Marta Rebon

Updated Monday, February 26, 2024-00:04

A year after the war ended, he still

hoped that his mother, imprisoned in Ravensbrück, was alive

.

The news of the death of the journalist and translator

Milena Jesenská

(1896-1944) came to him in the form of a letter, signed by one of his companions in misfortune, in which he spared no details (many of which, due to his age, escaped to your understanding);

Even so, Jana Cerná chose to deny the evidence.

Until one day

the sender brought him a relic: a tooth.

It was all that was left of Milena

.

I'm Milena from Prague

Monika Zgustova

Gutenberg Galaxy.

168 pages.

€17.50 Ebook: €10.99


You can buy it here.

"On the table, before my eyes," he wrote in a memoir dedicated to his mother, "lay a piece of his body, a fragment of his smile, a part of the mouth that once spoke to me."

This scene, read today, also speaks symbolically of the

silence imposed on a figure of incontestable interest whose face posterity blurred due to

her relationship with Franz Kafka

, although, when they met, she was a much more popular name in Prague than the author of

The castle

, and by no means was it his only romance.

The publication in 1952 of the letters he sent him,

valuable for the sincerity and personal connection they exude

, converted it, as Reiner Stach defined it (

Kafka

, Acantilado, 2016), into a postal address.

Or in one of those shadows that appear in the surroundings of a genius and disappear, "like extras behind the scenes."

Jesenská's postal responses were not preserved, but her dialogue with Kafka continued in her columns

, which he read and commented on.

A first person story

For decades, Milena Jesenská not only suffered from the invisibility of women overshadowed by the prestige of a man, but also from the diffuse authorship with which literary translation is understood (she was Kafka's first translator, someone who knew how to see from the beginning his genius), or that of the anti-fascist resistance that

the communist regime established in the postwar era erased for decades because it did not align with its rhetoric

, since Jesenská did not blindly embrace the Soviet Union in the 1930s (he was aware of the purges that took place). produced there).

Her husband, and Jana Cerná's father, the architect Jaromír Krejcar, returned disenchanted with Stalinist Russia.

In

I am Milena from Prague

- as she liked to present herself and which says a lot about her attachment to her city down to the last consequences -, Monika Zgustova (Prague, 1957)

holds the hand (almost literally) of Jesenská, who appears to her among many other "shadows of women" in the fog of Ravensbrück

during a visit by the author, and "tells her story."

If in Spanish we only had the biography

Milena

(Tusquets, 1987) of her German friend from the countryside, and also a gulag survivor, Margarete Buber-Neumann, written when the myth of Jesenská was already consolidated,

now we have a first-person account

.

It is not a biography, therefore, but an attempt to give it a voice through fictionalization.

To recreate, from a kind portrait, the sensitivity and courage of

a woman whose empathy, dignity and love of truth and life attest to her correspondence

, her journalistic columns and her chronicles in the face of the Nazi threat. .

As a backdrop, the end of an empire, the Austro-Hungarian, and the birth of a young country, Czechoslovakia, whose fragile integrity will be blown up with the Munich Agreement.

Added to this is the clash of

a generation, that of Jesenská, which gave itself over to political activism, as well as experimentation in love, art, drugs and norms

, including those that determined the role of women.

Kafka only appears in one of the chapters in this book, published in the year of the centenary of her death.

An unbreakable woman

To accommodate such turbulent times and such an expansive personality far from clichés in a hundred and a half pages, Zgustova arranges this story chronologically, starting from Jesenská's "flight" to the already decadent Vienna with the Jew Ernst Polak.

Milena's father, a fervent Czech nationalist, was strongly opposed to that marriage.

Polak had introduced her to the German-speaking literary circles of the cafés of Prague, and then did the same to those of Vienna

;

In return, he offered Jesenská, who did not have perfect German, but did have a privileged education for the time, a stormy relationship.

We are shown there the Jesenská that feels "foreign" and experiences the harshness of inflation and the postwar period.

For economic needs and loneliness,

she finds refuge in writing and, especially, in translation, a way of introducing new literary currents into the culture of her flourishing country

, an intellectual activism that she shared with her former classmates, who They referred to Czech as

Woolf

or

Joyce

.

She thus came into contact with Kafka and first translated

The Stoker

, whose protagonist she felt close to.

From the Jesenská translator, we move to the journalist and then to the prisoner.

To stay in Prague, where she returned after her divorce from Polak,

she displayed frenetic activity in the main newspapers

.

Even when she had to content herself with publishing in the women's pages, dedicated to fashion or cooking, she introduced between the lines the new modernity, that of

a self-sufficient woman and not a slave to the image

.

His convictions were not shaken by the invasion of his country.

There are his political chronicles and memorable opinion columns such as

Prague on the morning of March 15, 1939

.

In them,

he appealed to the dignity and moral courage of his compatriots

.

But, above all, in tune with Vasili Grossman, to the kindness and humanism that he does not know about nationalities.

Courage and solidarity that he also practiced before his arrest in Prague, helping Jews and communists escape

, as well as in the concentration camp, after "four years of hunger."

Confidence, he wrote, is acquired by people who have learned to lose without despair.