Prague Journal

Wednesday, February 23, 2005.

Helen Epstein, a Jewish journalist and noted author, gave a lecture this morning on “Women’s memoirs as genre?” to a class at the Philosophical Faculty Language Institute at Charles University. Epstein was the first tenured woman professor in New York University’s Department of Journalism, and has taught writing since 1974. She represented the United States in 2001 at the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize Writers Conference in Tromso, Norway. She is the author of five books of non-fiction, including “Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History,” a family memoir and social history of 200 years of Czech Jewish life, begun while Epstein was a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies in 1982. She is also the translator from the Czech of Heda Kovaly’s award-winning “Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague.” She is best known for “Children of the Holocaust,” which is widely used in university courses and by therapists. It is the first book to deal with second generation and post-traumatic stress syndrome in children of Holocaust survivors. Epstein was born in Prague in 1947, the daughter of a concentration camp victim whose parents died in the camps in Poland, and moved to New York before her first birthday. She became a journalist while an undergraduate at the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. For the next 25 years, she worked as a freelance cultural reporter for the Sunday New York Times and other national publications, writing profiles of such figures as Leonard Bernstein, Meyer Schapiro and Joseph Papp. Her profiles of classical musicians have been collected in the book “Music Talks.” She is currently on the faculty of the Prague Summer Seminars at the Charles University and an affiliate of the Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women at Brandeis University, where she produced “In Other Words: The Jewish Writer Reads Her Work,” an audio anthology on CD. She lectures frequently on long-term psychological effects of war-related trauma as well as on family history, and about memoirs as literary history. Her upcoming book is about her first love – in the context of the political and social issues and different family values, attitudes and backgrounds – at age 15. Needless to say, her lecture was riveting.
Following the lecture, I went to another Charles University building to meet with Alena at the Center for Gender Studies at the Sociological Institute. Alena is doing research on women in family businesses – focusing the work/family balance/conflict issues – for her dissertation. She is teaching a class this term on Gender and Work, and I have agreed to teach a session in May on women entrepreneurs.
Later in the afternoon I met with my landlady, Milena Halova, and her daughter Marketa. Both women work at the Czech National Bank, which is the central bank of the state and works closely with the Ministry of Finance and the Institute of Economics. CNB supervises the activities of banks and the safe functioning of the banking system and other financial firms. The Czech National Bank has the exclusive right to issue banknotes and coins, as well as commemorative coins. It also administers pensions and social welfare payments. Milena is currently involved with a massive computer software upgrade, to allow smoother cross-border transactions, and Marketa is working with the legal department to advise government ministers on the new EU constitution provisions and their fit with those of the existing Czech laws. They have both been working overtime on these projects, to the point of spending many evenings and weekends at the bank. Fortunately, they enjoy their jobs – and don’t have children at home.
Rick went to his Czech lesson this evening, so I met Brad at the Blue Garden pizzeria before heading home to an empty flat. It took me nearly 15 minutes to find the restaurant – it’s a little hole-in-the-wall on National Street – I must have walked past it three times before finding my way around to the back entrance! We talked about Eunice’s company – and the hifi market in the Czech Republic – and Brad’s new computer company. Entrepreneurs all around!

posted by JWinn @ 11:40 PM