Rok s ostatními sirotky – Jamek Václav (2025)

A Year with Other Orphans, a prose work straddling autobiography and novel, stems from the author's long-standing intention to recount a brief period he had to spend in an orphanage at the age of twelve. Working with time here posed a literary challenge. It was necessary to combine three temporal planes - the time of childhood and two moments and perspectives in which the text was later written: youth, when the author abandoned the first attempt in a state of incompleteness, and old age, when he decided to complete the book but also incorporate fragments from his youth. The work seems to have two authors, yet still only one.

"I want to tell about how I learned to laugh," the author states right in the first sentence of the book; and it is a defensive laughter, which serves as a tool of rebellion for the powerless. Alongside the awakening of the body, a moral awareness almost imperceptibly creeps into the child's mind, resulting in an escalating disagreement with the world, disillusionment with adulthood, and outrage. The orphanhood and life in the orphanage, depicted in the book not as cruel but as devoid of love, act as a kind of accelerator that sharpens the perception of things. The child begins to understand that defiance is actually the will not to be infected by despair and to insist on one's own life.

Published with financial support...