Tags: Alan Levy | communism | The Prague Post

Alan Levy, the author of 425 profiles, sits down with Alexander Zaitchik for just one more.

Alan Levy was born in New York City on 10 Februrary 1932. After studying at Brown and Columbia, he went to work as a journalist and soon won The New Republic's 1957 Young Writer Award and a subsequent award for his coverage of the Cuban Revolution.

After seven years of freelancing in New York, Levy took his wife and two daughters to Czechoslovakia in 1967, where they were eyewitnesses to the Prague Spring of freedom and the repression that followed. In 1971, the American Family Levy was expelled and deported to Vienna.

His two books on 1968 and after, Rowboat to Prague (1972) and Good Men Still Live! (1974), as well as So Many Heroes have been widely acclaimed.

His numerous other projects, including drama, opera and a biography of Sophia Loren, have also won international critical praise. In 1991 Levy became founding Editor-in-Chief of The Prague Post, a position he continued to occupied until passing away. Before then, Think sat down to talk with him about Prague - past, present and future.

THINK: Over the course of your career as a journalist, you've interviewed some of the most famous writers of the twentieth century. Who was the most exciting to meet?

LEVY: Ezra Pound, for sure. The interview in late 1971 in Venice was harder than pulling teeth. I wound up with 271 words of interview quotation in a 6,800-word article, but those quotes were at least 250 words more than Pound had spoken to any other journalist in decades.

The New York Times Magazine put it on its front cover on Jan. 9, 1972, as "Ezra Pound: The Voice of Silence," because their editors considered it "newsmaking. " I was happy because it brightened Pound's last months (he died the following autumn) and gave him - or, rather, renewed - the recognition he'd always deserved as a poet.

The fact that it came from someone named Levy generated a lot of flak that continued long after his death. Almost 15 years later I gave a lecture in Venice - "Ezra Pound: A Jewish View" - that the Ezra Pound Society published soon thereafter. By then, my "last interviews" with Pound, W. H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov had each been expanded into textbooks that are still in print.

People had a nasty habit of dying soon after they met with me; I try not to tell my 425 Prague Profilees of this alarming trend. My most memorable interview was with Kobo Abe, the Japanese existential author of The Box Man and The Woman in the Dunes.

He died well after The New York Times published my interview, but before I could do (or even sell a publisher on) a book about his works. (Graham Greene, interviewed in The International Herald Tribune, later agreed to a book, too, but died before I could start on it.) Anyway, what was memorable was our 10th night of sushi-eating when he said he'd take me out to the freshest sushi in Tokyo. I'd been to some raunchy, off-off-Ginza dives by then and expected the worst, but the joint turned out to be the rooftop bar on the 34th floor of the Keio Plaza Hotel, with a 6-foot-plus red-headed Japanese woman playing and singing "Danny Boy."

As I was about to embrace the second or third round of sushi, the shrimp moved! I looked startled. Abe administered a karate chop and as I ate the newly-killed shrimp, he said: "I told you it was fresh."

THINK: When you were covering Czechoslovakia in the late 60s, how many other foreign journalists were in town? Were they all forced out when the Russians invaded?

LEVY: In 1968, there were a lot of short-termers, plus The New York Times bureau, which Tad Szulc had opened at the Alcron, partly on the basis of my having won accreditation for Life Magazine at the beginning of the year. Most left when the invasion story died down. Tad Szulc was expelled before Christmas 1968 and his successor, Paul Hoffman, in early 1969 for "hostile editorials in The New York Times"; needless to say, he didn't write them.

By then, I could recognize that if any tourist or Yugoslav free-lancer had photographed Jan Palach being immolated in Wenceslas Square or any other damaging incident and sold it to Life in New York, the retaliation would be obvious. So I made a trip to Vienna and, over the phone, orchestrated letters from Life firing me and Good Housekeeping (which had no editorial page) hiring me as their free-lance foreign correspondent. Even though the Soviet press attache in Washington took out a subscription to Good Housekeeping the very next day, that change of accreditations kept me here another two years.

THINK: What is your most vivid memory of the 1968 invasion?

LEVY: Nowadays, it's smells. I walk down one street or another and I smell carbide. I ask myself why and I recall first the tanks and then an incident on THAT street around August 1968. Then the whole episode or experience comes back. I remind me of a friend who used to get toothaches in elevators. He did a time and motion study on himself and took his findings to the Muzak Corporation along with the dates when the missing teeth were extracted that were paining him now. Sure enough, the songs that were playing now were playing on the date that his dentist pulled each tooth to Muzak.

