Jsem Milena z Prahy – Zgustová Monika (2024)

Milena Jesenská was a talented translator, a brilliant journalist, a feminist, and a humanist. She was also a close friend of Franz Kafka. The novel I Am Milena from Prague depicts her extraordinary life in four chapters: The Foreigner, The Translator, The Journalist, and The Convict. Milena was part of the intellectual elite that gathered in Viennese cafés, alongside Musil, Kraus, Werfel, and Broch, and a member of the resistance when Nazi troops invaded Czechoslovakia. She rebelled against the traditional order imposed first by her father and later by her husband, against the secondary role assigned to women in newspaper editorial offices and in the workplace. In the final chapter, where we follow her in a women's concentration camp in Ravensbrück, Milena meets Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German journalist, with whom she will share a close bond. Based on documents, articles, and letters that have survived from Milena, as well as testimonies from those who knew her, Monika Zgustová reconstructs the life of this brave and extraordinary figure. And she pays tribute to the women who, in the turbulent and tragic times of the 1920s and 1930s, fought for women's dignity and stood up for the victims of injustice.