the former Soviet Union, which managed to impose its cruel, and often absurd, rule for nearly 70 years and took the lives of an estimated 60 million civilians.

But these are only numbers. Horrific as they are, they don’t tell us anything useful about the everyday humiliations inflicted on those who tried to live productive lives under communist rule – and paid the price. For that, Jan Rozner’s Seven Days to the Funeral is an excellent guide. A Slovak writer, critic, dramaturg, editor, and translator – and the husband of Zora Jesenska, one of the most important Slovak translators of the 20th century – Rozner was perfectly placed to witness the sinister machinations of the Czechoslovak regime.

He was also the ideal observer because he was an outsider. His father was Jewish and his mother of German descent, which led to a brutal comedy of errors when he and his brother were rounded up by Slovak police under the Nazi-allied government because of their father – and then released because of their mother. But being an outsider inevitably affected his personality: “There must have been some flaw in him, something that made him so withdrawn, buttoned up, unable to break the glass wall between himself and others,” he says about himself. That glass wall gave him the ideal window on Slovak society – and on himself. One of the fascinating aspects of Seven Days to the Funeral is that it is an autobiography written in the third person and in the form of a novel – but, unlike its contemporary literary cousin, autofiction, Rozner was scrupulous about telling it the way it truly was.

The Increased Difficulty of Translation

In the indispensable afterword, Ivana Taranenkova quotes Rozner’s Slovak publisher as saying that he wanted “ ‘to write a Joycean novel, without paragraph breaks, comprised of long sentences, a continuous narrative.’ ” We can probably thank his second wife, Slava Roznerova, who edited the book after his death in 2006, that it isn’t. Instead, it is more a Proustian work, in which Rozner uses Jesenska’s death from leukemia in December 1972, and the ensuing preparations for her funeral, as a pretext to examine his past, much the same way the author of À la recherche du temps perdu used the taste of a madeleine tea cake.

Jesenska had been a renowned translator of Russian books, such as And Quiet Flows the Don, by Mikhail Sholokhov, and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Both translations upset the authorities and eventually contributed to her being exiled from Czechoslovakia’s cultural affairs, as was Rozner, after the strangling of the Prague Spring, which they had both publicly supported, in 1969. As Rozner puts it: “She’d been expunged from public life and it was forbidden … to mention her name anywhere.” The same applied to him. The invaluable added material at the end of the book includes a brief article by Jesenska, “The First Resolute Show of Force by the Police of the Slovak Socialist Republic,” which describes her being beaten up by police officers during a public demonstration.

Seven Days to the Funeral begins with the days leading up to her death, proceeds with an account of the week leading up to it, and ends a few days later, when Rozner discovers that he’d been cheated by the funeral home. Rozner must have been scrupulous, self-deprecating, and sly, and that is how he writes. That he was scrupulous appears from all the detail he provides about his daily life:

They crossed the hospital courtyard and went to an annexe, where her office was located on the first floor. He lit up and noticing her mocking glance, offered her one too, and lit it for her. “Coffee?” she asked as always, as that too was a ritual of their get-togethers. Standing behind him, she put a mini immersion heater into a pot and waited for the water to come to a boil.

So the book requires a bit of patience on the part of a reader used to the streamlined works of writers weaned on social media. Rozner was, in fact, so scrupulous that he worked on the book for 30 years and was never sufficiently satisfied with it to call it finished. It took his second wife to prepare it for publication three years after his death.

Rozner is self-deprecating because he is constantly criticizing his passivity, indecisiveness, and lack of social skills – and he ends the book by questioning the source of its material, his memory. “[H]is memory,” he writes in the book’s final paragraph, “was like a sieve, making things up or changing details of things he was trying to recollect.”

Or was that just one more sly attempt to convince us of his honesty? Because Rozner was a very cunning writer. His constant self-criticism, for example, could be a clever ruse to convince us of his obsessive honesty. He is sly also through the way he introduces the main theme of the book, the oppression under which he, his wife, and their friends were forced to live after 1969. It is casually, almost incidentally (and not until page 25), as he is reminiscing about how he and his wife used to spend New Year’s Eve, without people or watching TV.

And then, all of a sudden, she started musing about life, wondered if there was any point to it, and said that she kept coming to the conclusion that it was pointless. He knew she didn’t say this because she couldn’t work, because she’d been deprived of every opportunity to work, she whose entire life up to that point had been filled with work….

And then he quickly – slyly – moves on to something else. That is the first mention of anything political in the book.

Just Piano Music

Rozner is also ingenious about how he finally settles his scores with past friends and colleagues who betrayed him and his wife. The reminiscences are triggered by his having to decide which of their acquaintances are to receive formal notices of Zora’s death. It is a brilliant device that allows Rozner to offer a broad catalog of government oppression and personal betrayal:

Then there was Matuska, the high priest of literary criticism, who once used to deliver lengthy and exhausting tirades in their old flat, and the more he drank, the more he would curse the Hungarians, the Czechs, and, coincidentally, also the Jews. … In the summer of 1968 everyone listened reverently, as if he were Confucius, to his wise speeches at meetings of writers, his bitterness mingling with unconcealed outrage as he declaimed in a trembling voice: Nothing is good enough for these democratizers of ours, not even Husak is good enough for them. [Gustav Husak was named first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1969, replacing the architect of the Prague Spring, Alexander Dubcek.]

The book helpfully provides a “Who’s Who” list that identifies many of the people he mentions, some of whom are provided with only an initial by Rozner, so that we learn that this excerpt refers to “literary critic Alexander Matuska (1910-1975).”

When the funeral finally arrives, it begins with a Kafkaesque scene in which two “shabbily dressed” secret police agents interrogate him about all aspects of the ceremony, including the music, before officially approving it. After a lengthy and irritating cross-examination, the two men – who have never heard of the renowned Czech composer Leos Janacek – tell him that the music he has chosen is not allowed. He finally explains what the music is.

The two men asked almost simultaneously, “So it’s just piano music?”

“Yes, only the piano. And the other record, the Moravian songs, is for solo female voice.”

For some reason, this made them throw in the towel.

At the funeral itself, the man who delivered the eulogy – a distinguished translator and professor of classical literature – was harassed by one of the officers before making the speech and later lost his university job because of his participation at the funeral. And many of Jesenska’s friends were sent “memos” telling them to stay away from the ceremony. All this causes Rozner to angrily exclaim “three or four times”: “These bastards, they have to stick their nose into everything.” No more succinct definition of authoritarian oppression has ever been written.

There are many reasons to read Seven Days to the Funeral, not least because Rozner was an excellent writer. He also had the posthumous fortune to have the book translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood, who have firsthand knowledge (in the case of Julia) of the period and are excellent writers themselves, as translators must be. They certainly deserve a great deal of credit for turning 450 pages of detailed rumination and recollection into a fascinating and, yes, entertaining read by wisely allowing Rozner’s unique personality to drive the narrative.

…

Siegfried Mortkowitz worked in journalism for more than 30 years, both as a reporter for Newsweek, Politico Europe, and other publications and as culture editor for The Prague Post. He is also a poet whose work has been published in several literary magazines and in the chapbook Eating Brains (After Hours Press). He currently lives in Prague with his talking orange tabby, Joe.

This article was supported by the Fund for Central & East European Book Projects, Amsterdam.