Before then, for us, it was black Tatra cars. We used to have one following each of us - even our daughters, then 6 and 7: a Tatra each on their way to school. During our years in Vienna between lives in Prague, both our daughters got the creeps whenever a Tatra turned up there - or someone in black leather and blue beret: the official disguise of the secret police.

Even our dog, who was born in Bavaria in 1975 and died in Vienna in 1989 a few months before the Revolution, had the same reaction to Tatras and men in black leather and blue berets.

THINK: Do you ever feel nostalgic for the quiet days when there were no foreigners in Prague, no crass advertisements, no crime? Sometimes it is easy to understand the nostalgia of Czechs who miss the safe bubble that was the communist system.

LEVY: There's a certain nostalgia when our old communist dry cleaner still refers to the street she works off as Rosenbergovych (after Julius and Ethel) instead of Svetova (after Hrabal's Cafe Svet).

But nowadays, she doesn't snip off all the buttons before dry cleaning - in case they melt. I guess I'm saying that I'm not masochistic enough to miss the Bad Old Days. I have to admit that I went orgasmic when I first saw American Express and Thomas Cook set up shop diagonally opposite each other on Wenceslas Square - instead of the lines outside Cedok.

I curl up in a posh seat at the multiplex in Slovansky dum and it swallows me up like lips (I'm avoiding a second sexual image here) and I agree with my wife when she says "this place is getting more like America every day," but, unlike her public persona, I'm happy for Prague, happy for me, that we can share the best and worst of the outside world nowadays. Crass advertisements? Porn? Take a look at the wall pastings and hangings in the WCs of many Prague widows whose husbands died early under communism. Their monuments are preserved as lasting tributes that make today's porn look pallid.

I cut off all conversations with Czechs - lately, young ones - who say things were better under communism. "Oh," I respond, "so you don't want me back here?" That changes the subject rapidly, because they insist they do - and I do think they do.

THINK: What were you doing when the Velvet Revolution occurred? Did you ever have any doubts about returning to Prague?

LEVY: By 1989, my foot in the Iron Curtain - aside from assignments for The New York Times on Polish jokes in Poland and the first Holiday Inn in Cracow - was doing Fodor's Guides chapters on Hungary (and a whole Fodor book on Budapest).

My deadline for the 1991 books was January 1990, so, as usual, my Big Push was in November and December 1989. In mid-November 1989, I was wandering through the Hungarian hinterlands. Even though Hungary had wrested itself away from communism the previous spring and I'd covered the cutting of the Iron Curtain between Sopron and Austria for the International Herald Tribune that July, provincial Hungary was still a place where there was no Western press and just canned news from the state MTI press agency, so I knew nothing about what was happening next door.

When I got to Budapest early in the week of 20 Nov. 89, I had a special project: In addition to my usual routine updates for Fodor's Europe, Fodor's Eastern Europe, Fodor's Budget Europe, etc., I was doing a bylined Budapest for Businessmen chapter for a new one-shot Fodor's Wall St. Journal Guide to Europe. So I had questions like "Does your hotel have modem jacks?" and "Are the mattresses hard or soft?"

This was 1989 behind the Iron Curtain, so my first question was invariably greeted with "What's a modem jack?" (thereby rendering the Yes or No answer obvious) followed by a hesitant "Well, I'd rather not say." What they were saying was really "I never heard of the thing, but what if the Hilton or Hyatt has them? Then my answer will be damaging to US.")

But I was able to deduce the truth from their responses... . The second question was met with: "Which is the right answer?" Anticipating this, I'd reply: "The truth. I like it soft. My wife likes it hard." Then they'd answer soft. Sometimes I'd reverse our preferences and they'd answer hard. The message was that more business travelers were male, so my preferences prevailed.

Only at the Grand Hotel Hungaria, a humbler 4-star hotel near Keleti Station, did I find a completely candid manager. He knew what a modem jack was and he assured me that no hotel in Hungary had one, no matter what I'd be told. That helped - but nothing like what happened next. He jumped at my question about hard-vs.-soft mattresses: "Alan, you've come to the right place. Ours is the only hotel in Hungary - maybe in all of eastern Europe - that has the asymmetrical mattress.

"The what?"

"The asymmetrical matress. It's soft on one side and hard on the other. If you don't like the side that's up, you tell the chambermaid to flip it. Here, I'll show you." He asked the front desk for the key to a newly-vacated room and up we went.

