Antonín Bajaja: On the Beautiful Blue Dřevnice / Na krásné modré Dřevnici

novel

Antonín Bajaja might have called his new novel The End of the Good Old Days in Zlín or A Moravian Amarcord.

This new work by Antonín Bajaja is a memoir of a childhood that began with so much promise shortly after the war, when the people of Zlín welcomed their liberators with bread and salt, there was merrymaking and the execution of a “Nazi” on the football field, and the “bourgeoisie“ believed the republic of Masaryk and the prosperity of Baťa would return.
But for the Iron Curtain, Zlín’s becoming Gottwaldov and comrades liquidating the class enemy, this childhood would have been a happy one. Members of the author’s family – his father had a private medical practice, his grandparents a hotel – lost their property, social status and freedom, as did those of their friends who were known as “reactionaries”. The leitmotiv of Bajaja’s book is the gradual disintegration of all that went before and the extinguishing of hope for its return. The childhood was in fact a happy one – after a fashion. The world of the children floated high above the ramparts of its adult equivalent. While the lives of parents and grandparents were disintegrating, the children enjoyed tales of singing communist heavens and had Pioneers’ adventures – until their lives fell foul of history on a grand scale and the tangle of “truthful lies” began to bring forth angst and nightmares.

The work is devised as a series of letters to the author’s sister Jana (Jeanne), with whom he lived through that happy childhood full of promise. Some of the writings in On the Beautiful Blue Dřevnice are tragicomical, reminiscent of paper boats. The first of them was written in the 1960s, and they were not intended for publication.