We barged in upon a tiny, wispy Transylvanian chambermaid perched on the edge of an unmade bed to watch a porn film on the room's pay TV. Caught in the act by the boss Himself, she jumped to attention and began to quiver in terror. He ignored her as he told me: "Alan, anytime you stay at a hotel here, you know you can watch the pay films free for five minutes and then a 15 DM charge goes on your bill. But you just have to protest the charge - particularly if it's from daytime hours - and any hotel in the country will credit the DMs back to you because they know these creatures do this all the time. Now let me show you how the mattress works."

She'd been sitting on the hard side. After trying it out, I offered to help my host flip the mattress. But he waved me away, saying "Let her do it. She isn't paid to watch TV." So this tiny, trembling wisp of a woman, who reminded me of a straw in the wind, flipped it with surprising strength and dexterity.

As the manager and I sat bouncing merrily on the soft side, he picked up the remote and started showing me first all the porn and feature films I could watch for free for only five minutes and then all the stations I could watch for free forever. As we went from Hungarian and German stations to CNN, Sky Channel and a sports station, I thought I was hallucinating: I'd caught a glimpse of Vaclav Havel and Alexander Dubcek together on a balcony with a crowd cheering them. I asked him to double back to CNN, where I learned that a Velvet Revolution had begun the weekend before.

And I thought to myself: There's a revolution going on and what the hell are you doing checking mattresses for Fodor's? But I had to finish the job. When I got home to Vienna the following Sunday, my wife handed me my unopened mail. At the top of the pile was an invitation to join Austrian Foreign Minister Mock and his brand-new Czechoslovak counterpart, Jiri Dienstbier, who had just been promoted from boiler-room duty near Bratislava. The event had been half an hour ago.

I didn't cross the border until May 17, 1990. That was because I had a jail sentence (in absentia) to do here that I didn't care to do in person. I couldn't get anybody to put in writing that I wouldn't be jailed for past sins of truth-telling. But when the Czechs lifted visa requirements for Americans on May 15, I decided to go for it. I knew where to call. The head of the Vienna branch of the World Wildlife Fund, a German named Alexander Zinke, had a better sense of the impact of my book (published in U.S. as Rowboat to Prague in 1972 and as So Many Heroes in hardcover in 1980 and paperback in 1981, but more relevantly in Czech in 1975 by Josef and Zdena Skvoreckys' 68 Publishers Toronto and smuggled into the country by visiting emigres and the Jan Kavan-Jirina Sikova ring; Zinke insisted it was already a "samizdat classic") so he'd invited me to make my return with a WWF camera crew and visit the former Iron Curtain near the ruins of Devin Castle outside Bratislava.

The watchtowers and barbed wire had been dismantled; the landmines removed from an area that was now a perfect nature preserve, where no human had trod for 40 years. The Siberian iris, which no longer grew in Siberia, was growing there. The storks which used to nest in the chimneys of the Austrian wine villages Rust and Moerbisch had deserted their roosts when the towns became too built-up suburban. Nobody knew where they'd migrated until the Iron Curtain fell and they were found nesting on fallen telegraph poles in this No Man's Land.

The WWF wanted to make the area part of a Tri-National Park, incorporating Austria's Marchegg swampscape across the Danube and a Hungarian landscape not far away. It never happened, but my return was filmed and shown as a plea for preservation. Anyway, we got to the border crossing outside Bratislava, less than an hour's drive from Vienna. The WWF crew was four Austrians, who never required visas for the CSSR or Hungary under post-WWI treaties dissolving the empire. (The communists got around that by requiring exit visas of their own citizens and, of course, they could always refuse an "undesirable" Austrian entry.) After being waved through the Austrian border station we drove to the Czechoslovak station, which looked to be at the far edge of a No Man's Land.

A border guard came aboard our minivan to collect our passports and Mr. Zinke's visa. (The visa requirement for West Germans hadn't yet been lifted.) I tried to speak Czech to him, for I knew that the system hadn't yet changed: Slovaks were stationed at Czech border crossings into the West; Czechs at the Slovak crossings. The thinking was that a Slovak was more likely to shoot a fleeing Czech and the same for Czechs regarding Slovaks.

But he just demanded my passport in German. He didn't ask for a visa. Then he handed our papers through a slot in a wooden shack that looked like an outhouse. One human hand was all I ever saw of life inside. After five minutes, the hand handed out the four Austrian passports, stamped for entry, and the guard came aboard, checked their faces against their passports, and handed them out. Another five minutes and he was back with Zinke's passport and visa. Then we waited another five minutes that seemed forever. Nothing happened.

"Are we in Slovakia or the No Man's Land?" I asked Zinke.

"It's made to look like the No Man's Land or even Austria," he said, "but it's still Slovakia. Sometimes people got this far and thought they were free, but when they stood up or slowed down, they were shot or caught or both - and the Austrians couldn't do a thing to help them. " Then he asked solicitously: "Do you want us to turn the van around." No, I said. I didn't want to leave The Old Country in a hail of gunfire.

A long minute later, from behind the shed, there emerged a Sad Sack of a soldier in shabby fatigues (unlike the uniformed soldiers) that made me guess his was the Hand behind the counter slot. In one hand, he had my passport. In the other, he had a tattered copy of the 1975 samizdat edition of my book.

"My name is Dvorak," he said. "Could you autograph it for me?" I have never felt more welcome anywhere.

Barely nine weeks later, on July 4, 1990, my wife and I came back to Prague for a monthlong visit. Our daughters, Monica, by then 26, and Erika, 25, flew in from France and San Francisco to join us. I had hardly spoken Czech for almost 20 years because our Czech friends abroad all wanted to speak English or German to us so they could assimilate faster. But on the night of July 5, I started dreaming in Czech. In my dreams, I schemed to come back here. On an October visit, we found me an attic in Kobylisy. By December, I had moved in. On October 1, 1991, Lisa Frankenberg, Kent Hawryluk and Monroe Luther and I celebrated the first issue of The Prague Post.

THINK: What were your expectations for this country in the 1990s? Were they met?

LEVY: When I came back in 1990, people asked me: "You've lived in Austria for 19years and seen how they've advanced. How long will it take the CR to advance to where Austria is now?" And I answered - in good faith - "Listen, your economy and your people are so much more dynamic that I'd be disappointed if you didn't overtake Austria within five years - 10 maximum."

So I'm disappointed because it hasn't happened and isn't happening. Why? I blame the politicians, starting with Klaus and continuing with Zeman. They kept this country in recession for an extra year or two and they seem to be pushing it back there again. How many times did Gregr and Mertlik advance contradictory programs (from the same party!), argue about it, water down each other's and their own proposals, and wind up going nowhere or lagging behind?

Remember: This country had an infrastructure that survived fascism and communism and a world war or two. But will it survive capitalism? The word Tunneling was coined in The Prague Post - in an Opinion piece by Howard Golden. This nation has been tunneled twice: In the 1950s, by the Soviets - conspiracies had to be created in order to build a slave labor system to get the uranium out of the ground; when the asset was stripped, the system loosened up. In the 1990s, different kinds of asset-strippers were back, bearing names like Harvard and the Dingman Institute. And much of the wealth of this country is out of it - somewhere between Ukraine and the Bahamas.

THINK: Are the Czechs ready for the EU? Would membership be good for this country, or disastrous for the EU, or maybe both?

LEVY: Like NATO, the EU is a country club the Czechs can't afford not to belong to. I wish I weren't a Euroskeptic, but I am.

THINK: Are you working on any writing projects right now outside of your work at The Post?

LEVY: Back in 1994, my New York literary agent took me to the Yale Club for lunch and told me he could get me a $40,000 advance from a well-known NY publisher to do a hot new book called "Second Chance City: Prague in the Nineties"; all I had to do was write a long sample chapter and outline. I wrote almost 40 first-draft pages, but got caught up in doings at The Prague Post and seldom got back to it. On a visit to NY in 1999, my agent took me to Sunday brunch at the Grand Hyatt and told me my book project was no longer Hot; it was a Mid-List Book but he could still get me $40,000. If it goes on this way, maybe they'll pay me $40,000 NOT to write the book.

THINK: Do you believe in UFO's?

LEVY: No, but I do believe in mystical experiences. My second life in Prague has been just that. Dreams have come true that I never dreamed. On Nov. 25, 1998, I took five bows on the stage of the Rudolfinum. Who could have imagined that? At Columbia Journalism back in 1952-53, many of my classmates dreamed of having their own newspaper - and some bought, inherited or married into them. I just wanted to write, but 10 years ago this summer, I was handed the opportunity to co-conceive (no, I'm not stammering) and co-create an English-language newspaper for the City I Love. It turned out to be the job I had been rehearsing for all my life.

THINK: Thanks for talking with us.

LEVY: My Pleasure.